My first attempt at an e-book

I have a book on Research Methods that I've been putting together.

It has been available at PSU's Bookstore using the OdinInk Print On-Demand system.  This has worked out well but I've been wanting to try making it into an ebook as well.

After doing reading on Amazon's Kindle publishing program, Barnes and Noble's Nook program, and Apple's iBook, I decided to try the Kindle's program first. the tools seemed to be pretty straightforward but I knew it would be a challenge to take a complex word document and convert it over to ePub or Mobi.   The book has a number of features including:

• Mathematical symbols in the text (font issues!)
• Equations (not handled well when ebooks typically emphasize plain text)
• Tables (hard to handle in ebooks where page layouts are not strictly contained)
• Figures (same as for tables)

I spent about an hour last night and this is what I came up with when viewed in Kindle's preview program.  The first picture is how it would look on the Kindle Fire (an inexpensive color tablet) and the second picture is how it would look with the very common e-ink Kindle ereader.

The pagination seems to change slightly but in both cases the equations are fouled up.  Let's see how it looks in a PDF.

The result is that it will take a lot more work to get this ready for Kindle.

I'll give it some more work but in the meantime, I found a service that allows for selling the PDF and will give that a try.  It is a quirky service that I found from a series of articles on e-publishing that I found on tuaw.com.  Gumroad certainly makes it easy and then you can load it on to any device that can handle a PDF.

Here is a direct link to the book on Gumroad.  https://gumroad.com/l/Timd

It is a first edition so comments and suggestions are welcome.  It is also the version that will be available at the Portland State University OdinInk publishing system.  I think textbooks have really gotten outrageous so I plan on keeping the book very reasonably priced.  The physical OdinInk version is $15 and the  PDF version is $10.  The PDF is DRM free to make it as convenient as possible for readers.  Pages have "gutters" so that it can be printed and put in a 3 ring binder or other binding.  The PDF is in full color while the OdinInk system is black and white except for the cover.  The cover is not included in the PDF but you can use the image at the top of this post or email and I can send it to you.

I'll write another post discussing the book's content.  Suffice it to say that it covers the material that I wish that I had known when I was starting off as a grad student at Georgia Tech many years ago.
I plan on using it as a supplemental book for most of my classes but anyone is welcome to get it.

Have fun!  Feel free to post corrections.  People that identify errata will be acknowledged and thanked in future editions.