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Pete_W.
Participant
November 16, 2023
Question

Converting from hardback to EPUB

  • November 16, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 361 views

I have published a 10" by 8" hardback book created in InDesign which has now sold out and I wish to create an eBook in the Kindle standard 9" by 6" format. Is there any way I can scale down the original document to fit the new format in InDesign without altering the book's pagination and index? 

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    2 replies

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    November 16, 2023

    If you want to export to a fixed-page layout, you would be best off reformatting the book at a ratio closer to that of the average Kindle screen. (There is no absolute standard, as the hard readers vary and the app readers are of course 'flexible.' But it's a really, really poor idea to create e-books in fixed-page format unless they are "picture page" books like children's books, art books, graphic novels or some how-to guides.

     

    The correct — better — flexible way to take a text book to Kindle is to export to reflowable EPUB. It's not simple, but then, neither is fixed-page export unless the source file was designed for export right from the start — fixed page e-books only seem like a simple, obvious option.

     

    The good news is that there are fairly straightforward processes to get from an InDesign print layout to a reflowable EPUB export that will make a clean, tidy Kindle edition. You can even do both from one source file, to simplify the work flow and preserve consistency (over keeping two different sources in step), but that's a fairly advanced option.

     

    The absolute base requirement for EPUB export is to have a meticulously clean InDesign file, with fully defined styles for every paragraph and character override. There cannot be default, undefined or spot formats. How is your source file in that respect?

    P
    Pete_W.Author
    Participant
    November 16, 2023
    Thanks for this James.

    The book was created using well defined paragraph settings throughout. The
    book does heave a few illustrations though (19 illustrations in a 316 page
    book) and when I tried exporting as a reflowable ePub it threw the
    positioning of the images out and caused stripes to appear across the
    images.

    Do you have any suggestions as to how I might overcome this issue please?

    Thanks in anticipation,
    Pete.
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    November 16, 2023

    A print layout rarely exports to EPUB in acceptable form; as a start, you have to apply detailed export parameters to the images so that they flow with the text in appropriate size and positioning. You can do this entirely with adjusting InDesign styles (in a copy — the result will no longer be suitable for print publication), but the fine-tune, pro way to do it is to use at least some CSS style adjustments in the export.

     

    But a well-structured ID file, with meticulous style management, a single text flow, and things like images properly anchored in place and formatted for export, is about 90% of the way there.

     

    Do you have any experience with HTML/CSS/simple web page layout? That's the path to using CSS for EPUB. (EPUBs are, more or less, just a packaged website with some quirks — XHTML content files, CSS style files, a few XML data files for things like TOCs, and a folder of image files. Easy to understand if you've tinkered with web stuff, and you do NOT have to work with the exported EPUB at all, just feed the right material into the export process.)

    Mike Witherell
    Community Expert
    Mike WitherellCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 16, 2023

    Yes and no. 

    Your 4 x 5 ratio book will become a 2 x 3 ratio epub. 

    You could try File > Adjust layout coupled together with adjusting the Paragraph styles in order to keep the same relative amount of text on each page. 

    However, text is going to reflow in this new page shape.

    OTOH, if the epub is a reflowable text epub, the reflow and change of page count is part of the way reflowable epubs work anyway. The viewer decides the text size, and therefore "page" counts become a non-physical thing. Indexes, if you bother to make them, have to be hyperlinks to places in text; not pages. Many epubs don't have classic indexes because of the search feature. The specialized version of epub for Kindle is an .azw3 file, also known as a .kf8 file.

    Mike Witherell
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