EBookFmt Home Page

The form was created to assist in creating the files needed to publish ebooks on the Kindle and also to create the 'EPUB' source files for publishing to the Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Apple iPad. As many of you will know not all these files are needed for the Kindle, even though the Amazon documentation says that they are (see Kindle Publishing Guidelines ). The guidelines say "TOC guideline #1: the Logical TOC (NCX) is mandatory" but in fact they will accept books without many of the items they say are mandatory, including not having a .ncx file. Nevertheless they may enforce these these requirements in the future and they are required to publish on most of the other platforms so it is probably best to do it right in the first place. The files created by the forms also use a single external css style sheet to control the text display and this can be edited to alter the display to suit your own requirements. There are a number of links in the documentation to sources of information on using css, ncx files, mobi, html etc.

Currently text for the following files is output.

• A mimetype file.
• An ebook.css file. This is referenced by the xhtml files to control the display of the various elements on the ebook readers. It is fairly heavily commented so even people who don't know css well can format the display.
• A toc.xhtml file, this file contains the information to create a "Table of Contents". This file can be saved and used as is with the opf file, or you can copy out the <div> containing the TOC links and paste them into your source html document to create an intrafile TOC. You can also edit the 'anchor' text of the links to make a more attractive TOC.
• A navigation-map.ncx file, this file contains the elements needed to make what Kindle calls the 'Logical Table of Contents' and is also referred to as the navigation map. It is the file that supplies the information to make the row of dots at the bottom of the Kindle screen that the 5 way navigation button can move through to jump to defined points in the Kindle document. This file can be edited to clean up the <text> text elements; if you add new elements you will, probably, have to resequence the playOrder attributes.
• A .opf 'packageing' file, this is the file that ties all the other files together and supplies the 'meta-data' needed. It uses the data extracted from your source file along with the data supplied by you via a number of input boxes. The opf file should be saved with the root name of your source file with a .opf extension.

Click on the make files button bellow, paste or type in the information into the input boxes as indicated and click the submit button. The form will be processed (this may take several minutes for a full novel sized book) and the form will reload with a number links now shown at the bottom. Click on each link in turn to get the text for the files. Each text page has instructions on it. Although these files are 'valid' they are not neccsarily complete; how 'compleate' they are will depend on how you have formatted your word processor files before saving them as html. At a mimimum you should format the Chapter/Section headings using the WP Heading styles. Also, a set of WP styles have been created to control the discovey of Author Names, Image Captions etc. The Documentation covers this in more detail. The files are complete in the sense that they have all the REQUIRED elements, of course you can add additional lines to the file for items you wish to include that are not among the required elements. The files can be used as created but they can also just be used as a 'validated' starting point for you to customise them for your own use. If you are not sure of how to

create properly formatted files it is reccomended that you create a version of your project using the 'valid' files, then make copies and edit the copies to make your customised versions. Click on the Documentation links to get an html or pdf version of documentation for the ebookfmt system. Downloading the pdf version of the by clicking on the 'PDF Documentation' link below and printing it out is reccomended As mentioned in the documentation you will need to download the ebookfmt.ott template file if you are using Open Office .

PDF Documentation HTML Documentation

I have made a few videos to help with using the ebookfmt form.

1. Getting the ebookfmt OpenOffice style template http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uik1qPNjTSI
2. Formatting the WP document (styles and bookmarks) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SIBJwJV4YU
3. Using the form http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej5t9InE8Jo
4. Creating the Kindle .mobi file using Kindlegen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eWqv1bt4E0