I’ve just started an online course — Editors and e-Books — with the Editorial Freelancers Association in the US. The blurb about the course says that it will ‘help editors learn the ins and outs of e-publishing, so they can confidently guide self-published authors from manuscript to e-book.’ Which is exactly what I need, given that I’m currently working with three authors who plan to publish in both hard copy and e-book format.
The first assignment was to look at two e-books: one fiction, one nonfiction. For the non-fiction, I bought the e-book version of the course textbook — APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish an eBook, which I’ll read onscreen via Kindle Cloud, since I don’t possess a dedicated e-book reader. For the fiction, I downloaded a PDF of The Two Destinies by Wilkie Collins, from Free e-books.net.
So far, I’m enjoying the content of APE, but not the layout or the onscreen reading. For example, a lead-in sentence to a set of bullets may be on one page, with the bullets on the next, and I haven’t worked out how to see which chapter I’m in. The PDF of The Two Destinies is very basic — it doesn’t even have page numbers — and I would much prefer to read it in a printed book or listen to it as an audiobook.