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Originally Posted by jonathan2
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.
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Smaller size is better, because most ereaders (all modern ereaders, I think) have multiple sizes, and you can always make text bigger, but not smaller. "Best for reading experience" depends on the reader; one of the advantages of ebooks is that the publisher (or author, for self-pubbed books) doesn't have to figure out what looks best--they just have to figure out what looks okay, and if the reader has specific preferences, they can arrange for those settings (or convert the ebook) for their own device.
I prefer small text, no margins, and 1.1 line spacing, indented paragraphs with no blank line between them; a 13-pt font would drive me bonkers and I'd stop reading. Line spacing bigger than 1.25 is annoying and results in too few lines/page.
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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.
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PDF is only good if you're designing it for specific e-readers. I make PDFs for 6" and 5" readers, because that's what I read on--but I make them to my specific preferences. For customers, I'd stick with the more flexible formats unless you have a compelling reason to go with the fixed-page filetype.
Calibre is a (free, open-source) program that will help you convert your book to ebook format; it needs RTF or HTML to start with, and there are Calibre forums here to help you sort out the details--how to set up the CSS and other aspects to create a table of contents and so on.
The two dominant ebook formats at the moment are .epub and .mobi/.prc; mobi works on Kindles and epub works on pretty much everything else (and some of them also support mobi). You can either poke at Calibre, learn to manually convert, and get the Mobipocket conversion software, or hire someone to do the conversion for you.