Thread: eBook common sense 101
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Old 06-20-2011, 12:58 PM   #6
fjtorres
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jonathan2 View Post
Hi there fellas, I'm new here.

And I joined this forum because I'm just about to finish my eBook I've been working on for quite some time and I thought I get some input from you.

What font and size makes the most sense and is the best in terms of the reading experience? At the moment I'm thinking Calibri size 13 or 14 at 1.5 spacing.

I've been writing the eBook in Word 2010 - but what would be the ideal format to release the eBook in - PDF? ePub seems to be a bit of a hassle to convert to from Word.

Thanks
What you are contemplating is not an ebook release.
PDF is an archival medium, an electronic paper format, a digital microfiche, and not an ebook format.
And going out of your way to hardwire the display is unnecessary and is not going to endear you to readers. ebook presentation formatting decisions properly belong to the end user. You worry about making sure you have something worthwhile to say and let the reader decide the font and size they like or need. (13 point calibri pdf isn't going to be very readable on a cellphone or even 6" eink readers. And you shut out readers who need large print.)

Creating an ebook from MS Word is quite easy and there are several paths. Mobipocket creator, Kindle create, mobiperl, and Calibre are all viable options that don't require in depth tech expertise.
So is using LibreOffice (free) to open the Word file and the odt2epub plug-in to save it as an epub and it takes but a few minutes. There is no need to hardwire anything that will only end up annoying the reader.

Also, consider that your distribution channels will dictate whether you even need to worry about ebook format; several channels do the end user format conversion on their system. Unless you intend to distribute from your own website worrying about ebook conversion may be redundant.
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