How to Publish

This post is specifically for our project managers, designers, and anyone who is going to work directly with the layout of the book.  For our e-book project, we are specifically going to focus on three platforms: Kindle, Feedbooks, and Internet Archive.  All three platforms have slightly different requirements for publishing books, and I've tried to summarize the requirements below.

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

Specific Formatting: To upload a book to Kindle, it needs to be formatted correctly.  Kindle says that uploading a book in .doc/.docx or in html format is the most preferred.  However, it does say that complex formatting in Word is not always supported.

I know that we talked specifically in class about ePub format and Mobi format, so most of the following information is going to concern those two formats. Kindle doesn't support Mobi formats anymore.  To get around that, they recommend using Kindle's KindleGen to create the book, but because we are already creating the book in another medium, I don't think this is going to be the best option.

Best Option for Formatting: As far as I can tell, the best format to create our book in would be an ePub format.  After that, we would need to download the free KindleGen tool, and validate the file.  Our book should upload correctly to KDP if we follow those steps.

Then, we will simply have to enter information about our book such as the title, authors, etc.

There is an option to enable Digital Rights Management on the Kindle Publishing site, which would make it harder for people to distribute our book.  I am assuming that we will not want that enabled considering we are offering our ebook for free anyway.

Then, we have to set our list price and take care of things like that.

The Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing website is pretty extensive, so there is no use in me trying to rehash everything here.  I tried to cover the most important things that will be especially pertinent to our builds of the ebook.


Feedbooks
Uploading to Relatively easy.  As I've said before, we probably need to work with our book in ePub formatting.  Feedbooks supports that type of file, and it also supports Kindle files.  We have to fill out some title and licensing information just as we have to do with Kindle.

Internet Archive
Publishing on Internet Archive is even easier.  You just drag and drop the file.  I am assuming you have to fill out metadata as well, but I can't see how to do that considering I don't have a file to upload.

In any case, I hope this information will help us in writing our ebook!