Summary

eBooks have become very popular over the past decade, and for independent authors, they have some distinct advantages. In this post, we will explore what an eBook actually is under the bonnet, how they are distributed, how they can be protected, and the ultimate question that is often at the centre of this blog: “can I just make it myself?”.

eBooks Deconstructed

Basics

At its core, an eBook is a digital file, and is in that sense not dissimilar to the PDF that you might produce to send to a printer. The primary practical difference, from the point of view of somebody visually constructing a book (which I hope, following the Typesetting post, you will consider doing yourself), is that eBooks can be reflowed, while PDFs cannot. Concretely, this means that if you open a PDF, it is like holding a physical sheet of paper — you can move it closer to your eye, or further away (zoom in and out), but the ratio between the page size and the font size will not change, and the text on the page will not change. eBooks, on the other hand, are intended to be displayed on many different devices, with different screen and font sizes. At default zoom, an eBook might be 100 pages, but may become 200 if you zoom in, with half the number of words per page; a PDF on the other hand, will remain 100 pages, they will just be very zoomed in. This difference means that your mental model when typesetting an eBook needs to be rather different than when producing a physical book (or more specifically, the PDF that will be printed to become a physical book).

Formats

• PDF
• MOBI
• Amazon formats (AZW3, KFX, KPF)
• EPUB

PDF

I have included this because you technically can distribute a PDF as an eBook, inasmuch as eReaders will display it. However, as I explained above, it does not reflow, so your readers will have to do a lot of zooming, panning, and scrolling. There is no good reason to distribute your work as a PDF, aside from extreme laziness.

MOBI

This format is now essentially obsolete. There is no good reason to distribute your work as a MOBI, not even extreme laziness.

Amazon formats (AZW3, KFX, KPF)

Generally speaking, Amazon produces these formats from EPUB files that authors upload to the Kindle platform. They have some benefits, including DRM (more on that in the ‘Protecting Your Work’ section), but tie you inextricably to Amazon’s ecosystem. Many very knowledgeable people have written about the pros and cons of selling your work on Amazon, so I will not discuss it here.

EPUB

This is the format that you should be using. Under the bonnet, it is a ZIP file (which is just a collection of files that have been compressed to make them smaller, and put into one container).

Even further under the bonnet, it is essentially a website. Web technology has long been able to handle reflowing text, allowing it to adjust to different screen sizes and orientations (phone vs laptop, portrait vs landscape), different zoom levels and font sizes, and even display options (custom fonts, light vs dark mode, etc.).

Can I Make An EPUB Myself?

Absolutely. In fact, making your own EPUB is a lot easier than typesetting a book for printing, precisely because of their ability to reflow. There is no need to obsess over widows and orphans, verso vs recto pages see this post if those terms are unfamiliar, page numbers, etc. Reflowing means that these become algorithmic decisions made by the reader’s device, rather than things that you have to plan out when you produce the eBook. Much like typesetting, there are two approaches: graphical, and code-based.

Code-Based

As I mentioned, an EPUB is really just a website, any images that need to display in the eBook (including cover art), plus a little bit of metadata (a file that tells eReaders the title of the book, etc.). If you are comfortable with HTML and CSS, you can try doing this yourself, but honestly, although it is the approach that I chose, I would not recommend it. If you are not comfortable with HTML and CSS, feel free to skip the next paragraph, in which I explain why.

eReaders tend to run ancient rendering engines, so you are not just writing CSS, you are writing polyfilled CSS with a dozen fallbacks, in the hope that your book will render semi-decently on the first-generation Amazon Kindle that somebody has had on life-support for a decade. It is frustrating, and the feedback loop is slow. I chose to do it like this for two reasons: interest, and having a single source of truth for the text; meaning that if I made any change to my Typst source-code, a script would produce a PDF for printing, and an eBook, with identical text, removing the risk of me editing the Typst (and therefore the PDF), and forgetting to edit the eBook. I am glad I did it, because I am dull enough to have somewhat enjoyed it, but honestly, it is not worth the effort.

Graphical

There are two main programmes available: Sigil (and its accompanying PageEdit), and Calibre Both are free, and open-source (meaning that they are not owned by one person or company, and are more like high-quality community projects). Of the two, I would recommend Sigil/PageEdit, as it allows you to create and edit your eBook in a manner reminiscent of Word or Google Docs, whilst retaining granular control of the code. Calibre is also powerful, and will do the job, but it focuses more on library management rather than purely on editing.

Protecting Your Work (DRM)

Lending or giving books to other people is a long standing tradition, which has been rather complicated by the advent of digital media, including eBooks. When you lend a paperback to somebody, you no longer have it, until they give it back. With digital media, on the other hand, you could copy an eBook an arbitrary number of times, and send it to as many people as you liked, and you would all simultaneously have a copy. Authors (or creators more generally, as this applies equally to digital art, DVDs, etc.) have long been concerned that this disincentivises people from actually buying their work, preferring to pirate it by receiving a digital copy.

