Ebook Formatting Options for Indie Authors

For indie authors, one great way to save money when it comes to publishing your books is to learn how to make your own ebooks. Personally, when it comes to creating ebooks, I recommend using Sigil, and I teach an online course on Udemy on how to use Sigil and other free tools to create your own beautiful ebooks.

But there are a myriad of other options. Below are some examples:

Formatting Ebooks

• “Binding Your Own E-books: Part 1 (The Internet Archive BookReader)” on New York Public Library
• “Evernote Now Lets Users Create eBooks” on Adweek
• “Format a Book in Word: Kindle Formatting” on Format Book in Word
• “How to Build a Better Ellipsis with Adobe InDesign” on The Book Designer
• “Introduction to Regular Expressions For Indie Publishers (Open Office)” on LearnOutLive
• “High Quality PDF to Fixed Layout EPUB® 3 Conversion” on Magic ePub
• MoJo’s Indexing and Editorial Service
• “How to Index A Self-Published Non-Fiction Book – A Beginner’s Guide by Joanne Phillips” on How-to for Authors
• “Publishing Books to Github pages with Bitbooks” on Bryan Braun
• “Review: PDF to InDesign Conversion Software for Book Layout: Markzware PDF2DTP” on The Book Designer
• “The Fonts of Popular TV Shows” on Web Designer Depot
• “Format a Book in Word: Base Font & Line Spacing” on Format Book in Word
• “What Sort of Back Matter Should Your Ebook Contain?” on Deborah Jay
• “Ten Great Ebook Production Tools” on Digital Book World
• “How to Create an Index for Your Book in Adobe InDesign” on The Book Designer
• “How to choose fonts for book illustrations” on Creative Bloq
• “The State of Web Typography” on Youtube
• “Building a real XML-first (XML-in) workflow for scholarly typesetting” on Martin Eve
• “How to Choose the Best Software for Print Book Design” on Self Publishing Advice
• “17 Ways To Use iBooks Author Right Now” on LinkedIn

Ebook Issues

• “Cross-Reader Compatibility With eBooks (Especially Poetry)” on ideatrash
• “Nook Covers Not Showing Up” on John’s Blog
• “Kindle publishing and the problem of apostrophes” on Alphr

Ebook Reading

• “How To Add a German-English Dictionary To Kindle on Your iPad or iPhone (iOS)” on LearnOutLive
• “Open Ebooks” on Hypothes.is
• “Habits of Easy (E)Reading” on Vimeo

Ebook News

• “Calibre Reaches Its 1.0 Release – an Event 7 Years in the Making” on The Digital Reader
• “Latest Calibre Offers Cover Grid, Docx Conversion and Virtual Libraries [Updates]” on MakeUseOf
• “The Readers Sound Off! How They Read, What They Like and Where They Find Us” on E-book Formatting Fairies
• “Ebook Platforms and Design – How to Format Them, Where to Sell Them” on STL Today
• “Lucidpress Launches Beta of Web-Based Design App for Print and Digital Publishing” on Forward Geek
• “What Enhanced E-Books Can Do for Scholarly Authors” on The Chronicle of Higher Education
• “Olive Software Offers New E-book Enhancement Tool” on Publisher’s Weekly
• “The Ebook Developer in the Corner” on Digital Book World

The Web

• “HTML and the future of digital publishing” on Real Business
• “Why do we need EPUB when we have HTML?” on Quora
• “Performant CSS Animations: Netflix Case Study” on Wealthfront Engineering

Tools Online

• CSS 3D Solar System
• CSS Animations
• CSS Sans Fonts
• “CaSSius: a CSS-regions-based PDF typesetter for scholarly communications” on Github
• “Pagination (PDF-like) using CSS Regions through css-regions-polyfill” on Github
• “Substance: A JavaScript library for web-based content editing.”
• “ProseMirror: In-browser structured text editing“
• VisualEditor