Amazon DTP FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

GENERAL QUESTIONS

1. What is Digital Text?
2. What is Digital Text Platform?
3. How does Digital Text Platform work?
4. Do I need any special skills to publish with Digital Text Platform?
5. How do I sign up for Digital Text Platform?
6. What are the Digital Text Platform terms of service?
7. Can my content include graphics?
8. Can I get information about the customers who purchase my content?
9. Can customers download my published content to their computer?
10. What percentage of the list price do I, as the publisher, receive?
11. What are the requirements for publishing with Digital Text Platform?
12. How does Amazon.com protect against "inappropriate" content?
13. I have physical inventory. Can I still sign up for Digital Text Platform?
14. Can I sell my title if it hasn't been published/released yet?
15. Where will my content be listed for sale?
16. Why should I publish my content on Digital Text Platform?
17. Who determines the price of my content?
18. Why is the price of my book higher in other countries than in the US?
19. Can I download, save or export a report?
20. I don't have an ISBN. Do I need one?
21. How does the Kindle Store handle customer returns? Am I affected?
22. You haven't answered my question. What now?

ACCOUNT CREATION

1. What are the sign up requirements?
2. Can I use my existing Amazon.com account to sell on DTP?
3. What account setup information is required?
4. Why do you need a social security number/taxpayer ID for US publishers?
5. Is tax withheld for publishers outside the US?

PUBLISHING

1. What are the guidelines for product description?
2. Can I remove content (unpublish)?
3. Can I change or update my content's information after publication?
4. What formats can I upload to Digital Text Platform?
5. Do I need digital rights to publish content?
6. I'm an Advantage Author. Can I list the books I have listed already?
7. How can I format my content (e.g., bold, italics, headers)?
8. Who will be able to buy and read my content?
9. Where can readers find my content?
10. How much does it cost to publish content?
11. Where can I find out how my content is selling?
12. How do I enter the author name for my content?
13. Can I change the country-specific content rights on publications I have already published?
14. What is Digital Rights Management (DRM)?
15. Can I enable DRM for my existing titles?

FORMATTING DOCUMENTS

1. Why doesn't my cover image show up?
2. Can I use frames inside HTML for uploading content to DTP?
3. What characters are supported in DTP?
4. Why doesn't the conversion look exactly like the PDF?
5. Can I use tables inside HTML?
6. How can I get better document conversion results?
7. What types of images are supported by Amazon DTP?
8. How do I get plain text (.txt) files to convert well?
9. Why doesn't the conversion look exactly like the Microsoft Word Document?
10. Does Digital Text Platform support XML stylesheets?

• Agree to and comply with the Digital Text Platform Terms and Conditions.

• Agree to and comply with the Digital Text Platform Terms and Conditions

It takes upwards of one week after you have un-published an item for it to be completely gone from the Amazon storefront.

• Make sure your cover image conforms to the Amazon 'product image' rules
• Use RGB - not CMYK - as the color standard when saving your files. This is normally an option in the File saving dialog in image manipulation programs such as Photoshop. RGB color may also be called 'True Color' in some programs. If in doubt, try to open a JPG inside Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. If a JPG opens fine inside a web browser, it's most likely OK to use as a cover image.
• Make sure your image is saved without color separation. This is usually a pre-press or color palette option. Use your image manipulation program or image analysis tool (some are freely available online) to verify that your image file doesn't have color separation.
• If the file type you are using supports compression, make sure that as little compression is possible is enabled, e.g. none for TIFF.

That character set includes the most characters found in western European languages and many associated glyphs such as the 'copyright' mark, superscript (power of two) and German umlauts. You can see a list of all supported characters here. An image showing all those characters can also be seen here.

Please note that the Amazon DTP interface will not automatically recognize 'illegal' characters in your input, such as Eastern European characters, Japanese letters, Russian characters, etc. You will therefore be able to enter unsupported text, especially in the fields for authors, content title, and other product information.

When previewing your content after uploading it, illegal characters will not be displayed correctly in the content body. They will, however, be ignored in the product information (see above). This means that it is possible for you to accidentally enter unsupported characters in the product info and make your content available for purchase, displaying incorrect or garbled characters on the Amazon Kindle Store product page.

There are a number of differences between the PDF format and the format Amazon DTP uses to display text on-screen. We will use this post to explain how to best deal with PDF conversion.

First, if you own the source from which the PDF was generated (such as a Microsoft Word .doc), we strongly suggest that you use the program you originally used to create the document to export or save the content as HTML. If HTML saving isn't possible, try to export or save the content in a format where you can open it with Microsoft Word, and save it as HTML from there. If you cannot get your content out of the PDF format, the following answers may help to explain the results you are getting.

