[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tugger

I never said KF8 supported everything in a print book. I said "A publisher can produce the printed book in InDesign, and then also have the Kindle edition as well with no additional work whatsoever." Well it is true, if you accept that some features will be resticted. But as I said, the vast majority of the work is carried over into the Kindle edition. For example footnotes work brilliantly.

Sorry--my bad shoulder is making me short, typing-wise. I may have sounded more shrill than intended. Personally, I find that footnotes output to HTML pretty spiffily just from plain old Word, myself. I'm not sure, when you say, "brilliantly," what you mean, or what your expectation was, versus what you got, etc. I've never really had any issues with footnotes, assuming that they're created correctly in the first place, whether the source file is RTF, Word, etc. If you'll elucidate, I'd be happy to understand what you mean?

I can imagine a set of guidelines for designers using InDesign, telling them what to watch out for when making the print book, so that the Kindle conversion will work beautifully, without effort.

Calling Amazon's plugin "some addon" is not fair to it. They have been making it better and better and with luck it will continue to improve. And why not?

I am well aware that it runs Kindlegen, why shouldn't it?

OK--your original post seemed unclear to me, then. You said that:

It automatically gives you both the mobi7 and KF8 versions (packaged together).

which I inferred, apparently wrongly, you to mean that INDD and the plugin did something that KG does not. My mistake.

I seem to have upset you. I suppose this is because you have a business that depends on what I'm suggesting could happen, not happening. But I am just the messenger, it isn't my fault!

As I said, given the clients that I see here, I am in serious doubt that I'll be panhandling for change (I mean, more than being in the ebook-making business in the first place, is, given the wee margins) any time soon.

To sum up:
I can see that ePub is better than Amazon's KF8, but KF8 does an awful lot.

I think you will still have a job because traditional publishers don't have a clue about technology and expect perfection, so they will be happy to pay you to sort out their messes and make them beautiful.

I think a variety of tools will develop to help new publishers and writers do the whole job without understanding the underlying technology. In 5 years it will seem ridiculous to have to know about css and html to publish a book. For example the same things were true in the early days of word processors, one had to know all about the underlying technology. I can remember configuring WordStar to handle various printers to get proportional fonts, which required lots of hacking around.

Well, they can kinda do that now, with products like Jutoh, but that lacks a few things for more complex books (like Tables, etc.). For $40, it's actually a very good product. I don't know if I'd use it for commercial production on our scale--but for DIY'ers, it's a hell of a product. They can also use iBooks Author to create pretty schnazzy ePUBs--fancier than you see anywhere else. (If you've not seen the McGraw-Hill Algebra textbook, and its brethren, you should). Of course, for this 5 minutes, that only works on iBooks--but it's a drag and drop interface. In theory, books could be designed by clerical workers, in that environment. I have an intern making a book for us that way right now--has Zero HTML and CSS knowledge, and can't even clean a Word file--as an experiment. The results thus far seem to indicate that you and I may have side-by-side panhandling spots on the sidewalk. Of course, that's really true of Jutoh, as well--a person with secretarial training can make books all day long.

PS. You mentioned getting an RTF out of InDesign. Please reveal how to do that? I can see how to make a PDF, HTML, or an ePub, but not an RTF. (It is easy to put an RTF into InDesign - it takes just one click.)

It's nice to have a little info! http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign...E05F90F1a.html

And it's that easy.

Pax. It was not my intention for this to be a dog- or cat-fight. It's just been my experience--for what it's worth--that a TON of INDD files that I see are light-years away from being remotely viable for an ebook in either major format.

Hitch