Review: Using InDesign to make a kindle book
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 21, 2012
We used Word 2010 to make both kindle and print books as described in the this Building Your Book for Kindle. If you have only text and no illustrations this works just fine. But if you have the problems with a large megabyte book with graphics and pictures as described in the comments by Barry Krusch above, then Word is a pain. Even for straight text books Word is a pain and gives buggy translation to mobi.I have not worked with my books in Dreamweaver but after extensive trials with everything from Mobipocket Creator to caliber and Sigil i finally settled on Adobe InDesign with the Amazon plugin as giving the best most faithful translation to the mobi format. You can use Look Inside to see the result here http://www.amazon.com/Isis-Reality-fragile-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B007LCPNQ6/ and here http://www.amazon.com/Athena-enough-Egypt-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B007LCPW1W/.You get incredible control over formatting in one step and it is easy to do corrections in InDesign and repeatedly translate the book to mobi with no sweat and a one button click until you get it right.Why keep fighting MS Word's bulky translation to html when there is a much easier way once you get used to it. I follow the Smashword's Nuke'm design guide on how to set up your file for ebooks (Amazon's guide wasn't out yet)and it works just great. Lately we write the book in Word in book format so we can see the final print layout as we write. The days of the double spaced manuscript in letter format and Courier Font is long dead and has gone the way of the typewriter.Then we import the final Word manuscript file to Indesign and make the ebook. The learning curve for using InDesign is steep and not for the fainthearted especially if you only have worked in Word and you will be googleing constantly in the beginning as Adobe have their own lingo for everything, very frustrating. But once you learn it, it goes quickly.You now have the advantage that with an extra days work you can format the ebook to print format.  We put in headers (page numbers etc), change the space before on the H1 style and we have the print book ready to convert to a pdf file you can upload to createspace giving you total control over layout, fonts etc.Talk about easy production for the single author.