Tag: eBook format

Excerpted from BookBaby’s latest guide, 5 Steps To Self Publishing, Part III of our series looks at the benefits of producing eBooks and printed books for your self-published title.

What is an eBook? An eBook is a digital version of your manuscript that consist of text, images, or both. An eBook can be read on most mobile devices, all of which can hold hundreds of titles at once. It's like taking a library with you on the go.

Even though they’ve been around for almost 10 years, a lot of folks are still trying to understand the world of eBooks. Our BookBaby publishing specialists field dozens of questions about eBooks every day, and any question, no matter how basic, deserves a good answer.

Authors are still acclimating to this new world of eBook publishing, which has some asking, "Why doesn't my eBook look like my printed book?" There are practical reasons why.

For many BookBaby authors, understanding the nuances of eBook formatting – like fixed vs. standard layout – can be a challenge. Gino Vasquez and Kyle Fadigan from our eBook Convertion team play an important role in many BookBaby authors' lives, converting manuscripts from programs such as Word or Pages into formats that work on eReaders.

In order to turn your book into a functional eBook, your manuscript document (.doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .html, etc.) must be converted to another file format (ePUB for most eReading devices, and .mobi for Kindle). Whether you're handling the technical aspects of this process yourself or having a service like BookBaby take care of it for you, there's a few things you need to do in advance to make sure your manuscript is optimally formatted for eBook file-conversion.

ePub has been widely adopted as the eBook format for Apple's iBooks, Sony's Reader, and the Kobo, and ePub 3 has some new features worth noting.