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As of May 16th my book Make Your Own Sugar Activities! is available for purchase in the Kindle store.  You can also download the first few chapters for free.

My Author Page

Putting a book on the Kindle Store is something any Booki author should routinely do with finished books.  It is a lot less work than putting a book on Lulu and the Kindle store has a lot more visibility.  I’m not suggesting that you give up on Lulu, just that you add the Kindle store to the ways you distribute your book.

Booki already does most of what you need to make a Kindle-formatted book, and OBJAVI *could* be modified to do the rest.  Until then you’ll need to do some work by hand:

1).  Export the book as an EPUB.

2).  Run the kindlegen program (a free download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS) on your EPUB to create something that is readable on the Kindle.  This will NOT meet Amazon’s requirements for the Kindle Store, because it lacks a Table of Contents and a cover image, but the Kindle can use it.

3).  Using either the Kindle Previewer or a real Kindle look through the book for formatting errors and go back to Booki to fix them.  I found a problem with bullet points because I used Open Office to create the first few chapters of my book, then I pasted the chapters into Booki.  This caused my <li> tags to have <p> tags nested within them, a problem I would NOT have had if I had used Booki to write the chapters.  I was able to fix this in Booki by turning on HTML mode in the editor and getting rid of the <p> tags.  In the Kindle having the <p> tags in there makes the bullet appear on one line and the text appear on the following line.

Note that the docs on Amazon’s site say you can’t use <table> tags in your book.  That is wrong. The current Kindles display tables just fine.

Another thing you should do is add a section to your Introduction explaining how to get the book in various formats, including the website, Lulu, the Internet Archive, etc.  When people download the free sample of your book they will get this information.  If you’re writing a FLOSS Manual and have code samples in your book the Kindle will NOT render them well at all so you should direct your readers to the website so they can see the code properly formatted.  (Another possibility to suggest is the Kindle program running on a PC or Mac, which can take advantage of the wider screen).

The Kindle Previewer is available for Windows and Mac OS, but not Linux.  However, the Windows version runs under WINE.  It is too slow under WINE to be used to check every page for formatting errors, but it works well to verify that your cover image and Table of Contents are correct.

4).  Create a cover image and upload it to your book.  The cover image does not have to be linked to any page of your book, it just needs to be uploaded.  You can use the “Insert Picture” button in the editor, upload the image, then cancel out.  The image itself can start out as a white rectangle with a 5 pixel grey border.  I used a 600 x 800 canvas, but Amazon recommends something a bit larger.  You can easily create a usable cover image in The GIMP.  I put an orange rectangle with rounded corners at the bottom of the image which contains the same text that we put on the back covers of printed FLOSS Manuals.  I also put my name on the cover image as the author.  The printed book does not have that.  Amazon wants books to have authors.  You can have multiple contributors, including photographers, translators, etc. They will all be listed on the Kindle Store page.

5).  Re-export your book as an EPUB.

6).  Create a directory and unzip your EPUB into it.

7).  Make a copy of the XHTML file for your first chapter named something like ch000_table_of_contents.xhtml and use an HTML editor to make a Table of Contents out of it.  The free Seamonkey web browser from Mozilla has a perfectly adequate HTML editor that you can use for this.  Each chapter in the TOC must have a relative link to the chapter XHTML file that contains it.

8).  Use the same HTML editor to edit your Introduction chapter and put a centered <h1> entry with the title of your book at the top of the chapter.  Underneath it put a centered paragraph with “by Author Name”.  I chose to put this text in italics.

9).  Using a text editor edit the content.opf file.  You’ll need to fix the top of the file to be like this:

<metadata>
<dc:publisher>FLOSS Manuals http://flossmanuals.net</dc:publisher>
<dc:rights scheme=”License”>GPLv2+</dc:rights>

Two lessons ago, we looked at applying styles to paragraphs, this lesson we will look at changing how these styles appear when we export our books. And of course we will be using CSS to do it all.

To keep things simple, we will focus on the Normal <p> element and the heading <h1> to <h6> elements. Each of these elements associated with our paragraph styles has the same properties that can be adjusted using CSS. There are a lot of properties an element can have, but in this tutorial we will look at two text properties, text-align and color.

CSS Recap

First a recap – a CSS declaration starts with a selector (this is the element whose properties we want to adjust), and is followed by a declaration (a list of one more properties followed by a value that we want to set the property to). To make changes to the CSS of a book, go to the book’s Export tab, click on Show advanced options and then set CSS mode to Custom. Changes are made in the Custom CSS text panel.

To set the text-align property for an element use the following notation:

h1 { text-align:center; }

As you can see at the beginning of the rule we set the element we want to adjust (h1). The declaration used to adjust the style of our element is enclosed in braces ( { } ). The property we want to change, text-align is separated from the value we want to change it to, center by a colon (:). Finally the declaration finished with a semi-colon (;).

Every declaration ends in a semi-colon and all declarations are enclosed between the two braces. In the above example the entire rule is placed on one line, to aid human readibilit of CSS sheets, especially when there is more than one declaration, a rule is often split over several lines as follows:

p {
text-align:center;
color:red;
}

Basic Text Properties

text-align
As it’s name implies, text-align adjusts the alignment of the element. There are 4 basic values for this property: left, center, right, justify. these all apply the same settings as we covered in Tutorial #15: Paragraph Formatting.

color
This property sets the colour of the text for an element, the values used can take many forms: For common colours you can use their names, e.g. blue, red, green, black. For a complete list of predefined colour names visit http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_colornames.asp; For more comeplex colours you can use Hexidecimal, RGB or HSL colour notations. Hexadecimal defines a colour value using: #RRGGBB, where RR, GG, BB are values between 00 and FF representing levels of the three primary colours. RGB defines a colour using: rgb(red, green, blue), the parameters red, green, blue are specified by a number from 0 – 255 or a percentage from 0% – 100% and represent levels of the three primary colours present in the text colour. HSL defines a colour using: hsl(hue, saturation, lightness), hue is a value between 0 and 360 (o or 360 give red, 120 gives green and 240 is blue); saturation is a value from 0% – 100% and represents the level of the colour defined with hue (0% gives grey while 100% gives the colour’s full intensity); lightness is also a percentage from 0% – 100% and defines the amount of light in the colour (0% gives black, 100% gives white and 50% gives the full colour defined with hue and saturation).

The following rules all give the same colour to h1:

h1{color:green;}

h1{color:#00FF00;}

h1{color:rgb(0,255,0;}

h1{color:rgb(0%,100%,0%;}

h1{color:hsl(120,100%,50%;}

h1 {
text-align:right;
color:blue;
}

h2 {
text-align:center;
color:#FF00F0
}

h3 {
text-align:left;
color:rgb(255,50,0);
}

p {
text-align:justify;
color:hsl(180,100%,30%);
}