Welcome back! Today’s post, the fifth in the “Self-Publish a Book” series is all about writing a great book.
Previous Posts: Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4
EPUB, Mobi, PDF—Understanding digital book formats
If you’ve hired a designer to work on a book’s interior, you won’t really need to worry about formats—they will provide you with all the files you need to distribute your book. But if you’re working by yourself—or you simply want to know how the sausage is made—this lesson will show you the basic differences between the most popular formats for self-published books.
Depending on your distribution plans, there are three formats you need to know about—EPUB and Mobi files for ebooks, and print-ready PDFs (guess why you might need those).
EPUB
This is the most common format for ebooks. It’s a standard based on HTML and it allows for “reflowable text,” meaning that the book can easily optimize itself to any device, whether it’s on an e-reader or an iPhone.
All major retailers, apart from Amazon, use it on their platforms. If you want to upload to any other ebook retail platform—through Kobo Writing Life or Nook Press, for example—or use an “aggregator” like Smashwords or Draft2Digital, you will need to have an EPUB file.
Mobi
When you purchase an ebook on the Kindle store, it arrives on your device in the Mobi format: a standard owned and used by Amazon. At its heart, it’s not that different from an EPUB file, with the exception that Mobi files sold by Kindle are “locked” to devices registered to your account.
Kindle Direct Publishing automatically converts all books to Mobi before displaying them in their store. The best way to ensure your formatting doesn’t get mangled in that conversion is to upload using the EPUB format.
How to get what you need
If you don’t want to deal with all this by yourself, there are paid services that will format and typeset your book. But what if there was an easy way to get your book ready for distribution without paying a single penny? Well, now that you mention it…
Remember the Reedsy Book Editor? We could go on and on about why it’s so awesome, but the most important thing is that it doesn’t need an “instruction manual”. You can just write your book and forget about the formatting. The Editor is fully compliant with all major ebook and print-on-demand retailer requirements, so you don’t have to think about each store on a case-by-case basis. And of course, the Editor is completely free.
You’re finally ready to share your book with the world, come back next week to find out how!
Hi Marios, thanks for providing this useful information. I’m glad that I get to read your article just at the right time, I was planning for an e book for a long time, but always missing some key information that you’ve shared in your article.
Your website has a lot of other useful articles to read. I’ll go through each of them, bookmarked your site. Many stuffs you’ve mentioned are absolutely new to me.
Thanks a lot for sharing this article. Looking forward to come out with my e book now.
Hey there,
I’m glad you liked my post. I hope you still find it useful, and read all the other posts, as well as answer my First Annual Survey 2019
Marios
I found this post very interesting, ebooks are like blogs I guess in someways, because, where a book gets published and sits on a shelf waiting to be brought, the blog is permanently out there with a wide range of content and the ebook is a great way of covering specific parts of that content
Obviously, there are ebooks and Ebooks, but eHub looks like it covers the professional looking part, which is essential to the reader
I like the way you give the reader a link to the software, because I am sure reading the post, as I have, ideas kick off in your head and you think I could do that!… Is that your own experience
Have you written ebooks?
Overall I enjoyed it and will be interested in reading the next installment as it were
Hey Dave,
No, I haven’t written any ebooks (yet). The series is based on extensive research.
Thanks for stopping by!
Marios
Ah thank you for writing this article. I was planning for publishing my ebook and distributing it through my website. I’ve prepared it in Google Docs to be converted to PDF. Is it hard to convert from Docs / Microsoft Word format to EPUB or Mobi format? I will also try to check the editor that you’ve mentioned above. There are many things that I still need to learn before publishing this ebook. Thank you
Hey there,
No, it is not hard to convert Word to EPUB/Mobi. You can do it online or try Calibre Library.
Good luck with your endeavor!
Marios