1. Why doesn't Amazon DTP retain the exact layout of my content in PDF format?
   Conversion usually cannot retain exact formatting because PDF is a fixed layout format designed for printing and Amazon DTP uses a reflowable format designed to be displayed on screens that differ greatly in size and width / height ratio. For an explanation on reflowable versus fixed layout, please read this article.
   
2. Why is so much of the formatting lost?
   The problem is that PDF is a "destructive" format in the sense that you lose all high level information. PDFs store characters and coordinates for each character or word. The information contained is very much like a scan of the printed pages. The notions of words, lines, paragraphs don't even exist in the format. Much less the flow of text (what follows what). So to convert the PDF document to a reflowable format which you can view on different screen sizes using any font size, our software has to apply "Artificial Intelligence" - like algorithms that simulate the way a human reader with knowledge of western typographical conventions would read the text. Using these algorithms, it reassembles characters into words, words into lines, lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into columns, etc... Even though we use a lot of complex algorithms, some ofthe formatting is lost. The goal of our software is to extract the text from the PDF without corrupting it and retain a minimum of formatting which is already an achievement.
   
3. Why are tables not converted?
   As mentioned in the previous paragraph, all the information about paragraphs, columns, tables, etc. is lost in PDF files. For instance for tables, you have lines that are drawn at various locations on the page. As of today, our software is not able to determine that these lines drawn on the page form a table.
   
4. Why are images not the same size as in the PDF?
   The pictures that are not the same size are either because they were of different DPI (dots per inch - screen resolution) in the PDF or because the conversion process had to resize them the keep the size of the file reasonable.
   
5. Wouldn't third party tools do a much better job at converting PDF to HTML?
   If you are dissatisfied with the conversion results, we suggest you try other tools to convert your PDF content to HTML yourself, as it is possible that you may get better results. As said before, if you own the original format that the content was created in, try to use that to "Save As" or Export the content as HTML, and upload the HTML to Amazon DTP instead.
   
6. Is there anything I can do to get better results?
   Use the source document whenever possible. If your PDF was produced by converting a Microsoft Word or RTF document for instance, use the Word or RTF import feature, it will give much better results. If your document was created with another publishing tool, try to find a "Save as" or an "Export" feature. If you can export either as HTML, RTF or Microsoft Word, re-importing that in the Creator will give much better results than importing the PDF file.
   
7. Why does PDF conversion lose so much information about formatting?
   When storing digital assets, the key point is to store as much information as possible. The PDF format stores very little information and is not editable. As a general rule, be sure to have your digital assets in a structured format (XML, XHTML, Microsoft Word, raw text, etc.). This will allow you to reuse them in different types of electronic publications.

BMP files will be very large in comparison to the other size formats, and GIF files have many built-in limitations. If you cannot have your files in PNG format, JPG is the preferable second choice, followed by GIF.

Amazon DTP does not support images in TIFF format inside HTML files (as part of your content), but TIFF images can be used for the product image as part of your DTP product details.

• Make sure all of the text inside your file is arranged in paragraphs. As the text is re-flowed depending on the device screen and font size, any hard line breaks (that you insert into a text file by hitting 'Enter') will make your text display poorly. This means that you should ensure that every paragraph of text is actually one long line, without any hard line breaks anywhere in it. Use two line breaks('Enter' twice) to separate those lines of paragraphs.
• Any HTML tags inside a text file will be ignored and displayed as plain text, showing the actual HTML code. You can't mix HTML and plain text.
• Remember that even though plain text using unusual characters and glyphs may display fine on your computer, it won't necessarily convert well to Amazon DTP. Check the list of supported characters to make sure.

The wording in the "Save As" dialog changes between Microsoft Word versions, but the best results are usually achieved with "Filtered HTML" saving. Review your content in Word after you've saved it as HTML and make any necessary changes, saving it again. Then upload the HTML file in Amazon DTP.

If you cannot save your content as HTML, be aware that the conversion from .doc to Amazon DTP's format will inevitably lose some formatting information in the process. Microsoft's .doc format comes with a few quirks and not all file format details are well-documented.

• Lists in Microsoft Word documents, especially nested lists with sub-categories, will not convert well.
  
• If you change list numbering between numerals and letters (e.g. I, II, III, a, b, c, 2.1.3), the conversion may also provide less than satisfying results.
  
• If you use tables of contents in your files, page numbers will not be updated correctly (since the text size and page 'numbers' in a reflowable format don't mean the same thing as in a fixed-display format). Make sure to use the standard Microsoft Word heading styles and Table of Contents insertion for best results.