Ashok Bagdy is the vice president of outsourcing services with Cameo Corporate Services, Ltd., a provider of medical transcription and other business process outsourcing solutions. Ashok Bagdy’s area of expertise includes e-publishing and the outsourcing and digitizing of books to make them online ready. One of the most popular ways of making content available in a digital form is to create a Kindle eBook, using a proprietary format provided by Amazon.

Converting a book that is only basic text into Kindle format is not extremely difficult. It involves creating an account in the Digital Text Platform and uploading the manuscript to one of several common formats, including Microsoft Word, PDF, and Zip archive. It is important to create relevant subtitles and input keywords, as these will ensure that readers are able to readily find the book at the Kindle Store. The steps are explained clearly within the platform interface, and a book can be loaded into the Amazon system for sale as a Kindle edition.

For books with images and illustrations, such as coffee table books or graphic novels, ensuring that an appealing format appears to the digital end user can be surprisingly complex. This is because the traditional layout of a word-processing document does not conform to the fluid needs of the Kindle e-book user. For anything but the most basic text, it makes sense to utilize a professional service. This will ensure that the layout is as professional as possible before publishing.