Designing for Kindle

Introduction

For most of our message series at Calvary, we publish a devotional journal to help people take Sunday’s learning deeper throughout the week. Recently, we decided to offer our next journal in both print and digital formats. As I was working on the Kindle version, I thought that someone else out there might be interested in the Kindle design process so I thought I would detail it here. Even though this is a bit of a technical process, I think anyone who is familiar with InDesign can learn to publish to Kindle.

For organization purposes, I’m going to break this down into three posts:

1. Designing For Kindle
2. Exporting A .mobi File
3. Publishing In The Kindle Store

Designing For Kindle

Our printed devotional journals are 9 in wide by 7 in tall. We design them in Adobe InDesign, which has built in support for exporting ePub documents (which is a format we will need to export to in order to eventually get to the .mobi Kindle file). However, InDesign on its own does not do a great job of reformatting a document designed for print into a digital ebook format. It mostly has to do with how InDesign reads the file and converts the XML that the Kindle needs to read…it simply isn’t made to handle that conversion smoothly. Since I like to control the look of my document, I decided to reformat it into a size and style that will be better for Kindle.

Step 1 – Reformat Document
After doing some research and experimentation, I found that a file that was 6 in wide by 8 in tall would work the best. I copied the text (including all of the paragraph styles) from my original journal file and placed it my new file. Though some ebook readers, including the Kindle and the various Kindle Apps, can handle images, color, etc. I decided to strip out all of the presentational design elements and just work with only text for my document.

Step 2 – Build TOC
The next step was to use InDesign’s built in Table of Contents (TOC) creator to make a table of contents. This step is important because the Kindle will read the TOC information and use it for the table of contents function within the Kindle. Simply follow these steps to create the TOC:

1. Make sure your chapter headings are mapped to a paragraph style.
   
2. Go to Layout > Table of Contents to tell InDesign which style matches up with your chapter headings.
   
3. InDesign will then attach the “place text box” icon to your cursor and you can click anywhere outside the canvas to place your TOC.
   

Step 3 – Map Styles To InDesign Tags
It’s very important to use paragraph styles when designing your document because they become the tags that the Kindle uses to determine how your document looks on the Kindle device.

To map the styles to the tags follow these steps:

1. Open the Tags pallet by going to Window > Utilities > Tags.
2. Make a new tag (click the new tag icon at the bottom of the pallet) for every paragraph style you used.
3. Open the pop-out menu on the tags pallet and select “map styles to tags.”
   
4. Match up your styles to the tags you created.
   

Step 4 – Cover Image
The last design task is to create a cover image. Once again, you’ll want to create your file at 6 in by 8 in. I went ahead and created a full-color cover since some devices (like the Nook) and apps (such as the iPad Kindle App) can display in color. However, on actual Kindle devices, the image will adjust to a grayscale image. Save this image as a .jpeg but do not place it in your InDesign file. You’ll add the cover to your document during the export and conversion process.
That’s pretty much it for the “design” phase. In the next post we’ll look at the process for getting your document exported out of InDesign into the .epub format, then converting the ePub to the .mobi format for the Kindle.