Attempts to prevent such piracy are termed ‘DRM’ (Digital Rights Management). A particularly interesting one, albeit completely irrelevant to this article, was used by the original PlayStation — instead of data being burnt on the CD in a normal pattern, it was burnt with a ‘wobble’, meaning that it could only be created correctly by a burner that ‘wobbled’ in a similar way; this meant that if you tried to put the disc into a computer to duplicate it, the copy made by the computer would be missing the wobble, and the PlayStation would refuse to start the game. DRM with eBooks is a touch more prosaic, unfortunately.

It is worth noting that preventing such sharing does pose something of a moral dilemma, inasmuch as the fact that most DRM systems are ‘all or nothing’, meaning that they prevent any sharing of assets. I suspect most would agree that I should not be allowed to buy an eBook and share it with a million people, but many would argue that stopping me from sending a copy to my friend (especially if I am not simultaneously reading it), is unfair. It is for each author to decide for themselves where they draw the line morally.

Third-party (Amazon style) DRM

In this form of DRM, Alice has an eBook, and she would like to share a copy with Bob. If you were to open the file that Alice has in a generic programme, you would not actually see the book text, instead you would see a jumbled mess of letters, numbers, and symbols. In a separate system, maintained by a third-party (e.g. Amazon), there is Olivia, the ‘oracle’. She knows that Alice bought this specific copy of the eBook, and therefore decides to give Alice’s device the information it needs to un-jumble the file and display the book. When Alice sends a copy of the file to Bob, and Bob tries to open it, Olivia knows that this copy belongs to Alice, not to Bob, so she does not give the necessary information, and Bob cannot un-jumble the file.

Pros

• This service is provided by the third-party that distributes your eBook (e.g. Amazon Kindle), so you do not have to build anything yourself.

Cons

• The concept of ownership is watered down. Specifically, the third-party can unilaterally block access to eBooks that you have purchased legitimately, and, more subtly, in some sense your device owns the eBook, not you, meaning that you cannot decide to read your Kindle book on your laptop, or phone (without using software from the third-party).
• As it is a service provided by a third-party, it is not free.
• It is capable of preventing any sharing at all, you cannot even lend a book to your friend (unless the third-party has deliberately decided to allow that), which many find unfair, as explained above.
• It is trivial to strip the DRM from the file. Many programmes exist that are capable of removing the DRM protection from eBooks — it does require a small amount of effort, but it will not stop a determined pirate.

Social DRM

Social DRM means that somewhere in the book, the system embeds some information about the purchaser, making the copy identifiable. The difference between this and the previous form of DRM, however, is that the eBook can still be opened on any device, its text is not jumbled. Somewhere in the book (anywhere from invisible metadata to block capitals on every page), it will include a ‘watermark’, mentioning the name of the person who purchased it. The philosophy behind social DRM is basically guilt — it does not prevent you from sharing a book, but it (in theory) prevents you from doing so anonymously, in the hope that people will think twice before committing piracy under their own name.

Pros

• Does not involve any third-party, so you can choose to implement it yourself, if you wish to, or use a paid service.
• Does not prevent sharing with friends and family, as one might do with a paperback.
• Allows people to truly own the eBook (some authors may view this as a con, but I do not).
• Although the watermark can be removed, it is a slower and more manual process than stripping third-party DRM.

Cons

• Does not actually prevent people from buying a single copy and sharing it with the world.
• With a bit of effort, the watermark can be removed.
• Depending on how aggressively you choose to watermark, it can hurt the aesthetics of the book. Having “COPY LICENSED TO #NAME” at the top and bottom of every page is not very pretty.

Amusingly enough, a similar approach was taken by Virgin Atlantic at some point (albeit more for marketing purposes than for preventing theft), in which they stamped “Stolen From Virgin Atlantic” on the bottom of saltcellars and pepperpots on their aeroplanes.

My Recommendation

Social DRM is the option that I chose for Venus In Chains. When you purchase an eBook, a bookplate is added after the title saying that this copy is licensed to your name. It is subtle, and unintrusive, and since I implement it myself, it costs me nothing. Third-party DRM is, in my view, only worth having as a perk of choosing to distribute your book via a particular platform. Amazon DRM is fine if you want to use Kindle, but do not choose Kindle just to get Amazon DRM. I distribute my eBook exclusively via my website, and to me, social DRM strikes a good balance between cost to me, convenience for my reader, and fairness for both of us.

Conclusion

• Make your eBook yourself, using a graphical programme.
• Use whichever DRM solution is provided by the distributor you choose.
• If you choose to distribute your eBook from your own website, prefer social DRM (I will be producing a blog post soon on exactly how to do that).