After learning the basics of design principles in our starting few posts, we’ll now dive straightaway into eBook creation steps.
Whether creating ebooks from TXT files or word processor documents or converting existing print publications to EPUB, the basics are all the same. You must learn to think in terms of EPUB, to reevaluate how your content is organized, and to know how to structure it using InDesign’s built-in tools in order to produce well organized, readable ebooks. The yellow brick road to becoming a wizard of ebook production starts with this chapter and proceeds through the next several chapters, creating progressively more interesting, more marketable ebooks and other EPUB-based publications.
Creating an Ebook from Scratch
Starting your first ebook from scratch—from a text document, from a word processor document, or by writing directly in InDesign or InCopy—is the best way to begin learning to create ebooks. (That’s not to say you can’t start from an existing for-print InDesign publication; we’ll convert those to ebook form later in the chapter.) If this is your first ebook, even if you have the content already in another form, start with this section—there’s a lot of important information here.
Beginning the Layout
Before bringing any existing content into InDesign, you must start a new InDesign document. Let’s do that using options with an eye toward the final EPUB output.
1. Choose File a New a Document. (File a New a Book is tempting, but that’s not what you want; I’ll talk about that in Chapter 6, “Fine-Tuning EPUBs.”)
2. In the New Document dialog, set Intent to Web, which will put the document into the RGB transparency blending space, and set the measurement system to pixels. Again, you might be tempted by the Digital Publishing intent, but that’s for digital magazines, not EPUBs.
.. to be continued
