View Full Version : How do I learn to create fixed page pubs

03-08-2013, 11:21 AM
I'm trying to create a photography book to sell as an ePub and on the kindle store - I've made plenty of iBooks and published them in the iBookstore - unfortunately one has recently been rejected because of Apple's censorship rules. My books look exactly the way i want them to in iBooks and want to recreate them as closely as possible to sell as mobi and epubs. I've noticed that unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a program similar to iBooks Author for making epubs... I've tried InDesign CS6 for epubs but moved to Pages as I thought it might be simpler.

So far I can't find any thing that explains step by step how to make fixed Layout epubs - in any program- usually I use Lynda.com but they only have fixed layout epubs for the iBookstore. My knowledge on inDesign and iBooks author is quite good but my knowledge on HTML is limited. Is this accomplishable?*

03-08-2013, 11:36 AM
You can start here: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Fixed_layout_ePub

03-08-2013, 12:16 PM
Have you considered making a PDF instead?

03-09-2013, 03:41 AM
You can't sell PDFs in the Kindle Store, I believe.

03-09-2013, 05:34 AM
You can't sell PDFs in the Kindle Store, I believe.

What about print replica books (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200738250) (AZW4)? AFAIK, they're just custom .pdfs with an Amazon DRM wrapper.

03-09-2013, 12:42 PM
You can't sell PDFs in the Kindle Store, I believe.

Neither fixed-page epubs, can you?

03-09-2013, 01:38 PM
No, but the OP said he wants to sell both ePub and Kindle books. I would imagine that the ePub books would be sold in ePub stores.

03-09-2013, 03:04 PM
I guess I misread the title, I thought it said "create fixed page epubs" :)

Do fixed-page epubs convert properly to mobi, anyway?

03-09-2013, 07:14 PM
Do fixed-page epubs convert properly to mobi, anyway?

Yes, if they are formatted in accordance with the Kindle Publishing Guidelines (http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf). Fixed layout .mobi files, or more precisely .azw3 files, need to be defined using 3 special mandatory metadata items:

<meta name="fixed-layout" content="true"/>
<meta name="original-resolution" content="1024x600"/>
<meta name="orientation-lock" content="landscape"/>

(Parameters marked in magenta are book-specific.)

However, Amazon's fixed layout syntax is different from Apple's. I.e., the OP cannot easily leverage his iBooks content.

03-12-2013, 09:09 AM
At present, all fixed layouts are not actually ePub because they are not standard. Each implementation has it's own formatting. iBooks is not the same as Amazon's KF8 which is not the same as B&N's. So you would have to code to each variety and it would be specific to a specific device/app.

If you don't have to do fixed layout, you'd be better off not doing so.