Is Calibre or Indesign better for designing reflowable epubs?

[Samson Hilleke]

I have been using Calibre to create and design reflowable ePubs from PDFs. My process has been to convert the PDF into an ePub file and then reformatting the ePub for widespread use across various devices. I have heard that some ebook designers use Indesign to create and design their ebooks. However, a quick Google search tells me that they only use Indesign for fixed-format ePubs, not for reflowable ePubs. Is all of this true? Should I invest in an Indesign subscription or stick with Calibre? What are some things Indesign can do that 1) Calibre cannot do and 2) would be helpful to me as an ebook designer?

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from using the community">

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Well, you're sort of asking a meta-question that has as many answers as you choose it to have — kind of like "What's the best way to get to Times Square?" The answers vary and multiply depending on whether you're in Herald Square, Texas or Uzbekistan. 🙂

One short answer: Calibre has the second-best EPUB reader around, temporarily in first place because Thorium has a persistent font-rendering bug. It's also great for converting e-books among six different formats, something that seems to be of paramount importance to some fairly large e-book collector/trader community. Otherwise, it's not really a very good tool/set for anything; even the book-builder crowd doesn't think much of it in that respect.

All of the other answers will depend on your skill set, background, expectations and approach to creating books. There are basically two roads —

The one you seem famiilar with is the long-standing one of using free, community, shareware, cheap and often idiosyncratic tools to "build" ebooks on a structural/file format level, about on a par with "creating" a print book by setting lead type. This is the approach of most of the e-book community, most of whom are amateurs, self-publishers or just at a low skill/budget level. While this "build a bear" approach was once the only way to create e-books, it's obsolete by a decade or more, much like composition via pasting things on blueline board, compared to publication layout in tools like InDesign. You can go there; the tools are free and the community support is insular, plentiful, and will give you as much completely conflicting advice as you can use. Most will go on at great length about how InDesign is a completely terrible tool for creating e-books.

If you're even remotely serious about creating quality e-books, and have the budget and skill set to use InDesign at a journeyman level, then — in my not terribly humble opinion — there is simply no better path than using InDesign, just as it's the premiere tool for creating print and PDF publications.

Put another way, there is only one path to creating a quality book in any medium: with powerful visual composition tools that generate export formats to whatever medium you've chosen. This is true for print; it's true for PDF; it's true for online and web publications... and it's true for EPUB and through EPUB, Kindle. (All other formats are essentially obsolete at this point, although conversion mania continues.)

A book is a book. Learn to write, edit, create and format books as an overall skill set. If the last step is an export to EPUB, it's no different than an export to PDFs for a print vendor.

You don't create books by hand-making your own paper, carving your own type and grunting over a screw-driven letter press... nor by using structural assembly tools to create a digital book.

[Samson Hilleke]

This is great! Glad to get some clarity on this question. Thank you for your answer.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There is a lot more to the debate and there is not an absolute, single solution/choice for every user and every project. But the fundamental choice of using those "hand building" tools is one approach, IMHO an obsolete and counterproductive one, and the other choice of using modern, established, visual layout tools is the other — and the correct one.

I'll throw in one more bit of snark: far too many claims that ID is lousy at the job or can't do this or that or creates "bad" or "bloated" or "broken" EPUB exports read, to me, not as "ID can't do it" but as "The writer doesn't have sufficient skill with ID, or 'non-structural' processes in general." Because everything they do with the hand-carving tools, I do with ID, day in and day out, and without the "essential" step of having to edit or fix the EPUB files after export.

As for fixed-page (FXL) vs reflowable, InDesign will do both, but it's a moot point: FXL shouldn't be used any more, especially not for all-text or nearly all text books. It's an obsolete, cranky, difficult format, very much "get it right or start over." A lot of newcomers see it as the obvious or simple option, exporting to book-like pages, just as with PDF... but it's the complete opposite, a hack for simple docs and unskilled users. Reflowable is the proper format for e-books (that are not composed of picture-pages, such as children's books, graphic novels and the like). Reflowable is more demanding, especially as you move away from simple novel-like layouts (text, a few headings, some text accents, not much more), but the intersection of "easy" and "correct" doesn't really exist for EPUB/Kindle.