Do I need an epub? or is the PDF enough?
Fellow indie hacker, I need your help in making a decision for my book...
As some of you have heard, I have recently published my book "beyond coding" (https://leanpub.com/beyond-coding).
So far the book has been released in PDF form and I have been very happy about the current flow of sales ( i had very limited expectations to be honest, so happy about the current result).
My question to you is:
Do you think it will be worth it for me to go through the hassle to convert the book into an ePub, or would you say that for a technical book, offering the PDF version is good enough?
NOTE: Unfortunately a straight conversation from adobe illustrator to epub would need some work
Just personally, I only use PDF
Just one person's perspective, obviously (and since I have not yet published an e-book, this is from the perspective of a reader, not that of an e-book author) - but for technical reading I'm happy enough with PDF - I rarely have read anything in epub format, and while I do use Kindle for recreational reading and language learning, I generally prefer a PDF for technical reading (because I typically want to have many different browser pages and apps and tools open so that I can quickly bounce between them when I'm reading technical material).
But I'm wondering - you mentioned adobe illustrator - is that just for illustrations and/or cover art pnly? I'm not sure, but I thought that LeanPub had some kind of authoring tool for the book contents itself, but if that recollection is correct, then I guess it means that their tool must not handle details like output format conversions for authors. But maybe I'm missing something.
yes you are right, they have a markdown like editor for author, but that was absolutely awful to use.
It lacks many needed components, and when the page was broken (for any reason), it would not tell you why and it took hours to go back and understand what paragraph broke it..
Imagine, it was so bad that I was thinking of creating a nice resource for technical writing wired directly at notion!
Illustrator is the tool use to make the whole book pages look pretty.. I was not aware that this was to "epub" compatible!!! newbie mistake!
That's interesting to know - while I have looked at LeanPub at a superficial level, I have not actually discussed its use with anyone who had actual experience with the platform.
I am curious, though, about how and/or what features of Illustrator you used to make the pages look 'pretty'.
(One of these days I may want to write an e-book or two. Many many years ago I wrote a computer book that was published by a computer hobbyist publishing house. It was a huge chore to do the work, and the financial rewards did not come close to compensating for the amount of effort that was involved. The book publishing game has changed considerably since then, as have the tools, and my own skills have improved as well, while the memories of the pain involved in such a task have faded, and so I may just give it another try.)
I have used a fiveer.com service, so I cannot really tell you how much was illustrator, and how much was the actual designer!
You can see an example on leanpub.com/beyond-coding, there is a free couple of chapter there.
Overall I found: