Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle [Kindle Edition]

Joshua Tallent (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Publishers and independent authors everywhere are excited—and somewhat anxious—about the move toward digital publishing. eBooks are revolutionizing the publishing world, and eBook reading devices like the Amazon Kindle are on the forefront of this revolution.

However, the formatting the Kindle requires can be hard to decipher and even harder to implement. This book serves as a guide to the process of formatting eBooks that look great on the Kindle every time. Each step is explained in detail, with examples and formatting tips found nowhere else.

In addition to instructions for the conversion and formatting process, this book contains detailed explanations of all the HTML and CSS markup supported by both versions of the Kindle, instructions for achieving optimal image display quality on their E Ink screens, and other details about the Kindle's formatting requirements previously left to chance or speculation.

Beautiful eBooks are at your fingertips. The Kindle and its readers await.

=== About the Author ===

Joshua Tallent has been an eBook Developer for more than six years. He was the first eBook professional to offer full-service, Kindle-specific eBook conversion services to small publishers and independent authors. Through KindleFormatting.com, Joshua has formatted all types of eBooks for his clients, including novels, poetry, business books, scientific texts, large print books, and more. KindleFormatting.com is a service of eBook Architects, Joshua's eBook development and consulting company.

Joshua lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two daughters.

=== NOTE ===

This eBook is published DRM-free. That means you can change the file extension from .azw to .mobi and open the book in Mobipocket Reader or on any other Mobipocket supported device. Print and ePub versions of this book are also available. Please visit http://kindleformatting.com/book for more information.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1432 KB
• Print Length: 170 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1440488886
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: eBook Architects (April 2, 2009)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0024FAPF4
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,062 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #12 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Reference > Writing > Editing
  • #79 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Reference > Publishing & Books

More About the Author

Joshua Tallent has been an eBook developer for more 8 years, and is an expert on formatting eBooks in the variety of formats on the market, including Kindle/Mobipocket and ePub. His book, "Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide," has been praised as the most helpful and thorough explanation of the detailed process involved in developing eBooks for the Amazon Kindle. eBook Architects, his eBook conversion and consulting business, provides services to both publishers and authors. Joshua resides in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two daughters. He can be found online at www.ebookarchitects.com and @jtallent or @ebookarchitects.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Detailed How-to Manual for Advanced Users, July 8, 2009

By 

Floyd M. Orr "Nonfiction in a Fictional Style" (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide To Formatting Books For The Amazon Kindle (Paperback)

For the prospective Kindle author who is somewhat more advanced in the field of computers in general and HTML coding in particular, this is an excellent guide for you. Joshua Tallent is obviously far more the mathematician and programming nerd than is the average POD author who just wants to cash in from Kindle sales. If you just want to convert the Word document version of your Mr. Average Novel into DTP, then you have several options that may be more efficient for you than following the instructions contained in this book. These options include, in no particular order of significance: uploading your book directly from Word into the Amazon DTP system; running your document through the Smashwords Meatgrinder; downloading and utilizing Mobipocket Creator; or paying Joshua Tallent directly to format your book perfectly for you, a service he offers from his website. If you have a very complex book containing varied text layout or a lot of photos or other graphics, and you want it all to look as perfect as possible in the Kindle version, then hiring Mr. Tallent's services is probably your best bet. If you and/or your book fall between the cracks of some of these scenarios, then Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide by Michael R. Hicks may be the best solution. If you are at least somewhat proficient in HTML and you want to do it all yourself, then Joshua Tallent's Kindle Formatting is an excellent, detailed guide.

Is Joshua's thin book worth $20 to you, or $10 if you have a Kindle? If you barely understood how to send your simple Word document to iUniverse, letting them design your cover while you contributed very little to your book's design, then Kindle Formatting probably offers a lot more than you care to know. If you are somewhat more experienced, particularly with HTML programming, and you do not want to pay Joshua directly to do the job for you, but you want to produce a DTP version of your work that is somewhat more perfect than the result offered by the simpler methods, this will be money extremely well spent. Joshua will show you all the little HTML coding tricks to make your Kindle book look like an escapee from your local Barnes & Noble. If you own a Kindle, you can get even more benefit from Joshua's book because you can see the details of your efforts in perfect translation. One of my favorite issues covered in Kindle Formatting is that Joshua explains in text and screenshots actual differences between the Kindle and the Kindle 2. The book was released prior to the DX: maybe Joshua will update the material at some time in the future?

Joshua Tallent's Kindle Formatting will take the experienced author exactly where he wants to go. The book has two simple weaknesses. There are some obvious proofreading errors contained within the straight text portions of the book. They do not detract from the reader's comprehension of the material, but for this price for such a short book, I would expect a level nearer perfection. Also for this price, I think the author could have included a lot more rudimentary material to aid the lesser computer nerd in his project of formatting his book for the Kindle. With these two caveats in mind, I can wholeheartedly recommend Mr. Tallent's book to advanced users. If HTML programming is beyond your scope, you might be better served by Mr. Hicks' book.

67 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Occasionally useful; not as good as claimed, May 21, 2010

By 

Oh Nomad - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle (Kindle Edition)

I was pretty disappointed by Joshua Tallent's "Kindle Formatting." It's an occasionally helpful intro for the true Kindle formatting novice (as I was when I picked up the book), but it falls seriously short as a detailed or ostensibly "complete" guide.

My main complaint is that it simply feels lazy. His treatment of images is a good example of this. In the one brief paragraph dedicated to discussing image types (.jpg, .gif, etc.), he says a few uninformative words about each of the file formats Kindle supports ("PNGs are very good for charts") and then concludes with, "I don't suggest using BMPs since the other formats are usually better." Oh, really? I'm glad to hear it's not because they're usually worse. When I'm wrestling with how to put an image with too much information on too small a screen, I want something a little more substantial than "I don't recommend it because it's not good." How about saying a little something about why?

Another explanation for cases like this might be that Tallent does not want to give away too many trade secrets. He obliquely mentions but never really describes all kinds of tricks that he uses in his own Kindle formatting services. I can understand his not wanting to write a treatise on the subject, and I can even understand wanting to preserve few painstakingly discovered tricks for himself, but I think readers of this small book (rather expensive at $20 for the print version and $10 for the Kindle version) deserve more than this extremely cursory treatment.

Again and again I have turned to this book with relatively simple questions only to come away frustrated. Google searches and some experimentation have served me much better.

A decent enough intro (although, again, much of this information can be found online and discovered for oneself through a little experimentation), but complete it certainly is not.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Helpful, but could be better, March 5, 2010

By 

Al Stevens "author, musician" (Cocoa, FL United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle (Kindle Edition)

It has a lot of good and helpful information, but most of it I had already discovered for myself before buying the book.

A book about formatting a book should be a well-edited book. This one is not. In addition to writing style and typographical issues, there are production issues, too. A figure (5.4) os the wrong figure, for example.

The book is supposed to explain all the "secrets." Not. For example, Kindle authors are told time and again that we have a default font and a mono-spaced code font and that's it. This book is published in a non-default sans serif font, and the author does not explain how he did it.

Are you interested in publishing formulae and equations? You get no help in this book.

I'd say buy another book, but I don't think there is another book on this suject. Perhaps that's why it's so pricey compared to other Kindle books.