Mobipocket Creator

If you want to publish and sell ebooks through Amazon's web site, you will need to create and upload a special epub file.

Authors who are HTML savvy can actually do this manually using an HTML editor, but for the rest of us, there are a few free tools available for download to help us convert our Microsoft Word manuscripts into the proper epub format for Amazon and Barnes & Noble online ebook stores.

Mobipocket Creator and Calibre both generate epub files for use on Amazon and Barnes & Noble's web sites; however, your end results may vary greatly.

It is not as easy as converting a Word document to a PDF file. When you do that, what you see is what you get. I liked it when ebook publishers let you use the PDF format. In my eyes, it is still an industry standard, but companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble want your ebooks in very specific formats so they will display properly and clearly on their respective wi-fi tablets.

When publishing a series of ebooks on Amazon, I used Mobipocket Creator and Calibre. Mobipocket Creator did not like my table of contents or my page headers. Page numbers in footers are meaningless on a tablet, so they can be removed before publishing. This makes your table of contents fairly useless, too.

In short, the online publishing experience has taken a few steps backwards in my humble opinion. What should be easy is not, and I don't really understand why these publishers can not adopt the Adobe PDF format as their publishing standard.

To use Mobipocket Creator, you import your existing file (DOC, PDF, TXT or HTML) and then you pick a cover graphic and add publishing and META tag information. Then you click a button to create the OPF file. This is what gets uploaded to Amazon.

Using a Kindle Previewer available for download from Amazon's KDP web site, you can open the OPF file to see how clean the conversion is and to identify any problems that need to be corrected with the layout. This can be an onerous task depending upon the quality of the original Word DOC file.

Mobipocket Creator is an old program. It appears the last update was made in 2008; however, it is still supported and used throughout the industry.

To learn more about Mobipocket Creator, please click here.