Setting clear expectations with new clients (regardless of if you’re a shoe shiner or a book designer) is one of the most important things you can do as a service provider. Since my business is book designing and not shoe shining, one of my key areas is showing my clients a comparison of print book vs kindle format.
Although Kindle formatting is making strides everyday, it serves a bit of a different purpose than a book formatted for print. The intention of eReaders is to allow the person reading to customize their own reading experience on a variety of different devices.
There are two types of Kindle formatting: reflowable and fixed formats.
- Using the reflowable format is what is going to give the purchaser of your book control over font size, columns, pagination, etc. This will also ensure that the text is searchable.
- Fixed formats are reserved for image-based books, like children’s books and comics.
I was blessed to work with Jaclyn Harwell at The Family That Heals Together with Jaclyn Harwell on her cookbook, “Nourishing Holiday: Grain-free, Gut-healing Food For Every Celebration“.
Here are a few pictures that clearly show the difference in a custom-layout cookbook for print and its Kindle counterpart.
The first image shows the Kindle in portrait view, which allows the reader to see one page at a time. The remaining pictures show the Kindle in landscape view, allowing the reader to view 2 pages at once.
Any image can be double-tapped to show it in full screen, as displayed with the last image.
Unlike some sites who promise Kindle conversions, I do not just run your file through a converter app. I rebuild the file in Adobe InDesign, the industry-standard for book formatting.
Your final files will:
- have active hyperlinks where you need them,
- have an interactive table of contents,
- retain formatting for all of your bold, italics, bullets, line numbering, and color, and
- have high-resolution graphics (as long as you can provide me with high-resolution graphics for the file).