Formats for Books

When you’ve written something you have spent many hours pouring yourself into, the next step is to publish it. With the advent of the internet, it’s never been easier to make your book available to the public—there are millions of do-it-yourself guides to help bring your book to the masses. While it is relatively easy to publish your book as an ebook through Amazon, that’s not the only format out there.

Thanks to the internet, whether you are an independent author, a publisher, a big press or a small one, you can maximize the availability of your book by using the three major formats for books: print, EPUB, and Mobi.

How We Do It

Here at Ooligan Press, we take your manuscript and convert it into these three formats. Before arriving in the Digital department, the manuscript goes through extensive editing to make it the best it can be, and then it goes through XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, typecoding. This is usually done by the editorial team, but the Digital department acts as a resource and aids in troubleshooting throughout this process.

After the XML document is created, it is imported into InDesign for layout and design. The design process creates the standard that the electronic formats will strive to meet—after all, we don’t want the ebook to look like a completely different book. After the book is styled, it gets sent to the Digital department where it is coded using XHTML and CSS code to make an EPUB file.

Once the EPUB file has been created, it goes through several rounds of revision. When we’ve fixed all the issues in the files and created an agreeable version of the ebook, it gets uploaded to an online distributor that streamlines the availability of the book in multiple ebook marketplaces. The book is also converted into a Mobi file (Kindle’s Format) and made available in the Kindle store.

Fun Facts About Ebooks

1. Due to variations in the screen sizes of different ereaders, we try to make the text within an ebook as fluid as possible. Our goal is to have the text automatically adjust to different screen sizes while maintaining the styling that the design team created.
2. Sometimes we have to modify the CSS code to make the style a better fit for ereaders. In one instance, we used code to increase the spacing between the chapter numbers and the text so that it looked cleaner and matched the print version better.
3. It only takes a single misplaced semicolon to make an entire ebook unreadable.