Customer Reviews

Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide To Formatting Books For The Amazon Kindle

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the details of the Kindle's AZW format. Even if you just want an overview, this may still be the book for you because it is very readable and could be skimmed and dipped into as needed. As a tutorial on how to edit ebooks it may (or may not) be over emphasizing direct editing of the HTML, but that is what makes it useful for reference. A lot of the information is also applicable to MOBI ebooks in general, although there is no discussion of any device specific issues except for the Kindles (not even Kindle ebooks on the iPhone).

Things I found out from this ebook:

* The PRE tag and CSS font-family: monospace do not work, use CODE (or TT or SAMP or KBD) tags instead.
* Maximum in-lined image sizes are different on the K1 and K2.
* Blockquotes indent by 1/2" on the K1 but 1/4" on the K2. This makes nested blockquotes useless on the K1.
* How to include navigational waypoints on the K2.

I actually read the ebook on my PC using Desktop MobiPocket Reader (it is DRM-free, so just rename the file from .azw to .mobi). I never do this for fiction, but a larger screen does help for technical books. It is readable on my K1 though, and would be better still on a K2.

Things move fast in the Kindle world, and this two-year old book, whilst excellent in its day, is now somewhat past its sell by date. It still contains much useful info, but don't expect anything about the Kindle 3 or Kindlegen or Calibre. It has a chapter on Mobipocket Creator, but of course this program is also out of date, not having been maintained since 2008 and now throwing up the occasional Javascript error if you're running IE9.

Mr Tallent usefully discusses how to use Microsoft Word to prepare one's e-texts, but alas he fails to consider how its considerable search-and-replace functionality (let alone its powerful VBA program language) can be used to add the necessary HTML tagging directly. Instead, he limits himself to using Word's own bloated HTML output and then clearing the inevitable mess up aftewards with alternative search-and-replace functionality found in programs like Notepad++, a technique which, depending on the complexity of the text, may well prove more demanding in the long run.

So should you buy this book? Perhaps. Certainly an updated version will be worth purchasing if it maintains this quality of insight.

I bought this book and use it extensively in formatting books for Amazon Kindle Books. It is comprehensive and easy to understand. In addition, Mr. Tallent has been more than forthcoming when I've asked him questions through his web site. This book, in my opinion should be on the shelves of every independent publisher entering the new age of e-publishing.

Before I read this book, I tried to convert a book into Kindle format, and succeeded only half-way. Despite extensive googling, and questions posted on message boards, I was lost. (I have written software for over twenty years and am conversant in XML, HTML and CSS. I thought that would be enough...) Thus I had very specific goals when I purchased this book for my Kindle2:

1) How do I create a TOC?
2) How do I create navigational waypoints?
3) How can I make my illustrations look their best on the Kindle 2?

This book answered those questions well, plus many others that I didn't know I ought to be asking.

There is no fluff in this book. Every page has useful and timely information. Mr. Tallent writes clearly and his book is well organized. (And he included Perl scripts, so he must be smart!)

Great book to guide you in writing content to be published on the Kindle. This book is not for beginners or casual writers. But if you are a serious writer or publisher, this book is indispensible.

I had the privilege of getting an early copy of this book. I met joshua online at his website (www.kindleformatting.com) where he was generous enough to share some tips on formatting. I was just getting into the whole kindle thing and he was very patient with me.

After a while it came out in the conversation that he was writing the 'tome' for kindle formatting. What?? I thought? gimme gimme! After all i was spending hours figuring out the poor out of date documentation on the DTP site.

This book will save you WEEKS of trying to figure things out on your own or googling around. There just isnt much info out there. Joshua is THE authority on the subject having been in the game since day one of the Kindle 1 release. He has a passion for the subject and continually updates the material.

Highly recommended to get you up to speed and on the road to master kindle formatting.

Kindle Formatting: the Complete Guide... is a bit of a misnomer. Of course there is some good information in the book about how to format your title for a Kindle, but the information is not at all complete and worse, sometimes even completely wrong.

For example, in the book you'll find a statement that < p > and < div > are essentially the same, but they aren't. < div >'s CAN be used inside blockquotes, whereas < p > 's cause the blockquote to be completely ignored. A combination of < p > and < div > can even yield hanging indents inside blockquotes, although this only works on the Kindle and not on the various PC or Mac readers.

Also, the section on how to deal with images or tables could be a lot more extensive. We're only warned that Kindle will resize images automatically, but you'll find nowhere that this can be prevented by specifying the actual dimensions in the HEIGHT and WIDTH arguments of the IMG-tag. Instead we're told that the ALT-argument isn't used by Kindle at all, but that it's "good coding practice" to include it anyway. Furthermore there are about 8 pages that simply show an image inside the ebook with no explanation as to how it's formatted to appear that way. And, since Kindle 1 doesn't support tables (every other Kindle and even all old Mobipocket reader implementations do support them), you'll get the advice not to use tables at all. So, there is no information on how to align text in tables, how to create vertical spacing inside tables, how to specify width of table cells etc.

Which CSS is and is not supported is also not very well documented. Mobipocket supports a lot more CSS elements than the book leads us to believe. You just have to know which combinations don't work (e.g. using CSS to specify margins for block quotes or specify a left margin for a div inside a block quote won't work). Almost as an afterthought we're told that inter paragraph spacing can be achieved with CSS as well, even though fine grained inter paragraph spacing can be achieved with CSS a lot easier and more consistent than with the HEIGHT attribute the book uses in all examples.

Summarizing: this is a good book for anyone who wants to know how to create ebooks for the Kindle and have more control over the display of their book as opposed to submitting a Word or PDF document, but don't expect a complete reference. The information is far from complete and sometimes it's even incorrect.