Ebook Template or Format?

[CONNIE]

Is there a template that supports or is best used for EBOOKS?

 

[Yves Dhondt]

Most e-readers don't support doc or docx files. Some come with software that
can convert your document to a format the reader can understand, but that's
about it. So there is no template that 'supports' ebooks.

You don't really format books for an e-reader. The e-reader is responsible
for doing that. It has to take into account its screen size, the font the
user requests, the size of that font, ... So there is no template containing
styling information that is best used for ebooks.

The most commonly accepted ebook format nowadays is epub. An epub is
basically a zip package containing one or more xhtml files with images and
other things. The closest Word can get to xhtml files are filtered html
files.

Hence, when creating an ebook, a basic rule of thumb you can follow is:
don't use any features that are removed when you save your document as a
filtered webpage (html).

Yves

 

[Deej Hernandez]

Is there a template that supports or is best used for EBOOKS?

Connie,

I have a Sony PRS-505 and I create eBooks for it in Office 2007 by
formatting everything in Word and then converting the document to a PDF
format. I've never seen an eBook reader that wouldn't read PDF and you don't
need Adobe to convert the document either. Microsoft has a download that
will save documents as PDFs and it works rather nicely. By converting to PDF
you allow the document to keep its formatting and the only problem you might
run into is the Reader not supporting a font you have used, in which case
most of them will insert their default font.

Hope that helps.

 

[Yves Dhondt]

pdf is a bad format to read on an ereader. As long as it's just plain text
on A4 pages, most readers can do the reflowing in an okay way. But as soon
as the pdf becomes a bit more complex (multicolumn, equations, ...) all
ereaders have issues processing the pdf. In most cases they just draw an
entire page and let the end user enlarge parts of the page to his/her
liking. This works but is certainly not userfriendly.

Yves