Monday 29 April 2013

Review: publishing an ebook - iBook vs Kindle [Amazon vs Apple]

I'm working on a new book that I'm meaning to publish myself. Rather than go all the way down the wrong route and find out only at the end that I've made the wrong choices, I decided to publish a small pamphlet, or monograph, to try out the process itself.

I shouldn't do this, I suppose, many authors of articles force their readers to hang on until the very end before revealing their results. To be kind, if you don't want to read the rest of this, the answer was simple: avoid Apple's 'iBooks Author' and its iBookstore and, instead, publish through Amazon's Kindle.

Here are the reasons why. The pamphlet describes and afternoon spent at a perfume course at the perfumer Galimard in Grasse whilst on a holiday in Provence. It's a simple and short story that should have worked well in iBooks Author.

It started out well. It was easy to drag and drop the photographs and the text flowed nicely around them. It looked as if the whole process would be, if anything, easier than that using word.

Then I started hitting problems. The first was pagination. If you paste in, or write, a block of text that is too big for the page, it simply truncates it, which is not very good. You can add another text box and another page, but the process is clumsy and not intuitive.

There's a nicely easy table of contents at the top. Or so it seems. Once you've added your chapters and they simply appear in the contents - lovely. Apart, though, from its strange idea to translate a normal one-page table of contents into a multi-page interactive version - not a bad idea, I suppose, for a book of hundreds of pages, but completely useless for my little pamphlet. It is not at all obvious or easy to switch back to a normal table of contents..

You're invited to choose a template at the start from a range. The first lot allow your ebook to have both landscape and portrait pages - which looks tempting and useful. Beware, though, you can't change from this back to a simple portrait document - as I discovered to my cost. If you do, you have to copy and paste all the text and pictures to a new document, the template fixes itself as landscape. So, even if you turn it around, when you come to export it to a .pdf, it all comes out as landscape and your formatting is spoiled.

Not only that, the template locks you in to quite a few settings, including the background. If you choose a template that doesn't have a white background, you can't change the background in any way!

Once you get past all this, you hit the real problem! When you try to publish your e-book, you discover that you need a US tax code. No matter where you live, no matter where you want to publish the book. It turns out that getting one involves sending paper forms in  the post to Texas!! Just to publish a pamphlet that may well sell only a dozen copies.

So, I moved to publish on Kindle. It's a bit messy to edit the .pdf that you get out of iBooks, but not impossible. I then used Calibre to convert the document from .pdf to .ebook (or .mobi if you prefer) and submitted it. A few minutes later and it was working! The next morning it had been accepted.

There simply was no contest. Despite looking so easy, the Apple iBook Author route really doesn't work and Amazon's Kindle bookshop makes publishing really easy.