MiddleoftheNight Editorial Services

     creating books
Masthead Image

eBook publishing: What is it?

eBooks—electronically digitized books read on dedicated e-reader devices such as Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, or Apple's iPad, or perhaps simply read on a website via an online browser, even with a PC—are light, space-saving alternatives to printed hard back and paperback books. When a book takes the material form of bits and bytes (or what we might more poetically call aether) rather than atoms, it weighs less on you, at least physically. For those who find reading a "real" book too heavy or too time-consuming to engage in (and there are increasingly more of you, it seems), ebooks might provide the right mindset for falling into a good book again. Even if you're only searching desultorily through an ebook by means of its tempting search function or hyperactively jumping about through hypertext, watch out: You might find yourself caught in its spell.

 

Why is eBook publishing important?

To the relief of travelers having to pack a suitcase full of heavy books, ebook publishing here in the early 21st century is heralded as comparable to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century. It's doubtful ebooks will ever replace books in print (there are a lot of us bibliophiles who love the sensuous qualities of a printed book too much to give up buying them), but reading via an electronic device offers a convenience and an incomparable searching capability that are here to stay.

In contrast with a pdf, which Anne-Marie-Concepcion in her course on Lynda.com describes as a "frozen page," even if a visually appealing one, epub- and mobi-formatted book files automatically reflow to fit the screen size of the device on which they are viewed (e.g., becoming small enough to be read on an iPhone). Consequently, she says, mobi and epub formats are "the wave of the future."


eBook services: What we can do.

Because the numerous e-reader devices available for reading ebooks require different formats, ebook publishing can be confusing--an unstable Tower of Babel for readers and publishers alike. Fortunately online courses as well as the latest books--yes, even ones paradoxically read in hard copy form--keep us up-to-date. We work with the three basic formats--mobi, pdf, and the Open Source epub--via Adobe Digital Editions InDesign to produce ebooks for the Amazon Kindle, Adobe Reader, and Barnes and Noble Nook, respectively (as well as for other e-readers such as the iPad). Further, we can publish you directly with the three main ebook resellers that welcome independent authors: the Amazon Kindle store; the Apple iBookstore; and the Barnes & Noble Nook store.