Making Your Own eBooks

RESOURCE: Making your own ebooks for the Mac/iPhone/iPod Touch

There is a twisted, tortuous path you must follow if you want to make your own ebook to read on your Mac or your iPhone/iPod Touch. Here are a few of the ways:

Use Linux. This requires jailbreaking your iPhone to install a Linux ebook reader called “Books.” This is NOT recommended under any circumstances, because your iPhone will be useless for anything else at all.

Become a Programmer. This is a real Apple Developer apps builder, requiring you to know specific coding applications. Not for the novice or those with no time to kill.

Use Stanza. This shows how to put your purchased O’Reilly’s ebooks on your iPhone using the Stanza app. It is more complicated than it appears, and you may find a few landmines along the way. To date, I have not been able to open Stanza on any Mac or my iPhone. However, my wife Connie can open Staza, and uses it just fine. Stanza IS still in Beta.

Sell your own ebook to appengines.com. Have appengines create your ebook for you. First you must get them to agree to build the ebook by giving them up to a third of your profits for selling your ebook for you on the Apple iTunes App Store. If your ebook is your own and you are trying to find a place to get it published, this is a great thing. Apparently this company is agreeable to looking at your potential work to see if it is a publishable work or not. I cannot tell you how rare this is! In fact, I have a novel with them now, which they are submitting to Apple’s App Store. Details to follow.

Buy your ebook online. This is an excellent article that describes the current state of commercial ebooks on the iPhone/iPod Touch today. Although many ebooks here are free, this is useless if the book you want does not appear in the list of ebooks for sale at these places.

Creating a readable ebook without any of the above
The very best way to put an ebook on your iPhone is to have an account with Apple’s $99 dollar a year MobileMe. Simply load your ebook, document, PDF, or text file, article, blog – whatever onto your MobileMe and open it on your iPhone using MOBILEDISK, which is a .99 cent Apple App designed to allow you to read anything you put on MobilMe. Things are really pleasant to view and easy to read with this app.

The second best (and free) way to get an ebook file from your Mac (perhaps a good, free Asimov SciFi novel from the web?) is to create a PDF file from a text file of whatever book you want.. This can be better than making a TEXT file of the book you want to read on your iPhone/iPod Touch, because it has pages which can help you navigate a bit better than with a text file, which has no pages at all, but is one continuous stream of text from beginning to end.

You can use most any text application on your Mac to open the ebook or text file you just downloaded. But on no account should you EVER use Microsoft Word to open one of these plain text files, because it will make your ebook file unreadable on your iPhone/iPod Touch. I use TEXT EDIT for my everyday text reading app on the Mac. Really Simple Text will do very well too.

Most of the novels from the web which I have downloaded, I have saved in rich text format (RTF), where the text will have bold, italic and page layout options. This is much better than plain text, which may not even have line or paragraph breaks.

How can I justify downloading any novel from a website? Because I own the hard copy of the book I want to see on my computer or on my iPhone/iPod Touch. If you own a copy of the book, it is exactly the same as if you own a CD with some song you want to copy into iTunes, so you can listen to it on your computer or on your iPod, right? You own the song, so you can make it in a different media format to use on a portable player. You have the same right to make an electronic copy of your physical book.

If you do not own the physical copy of the book, downloading the book from the web electronically constitutes theft, unless that book is freely authorized to be downloaded and/or is in the public domain (but you knew that).

To make a PDF of the text file of your book, you simply PRINT and use the PDF button on the bottom right of the print menu.

However, you will not likely be able to read your PDF on your iPhone/iPod Touch because the text will be too small. So you first need to SELECT ALL on the text of your ebook file and change both the FONT and SIZE. You can use any font you want, but I have found the very best font to use on the iPhone is GEORGIA, and the best font size for reading on the iPhone/Touch is 24 POINT.

The inherent problem with all this is that the bigger you make your point size, the more pages you have to scroll through in the iPhone/iPod Touch. A larger font makes fewer words on a page, but more pages. 24 Points is about the optimal here for readability and number of pages to scroll. Just be aware that some of these ebooks can have 500 pages. Your mileage may vary.

After you fix the font and the point size of your text, and SAVE it, then you can print your PDF and it will be readable in your EMAIL as an attachment.

But you need to understand that this is not really a good thing. What is needed, and is NOT available, is an EBOOK READER app for the iPhone/Touch – one that allows some automatic formatting and paging for the ebook you want to build. (I suppose Stanza would work here, if it would work at all.)

To see what a real ebook app should look like, GO HERE. This link will open iTunes. Once you are there, go and download “A Princess of Mars” which is a FREE ebook by Edgar Rice Burroughs. You will immediately be seized with fits of jealously over what a true ebook should look and act like. The book is beautiful to the extreme, and running it as a stand-alone app is a dream.

But what about doing this yourself on the Mac? Well, the results are not pretty. This is because the only way you are going to read your book is in your MOBILEME using your MOBILEDISK, or in your EMAIL app as an ATTACHMENT. As far as I know, there is no way to build your PDF, RTF, or TXT file and have it placed on your iPhone/iPod Touch desktop (yet). Although O’Reilly may be on to something.

The basic problem with the EMAIL app on these devices is that there is no page scrolling and the page breaks are really shown as 8.5 x 11 inches with wide margins. Believe me, I have tried other methods (saving the RTF as a PDF postcard sized document, etc.)

The big limiter here is that in the email app on the iPhone/iPod Touch there is no rotating the device to read in landscape mode. You can only use the portrait mode for reading emails or attachments. Nor are there chapters, where you can jump to a selected place in your ebook. So far, I have had no luck using HTML to format my ebook with chapters and headers in a way that will open and work on the iPhone.

RTFs are no really better in the EMAIL app on the iPhone/iPod Touch. There are no pages in either RTF or TXT files, and your scrolling may only be done with your finger gesturing down the screen. If you are a patient person, this is no big deal (and I am not a patient person).

This is an especially painful thing if you close your book half-way through it to do something else on your iPhone/iPod Touch, and then go back to the place you left off. There is no way to bookmark your place in an attachment in the email app on these devices, and you will have to start over at the beginning to scroll to where you left off.

If you want to put your ebook directly into the iPhone/iPod Touch, simply attach the enlarged 24 pt RTF file to your EMAIL. Email it to yourself, and open it on your device. It will appear as an attachment, just like the PDF did. The RTF shows up as a single stream of text from the beginning to the end of the novel. There is still no navigation, other than gesturing a screen at a time, but you may find this marginally better reading than using a PDF on the iPhone/Touch.

Ideally, if you are flying on a long trip, you can open the novel on your iPhone/Touch and read the whole thing in one sitting. Both of these devices will allow you to finish before the battery runs down.

And if you are taking your MacBook or MacBook Pro with you on the trip, use that to read your ebook, because you can make the file appear in any size you want and there will be SCROLL BARS to navigate with.

This whole thing, of course is regrettable. There needs to be a simple ebook reader that allows a person to make a readable document on the iPhone/iPod Touch, with pagination, chapter navigation, scrolling, etc. (Is there a Programmer in the house?)

Until then, well, we are sort of stuck with this kluge of reading ebooks in MobileMe, or as attachments in our email app, right?

Best of luck to you.
Sorry. No Refunds.
Your mileage may vary.
Don’t squat with your spurs on.
Always drink upstream from the herd.

Regards,
Roger Born

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