I’m pretty sure that when Steve Jobs announced earlier this year that Apple’s iBooks application for the (then) upcoming iPad would use the ePUB format I’d never heard of it before. eBooks I had purchased up to that time were usually in .prc or Kindle format (.mobi).

For months now whenever I have logged into my Amazon Advantage account (I sell books through Amazon.com and they keep a small inventory of each title) I’ve been reminded that I should be making all my published titles available to the multitudes of folks who are reading books on their Kindles. So I finally gave in and started looking into it. Come to find out that one of the best ways to get books onto the Kindle platform if you are using InDesign CS4 (I am) is to export the publication to ePUB first, and then use a program called Calibre to convert to .mobi, which is the Kindle’s native format.

It all sounds so easy doesn’t it. You open your book in InDesign, go to File>Export for Digital Editions, choose your export options, and click Go. Ahhhh. If only!

The first thing I learned is that you really should break the document up into separate InDesign documents for each chapter. Not trivial when you have created each of your books as one long document. Breaking them into chapters makes it easier for ebook reading devices to load the pages to be displayed. It also means that during the export, InDesign will create a table of contents that will be used by the ebook reader to provide easy navigation for your readers.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I successfully converted Pastoral Letters to Kindle format and within a few days it became available for sale on Amazon’s Kindle Store. I downloaded a free sample (first 10 pages) so I could see how it performed on the Kindle app for iPad. I quickly found some shortcomings in the formatting and made some edits and re-uploaded it. After that, I purchased my own copy. Cool.

Since then I have uploaded a second book to the Kindle Store, The Way of the Cross by J. Gregory Mantle. As of this writing it has been accepted by the review team but will not appear on the store for another 24-36 hours. I sell ten times more of these on Amazon.com than I do of Pastoral Letters, so it will be interesting to see how they sell in Kindle format.

In my next post I’ll tell about my experiences submitting books to Apple for the iBookstore.