Book Update

Our book, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning, has been updated and is available for Kindle users (or users of the Kindle app). It is difficult to know what to call this edition. We had 5 editions with a commercial publisher and have updated the Kindle version twice since. Our reasons for moving from a commercial textbook publisher to Amazon were complex and we have explained this in a series of posts some years ago. Short version – we wanted to author content not suited to the once every three years textbook model.

Perhaps some thoughts on getting a book into the Amazon environment might be useful to others.

Issue 1 – update or new book

Amazon has a feature I like in books that may involve updates. Updating a book once you have prepared the appropriate files (the preparation is the issue) is trivial. You can change the content of an existing book by uploading the new files and the modified version of the book will appear in 72 hours or less. You might want to do this because you have identified errors that need correction or because it is time to update the content. What we just finished is a major rewrite.

The nice thing about the update is that those who already own the older version can move to the new version at no cost. Here is the problem with updating a book. The publication date on the Amazon site is the original publication date. As an author, you have the opportunity to write a description of your book and could include the date of the most recent update, but this information tends to get buried. The original publication date is prominent. I am concerned because what appears to be a dated book about technology is likely to be ignored.

I am not sure what to do about this. I want those who have already invested in our content to be eligible for the update. I think I will give it a month or so as an update and then I can easily delete the existing book and upload the book again as a new book. I will have to see how things go.

Issue 2 – formatting

Several previous authors of a Kindle book have discovered that formatting a book for the Kindle is quite a task. What you see in your word processing environment is not necessarily what you get in the ebook. These authors have decided their experiences were worth another book and you can purchase multiple Kindle books on preparing a book for the Kindle. My recommendation – these books can be helpful, but the information in this area seems to become dated very quickly.

I found that things kept changing on me and I had to experiment each time. The last time I found what turned out to be a fairly easy approach. I wrote in Google docs. I used Apple Pages to finalize the manuscript and save it in a format I could submit. Apple then updated Pages and removed features I needed. This time I again wrote in Docs, but I had to use both Calibre and Sigil to generate a final product. I should give credit where credit is due and point any interested Kindle author to a YouTube video that explains the process. To be fair, part of my issue has been not using MicroSoft Word, but even Word users have to do some post-production work.

I wish Amazon would invest more in tools for formatting. I am proposing something like iBooks Author. iBooks Author has a lot going for it, but it is simply not flexible in the platforms it supports. I must prepare a textbook learners can use even if they do not own Apple hardware.