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• • December 7, 2017 at 9:43 am #100132
    Michele Jarosz

    Member

    I have a large paperback book that I publish, 1200 pages. We recently divided the book into five sections to make ebooks. We wanted these books to go on Amazon, Google Play etc. The large distributors. Through research I found out that these large houses only take epubs. I was also told by my printer that I could not do epubs with this book because there were too many pictures. (7,800). Although I did notice that 2 of the publications were on Amazon but not all 5.

    I was also told that epubs have to be numbered from 1-200 for example. Whereas we have some pages from the front of the main book and some from the back of the main book and they are not consecutive.

    To make a long story short we had to do interactive .pdfs of each book which eliminates the large houses from carrying our ebooks.
    Is there a solution to this dilemma?

  • December 7, 2017 at 12:32 pm #100143
    Paul Marriner

    Member

    You are getting some bad information. The problem of a book with that many images is that it’s likely going to have to be very expensive to cover the cost of the download penalty.
    First, typical reflowable epubs aren’t suited to image-heavy books (I have 2 for sale but they had to be completely reformatted to include only 1 image per page). You can sell non-reflowable ebooks on Amazon by using the Textbook Creator (this requires a pdf, the result is essentially a fixed-layout epub). Of this type I have one title up and a second (1600+ images) soon to go. I haven’t explored all the outlets but most of the others will deal with fixed-layout epubs, just not pdfs. I’ve never tried to split a single fixed-layout epub or interactive pdf into sections with non-consecutive numbering but I can’t see a theoretical bar. The pages may be numbered starting with 1 in the pdf, but page numbers from the indesign master pages should be retained. Mostly I foresee a horrible problem with indices.

  • December 7, 2017 at 1:51 pm #100145
    Michele Jarosz

    Member

    We had no problem with the interactive .pdf files as far as the index goes. We kept the page numbers the same as the original book resulting in each ebooks index pages only being active for that particular section of the book. I.E. page 321 went to page 321 if it was part of that ebook. We included the entire index in each ebook. Can an interactive pdf be converted to an epub?

  • December 8, 2017 at 1:05 pm #100221
    Paul Marriner

    Member

    Yes, including the entire index in each book works. Since you’re here I’m assuming you have InDesign. Providing you have one of the latest versions you can convert the ID file to a fixed-layout epub. This retains interactivity. You can pay to convert directly from a pdf to epub, but this isn’t possible in ID (at least to my knowledge).

  • December 13, 2017 at 8:44 am #100312
    Michele Jarosz

    Member

    Our distributor, Ingram books, will do that conversion for us. I was worried it couldn’t be done after they were made interactive.
    Thanks so much for your help.

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