Publishing for Kindle Fire advice.

[ekovv]

Hi, first post, not sure if there is a better section for this topic or not.

I've been working on taking some instructional landscape painting PDFs and formatting them into ebooks for the Kindle Fire.

At first I was keeping things really basic by just importing the text and images into Word and doing basic formatting, then saving it as html and converting it to mobi to test it on my Kindle Fire. This worked to an extent but I still don't have control over the formatting like I would want to.

The book is more or less laid out with each step as an image and text together so I need to keep them from separating into multiple pages which tends to happen with the reflow text.

I was thinking the book should be formatted more like the digital magazines on the Kindle Fire where you can view a two page spread in landscape, however if you switch to portrait the page splits into two separated pages.

I read about fixed layout KF8 formatting which might be what I'm going for but I'm not sure how to go about it. I don't know html or css but I'm willing to start learning. Just wondering if anyone has experience with this kind of thing and can point me in the right direction. Thanks.

[Jessica Lares]

Have you tried putting your images and text together, as in making a image file, adding some canvas space at the bottom and adding text and saving it? A lot of people seem to do it that way. It doesn't give freedom to the reader in formatting, but it does help in your case.

But yeah, KF8 is probably what you're after, specifically the <figure> and <figcaption> tags. Here is the supported list from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm...d_i=1000729511

Start out with the Kindle Format 8 Overview page at Amazon.com. Download and read the publishing guide and download and examine the sample books.

You can force page breaks in HTML (and thus KF8) for reflowable text, but if the reader increases the font size it might break at the wrong place. Nonetheless, it is doable. A better option might be to use Kindle Panel Views as illustrated in comics and graphic novels.

Again, everything to get you started is on the linked page referenced above.

BTW, welcome to MobileRead! A better place for this kind of question is probably the mobi forum here at MobileRead: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=168