I'm finding myself in need of a crash course in best practices for producing books for eventual conversion to Kindle or other e-book formats.

I picked up a pretty good reference: "Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle eBook" by Joshua Tallent. So far, a quick skim has clarified quite a bit about what is formats produce the best input (HTML/XHTML) and what HTML and CSS codes are supported (and not supported), along with a small handful of custom codes.

So, from InDesign, the logical choices for export are Export for Digital Editions or Export for Dreamweaver (no big surprise), with the two variants creating similar but different XHTML code, and second only able to process on file at a time. The .epub format produced by the former is essentially a .zip file, and if you change its extension to .zip, it can be unzipped and the contents manipulated. Of the two HTML renderings, I prefer the Digital Editions approach, as the InDesign styles are managed in a way that provides a slightly better product for the eventual GREP treatment that is required for either.

So now, for the part that is more strategic, is what choices can be made in the creation of the InDesign files for book production that will simplify the processes later for Kindle conversion?

One thing that I think is helpful is to use style names which can be massaged with least hassle into the standard HTML codes that are required, such as h1-h6, p, li, blockquote, etc. (actually a pretty short set of standard and familiar HTML codes), along with classes that can handle the variants (many of which may not translate into usable Kindle features).

So, as luck would have it, the first book I need to deal with is one that was built in Quark 4.1 and had to be translated into InDesign (fortunately with too many horrible side-effects on this occasion). The style sheets, of course, are not named as standard HTML styles, so I put together an easy script to translate style sheet names into names which can be massaged into HTML styles + CSS classes. (InDesign offers no automaticization here.)

For instance, my heads were named 1,2, and 3, and were simple to change to H2, H3, and H4, reserving H! for part numbers and titles (PN and PT changed to H1.PN and H1.PT) and chapter numbers and titles (CN and CT changed to H1.CN and H1.CT). Body text styles were handled like GT to P, GT (no indent) to P.NoIndent, GT (space above) to P.SpaceAbove, etc. BL and BL (first) to LI.UL and LI.ULF; and NL and NL (first) to LI.OL and LI.OLF; etc., etc.

This would allow the HTML renderings (which all are rendered as <p class="li.ul"> to be GREPed into <li class="ul">, etc., except for correct HTML tags such as H2, H3, and H4, which become <h2>, <h3>, and <h4>). Everything else gets a <p> tag + class=<stylename> in InDesign's conversion. So that's why I've settled on a style-naming approach that can be easily GREPed into proper codes.

So these are some of my insights very early on in this process. I'd appreciate the insights of others who have already traveled further down this road. Particularly welcome are any pitfalls to avoid, strategies for simplifying the process, and insights on what may be required for the Nook, Sony, etc. And also, since the situation is likely to get richer within the next year or less, what elements are worth defining in CSS even though they won't be recognized by current platforms (like fonts, fill colors, and many, many more).

Also, please recommended any useful resources. (There are already a number included in the aforementioned Kindle Formatting book.)

Thanks in advance,
Rick Gordon
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RICK GORDON
EMERALD VALLEY GRAPHICS AND CONSULTING
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WWW: http://www.shelterpub.com

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