Convert Book to eBook Project—Part 1

My personal project for the Fundamentals of ePublishing class is to convert a book that I designed for print into an eBook. When this book was created, it was only thought of as a print book, so there was no thought whatsoever as to how it would convert into an eBook. Also, there is the problem of what format for an eBook. I already use pdfs as part of the proofing process, although I don't use them as eBooks, so my initial challenge is to create a pdf with links, not just a pdf of a print book. So went through the book and set up links from the Table of Contents to the intended pages, and I also made the hyperlinks listed throughout the book into active links that will open in a browser. I did most of this in InDesign (CS3), and then did a few tweaks and adjustments in Acrobat Pro (v.8).

Since I almost exclusively work with print publications, there was a bit of a learning curve in doing this. It took a little playing around to make the links look how I wanted them to look, which is just normal (I hate the bright blue default hyperlink look) without the weird default box that InDesign automatically puts around links. Still, if you hover the mouse over a link, the finger appears alerting you to a link. I think this is sufficient, without hitting the reader over the head with the default hyperlink look, but I might go back and adjust the look of the links later, we'll see.

Here is the pdf that I created (click on the image of the book to link to the pdf):

My next step is to experiment with xml, which I have been doing, but I now realize it's unrealistic to think that I can code the entire book in xml from scratch, at the very end of the design process. The more I read about it (which I have been doing for months, the best book so far for me is A Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML, although it doesn't even talk about eBooks, it talks about XML in a very designerly, non-technical manner), the more daunting it is (this is a 128 page book). However, there are many free/shareware tools that are available to make this process easier. I think it would be easiest to code a book in xml if I knew the book would be converted from the beginning.

I will post throughout the various steps with resulting documents.