Getting started with ebooks

The question: I prepare books for print and I'm wondering what are good resources for taking authors through the process of Kindle publishing; this seems a useful ability to pick up.

Getting in at what is still a relatively early stage would seem to be a good move -- and what Kindle books I've downloaded so far (admittedly mostly free) are, to put it mildly, not very well done. My first experiment a week or so ago of just a 2-page file was, at least in my view, well up to average standards. But the couple of print-prepared documents I've experimented with since have been disasters.

I found Joshua Tallent's site at kindleformatting.com very useful, but the free trials so far of various software to convert from pdf to epub and the mobi format (the latter being what the Kindle uses) have been disappointing. The best so far has been the conversion aspects of the Calibre ebook library and uploading/conversion program: calibre-ebook.com

A trial version of Adobe InDesign in the new CS5.5 edition holds out promise with its new Article palette to take a print file and reorganise the items into the order needed in an ebook and to leave out other items like running heads and page numbers. That will convert to Adobe's favoured epub format that Calibre and other programs can convert to .mobi. However getting InDesign for just e-publishing at its present level would seem an expensive outlay.

I would be interested in learning from others who have dabbled or more with Kindle or other e-publishing and what software they used.

My guess is that we have yet to see the software which will let us seemlessly change a print-publishing file into one for e-reading.