How difficult is it to create an ebook for kindle?

February 19, 2014 9:54 AM

I'd like a quality ebook with hypertext and art. Assuming good computer skills and time, can I do it myself or should I hire someone?
posted by larry_darrell to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You can do it yourself. Do you have access to iBooks Author or InDesign? Where are you planning to distribute said ebook? Memail me. This is a big portion of my side job.
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 10:08 AM on February 19, 2014

My partner literally just made one for a project starting from zero experience in less than a month. He used iBooks Author (Mac only I believe).
posted by atlantica at 10:10 AM on February 19, 2014

Not difficult at all and depends on the format. An .epub is just a renamed zip file. If you can do html, you can create an ebook.
posted by nakedsushi at 10:40 AM on February 19, 2014

I did it myself and it was straightforward...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 10:42 AM on February 19, 2014

I created one by taking one of the Project Gutenberg books as a model (in epub format), and generating the book by editing the included HTML files. Amazon then converted it to a Kindle book automatically. It took a bit of time tweaking to make sure the converted version also looked good on a Kindle, but it was a fun project.

You can judge for yourself if the results were decent: .epub, .mobi, .pdf. (I assume self links are ok in this context)

Looking at previous answers, looks there are easier ways to do this than the path I took.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 11:00 AM on February 19, 2014

Take Pride in Your Ebook Formatting is a 9-part article about, well, ebook formatting
posted by lharmon at 1:46 PM on February 19, 2014