E-Book Tools From Amazon

Last week I told you about a surge in e-book sales after the holidays. If you are in the business of creating graphics and electronic documents, this is a trend that should be on your radar. As Amazon is one of the largest sellers of e-books, they want to make sure that tools are available to help designers create compelling titles. If you are talking about the latest thriller, it is most likely made up of mainly text. Yet there are other types of titles like comic books and graphic novels that are light on text and big on graphics.

The more graphic titles just didn't play well on the earlier Kindles since they only supported a few levels of gray. Now Amazon has the Kindle Fire as well as apps that work on iOS, Android, PC and Mac for reading Kindle books. With the announcement of the Kindle Fire also came the announcement of "Kindle Format 8". So that designers can support the new format, Amazon has released the KindleGen utility for converting materials into the new format and the Kindle Previewer to preview a book. For those who are already using Adobe InDesign to create books, there is also a free add-on to convert from InDesign to Kindle format. That is in addition to the features already included in Adobe InDesign for converting to ePub format. As e-books continue to gain in popularity, there is no doubt we'll also see more tools making it easier to create e-books.