InDesign to Kindle conversion guide
By Paul Biba
Adobe’s Digital Editions blog announced this guide today. Here’s what they had to say:
Today, we’re posting a how-to guide that explains how to convert eBooks authored using Adobe InDesign for compatibility with the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Store. Because Amazon uses their proprietary AZW format, the Kindle doesn’t natively support the open EPUB standard. However, with a bit of open source software, it’s fairly easy to convert the EPUB files exported with InDesign into the Amazon-compatible MOBI format.
Converting InDesign documents for Kindle compatibility requires the following steps:
1. Export InDesign document to EPUB
2. Convert EPUB to Amazon-compatible MOBI format
3. Preview on Kindle device (optional)
4. Upload to Amazon store
For complete details, check out the Adobe InDesign to Amazon Kindle Store white paper.
Update by Chris Meadows: Also, author Henry Melton (whom TeleRead has mentioned a few times in the past) has blogged his process of converting his newest book from InDesign to a Kindle-readable format.
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September 18th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Sadly, Adobe has missed a vital step: How to get your InDesign document to EPUB. I know Adobe says to export from ID to EPUB (which is an option on the File menu), but the export doesn’t work very well. It’d be so much better if Adobe spent less time writing white papers and more time fixing its export option.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Agreed: I tried it once, and never got through it. It was far easier to manually create the OEB from HTML pages created from pasted Word text, than to go through ID. And that’s saying something.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
If the target is Kindle, the best way to go about it is to skip Adobe-ware altogether: Just use MobiCreator or MobiPerl with your doc, rtf, oeb, or html file. Both produce excellent output and are free, to boot.
Mobiperl in particular is a jewel; I used it to turn my entire PG library to mobi format with a single monster batch file and it did not glitch once in 14,000 conversions.