I have successfully converted one of my books to epub format and uploaded it to B&N’s Pubit program. It went live this morning less than 48 hours after uploading it. Here is the link to it: bit.ly/ebhKoY
I had tried the new Google Edition’s program but after a week the file still said "processing." So I went elsewhere.
B&N’s Pubit program is very easy to use. I love the Nook Emulator which allows you to proof your uploaded book in emulators of both Nook and Nook Color before going live with it.
I just signed an agreement with Kobo (owned by Chapters/Indigo the largest book seller in Canada). They are less used to dealing with self-publishers but I think it will work out for me.
I will also go for Kindle but mobi seems to be the file format that works best with them. So I will need to learn more about mobi.
Which brings me to the fact that I am a do-it-yourself-er. I tried some epub conversion programs and did not like the results especially with the Pocket Tax Guides which have tables. Most of the conversion software writes junk code which results in bad layouts of anything more complex than a paragraph. Calibre is good for some things but their code is not. So I downloaded Sigil where I could view and edit the code myself. You see the epub format is a zipped cluster of files. Some of them are the control files. The biggest one is the content file. The content is written in the epub subset of xhtml which is similar to html. I knew html. So learning xhtml was not that hard. The next trick is being able to read and edit the control files which even Sigil can’t do. There is a tiny program out on the Net called Tweakepub which allows you to do that. You have to be careful there or you can break the epub. (Always backup before tweaking.)
Every reader out there is a little bit different. So I was not surprised to have to do some additional tweaking after upoloading to Pubit. The Nook emulator allowed me to do that.
The Publisher’s Pocket Tax Guide will go up next week.