Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Saved by a PDF (The easy way to do complex Kindle formats)

When I prepared my first Kindle version of Write and Organize for Deeper Learning, I spent days trying to format the document so it would look good on Kindle. Amazon's Create Space lets you upload a Kindle document and see how it appears on a Kindle emulator. When doing this, it became clear that weird bullets (like a checked checkbox) didn't translate. So I kept making changes, checking them on the emulator, and fixing anything that didn't look good.
But the emulator can't show you what your document will look like on different sized screens. Since the Kindle app can be loaded onto smartphones, tablets, and other devices, people can view Kindle books on a screen that ranges from small to large. And therein lies the problem. A table or detailed image that looks good on a computer screen Kindle app may look terrible on a smartphone Kindle app. And mine did. Because my books are filled with tables and complex images, I needed another approach. Some people recommended making my tables into images and I tried that. But it wasn't a good work-around, in my opinion.
I didn't know what to do about this so I reached out to Diane Elkins, the author of the E-Learning Uncovered books. And she told me to try the Kindle Textbook Creator. It turns a PDF into a Kindle document. Using reflowable text and images simply doesn't work well with very complex formatting. At least today.
When you buy a Kindle that says: [Print Replica] they used the Kindle Textbook Creator. The Kindle doc is formatted EXACTLY as your book is formatted.

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