Last week I published a book on Amazon’s Kindle platform. It was a fairly straightforward process, although I had to take some care with the formatting. I wrote my book in Word and was fortunate that I did not have any images or tables. Had that been the case I feel that using HTML would have given me more control and led to a more smooth uploading process. As it stood the only things that took a bit of work were creating the clickable table of contents and designing the cover. For the latter I used a Creative Commons licensed photo and added some color and text using GIMP. Other than those minor things, it was quite easy to submit my book to Amazon and after a period of a few hours it was approved and made available in the store!
Information Literacy for a Wider Audience
The book itself is called Savvy for the Social Web: The New Skills You Need to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age. It’s about better online searching, dealing with information overload, and being more productive online. My goal was to take major issues and ideas in library and information science, that I studied as a grad student and now deal with in a professional setting, and share them with a more general audience. Here are a couple excerpts from the book description:
When online searches give us millions of results and with automatic notifications and seemingly endless streams of social network feeds coming at us, this glut of information can be overwhelming and can lead to confusion, frustration, and indecision. … Each section of this book contains a brief overview of key theories and concepts, drawing from the work of librarians and information science researchers as well as bloggers like Pat Flynn and Leo Babuta, and also contains a list of actionable tips you can put to use.
If you have a chance to give it a read, I would love to hear any comments or suggestions! View the Amazon book page.
Congratulations on the book and also I pray it becomes a ‘cult book’ in a sense that it will become widely read by people of all persuasions. You make the complicated things simple and also this is a friendly material to those who want to maximize their time on the web.