Capclave Ebook Workshop

Had a great time at Capclave this weekend. One of the things I did there was run a small intro to ebook design workshop. With only two hours, I decided to go with more of a shotgun approach to covering the topic. It would have been nicer with a bigger screen, but overall, there were only a handful of things I would have done differently. If you were there, thanks for attending and I hope you were able to get something out of it.

Here are some of the things I shared with the group:

• Sigil (for editing the epub files)
• Calibre (for converting epub to mobi/kindle)
• Word2CleanHTML.com (for stripping a Word document down to the basics)
• EPUB Validator (to test your epub files before converting to mobi)
• Nook Reader App (reads epub files on a variety of devices)
• Kindle Reading App (reads mobi files on a variety of devices)
• Adobe Digital Editions (reads epub files and tends to act odder than others)
• MobileRead Forums (great place to get answers about anything ebook, my go-to site)

I also promised to share the basic CSS I had used for my examples:

p {
margin-top: 0em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
text-indent: 1.27em;
}

p.noindent {
margin-top: 1em;
text-indent: 0em;
}

p.line-above {
margin-top: 1em;
}

p.line-above2 {
margin-top: 2em;
}

h1 {
margin-top: 4em;
text-indent: 0em;
font-size: 1.6em;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
margin-bottom: 2em;
}

p.book-title {
margin-top: 3em;
font-size: 1.7em;
font-weight: bold;
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: center;
margin-bottom: 0em;
}

p.author {
margin-top: 0em;
font-size: 1.5em;
text-indent: 0em;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}

p.centered {
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: center;
}

I didn’t say I was going to do this, but I’m going to start blogging some of the details from the session. It’s going to take a bit of time (need to squeeze it into my schedule), but you’ll eventually have everything we covered with details.