I am the author of several books. I've offered ebooks as well as paperback for several years now. While my ebook sales are much lower than my paperback sales, I consider the ebooks worthwhile. One reason is international sales. Heaton Research books are produced at two locations: the USA and the UK. These two locations still leave much of the planet with very high shipping costs. For example, shipping costs to Asia cost more than the actual book! Many of these customers buy Heaton Research ebooks.

Currently, I only offer Adobe PDF format ebooks. To do this I license the book to Adobe and they handle all of the sales. This is probably the most simple of the formats for a publisher to use. I already generate a PDF to print my paperback book. I simply generate this PDF at a lower resolution and send it to Adobe. They then put it into their special protected PDF format and sell it. Sometimes I think their format is a little too locked down, but they have far greater distribution than I have access to. For several years, this was the only ebook format I offered.

Now I am experimenting with other ebook formats. Adobe is not the only game in town. They were simply the easiest to get up and running, and ebooks were an experiment for me. The experiment worked, so now I want to expand into other formats. I could not find any place that listed exactly how to create each ebook. This was a surprise to me. It took me some time to pull together how to publish each of the ebooks. So, I am going to aggregate this information here, and hopefully save someone some time.

As I see it there are really five ebook formats worth worrying about. Should this list be expanded? If so, tell me why. The ebook formats that I am interested in are as follows:

• Adobe EBook (*.idpf)
• Amazon Mobipocket (*.opf)
• Microsoft Reader (*.lit)
• Palm eReader (*.pdb)
• Amazon Kindle (*.azm)

And now, for the important part, how do you create each of these.

Adobe eBook

Adobe books have the extension .idpf. Basically, you need to create a PDF. There are a million different ways to do this. All of my paperback books were created using Adobe InDesign. Adobe InDesign can export to PDF, so this is how I did it. Microsoft Word documents can easily be exported to PDF.

Amazon Mobipocket

Mobipocket books have the extension of .opf. Mobipocket seems to be a major ebook player, as it is very common on SmartPhones, particullary Blackberries. Their ebooks are sold through Amazon.com and the Mobipocket Store. To read a Mobipocket book you need the Mobopocket Reader. To create ebooks you need the Mobipkcet Creator. Both are free downloads. Mobipocket takes HTML as its source to create an eBook. It will also take a PDF, but the conversion is not pretty! I found it best to use HTML.

Microsoft Reader

Microsoft Reader books have the extension of .lit. Microsoft Reader books can be bought from many sources, such as Microsoft. The Microsoft Reader can be downloaded free of charge. However the software to create Microsoft Reader books is not free. Most Microsoft Reader books are created with ReaderWorks. ReaderWorks accepts a variety of input formats for ebooks. HTML seems to work the best.

Palm eReader

Palm eReader books have the extension .pdb. Palm eReader books can be created using the DropBook application. This is a free application. Drop book accepts files that are marked up using the Palm Markup Language (PML). Palm eReader books can be bought through the eReader Store.

Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle is the latest eBook format. Kindle books are read using an Amazon Kindle, a hardware ebook reader. I do not know of any way to read a Kindle book using a computer. Amazon Kindle books are created using the Digitial Text Platform. This is a web based application that accepts files and converts them to Kindle format. As with the other formats, HTML works the best as an input format.