eBooks are all basic HTML and CSS. I have put a sample from my book up at https://github.com/jaspergregory/simple-epub-photobook. I left out most of the photos. But, of course, you should use your own.

Amazon Kindle has a specific flavor called Mobi and everybody else uses the ePub standard. Any tool for hand-written html will work.  Just start with basic text and add tags. 

Textmate (http://macromates.com/) for mac is my choice for hand coding anything.

Adobe Dreamweaver can be used if you have to, but it changes stuff without asking.

Adobe inDesign documents can save as ePub, but be warned. You have to do some intermediate level work to make the text and images flow like an html document. If you do not already know inDesign, this is a horrible option. 

Microsoft Word is required by one of the bookstores, smashwords. Supporting Smashwords is really the only good reason to use it. Do not try to save a Word file as html. That will give you a mess.

Calibre is an open source tool that lets you import one format and export in a few other formats. I use it to spit out ePub and mobi files. It gives a basic catalog interface too, for keeping track of your books. It is just OK. I am still using it, but here are a few caveats.

• the output is substandard. for instance the ePub does not pass the ePub validations. you have to run an validation tool and fix problems by hand.
• the PDF output looks like crap
• the RTF output can be imported into WORD or a PDF creator, but again the output is substandard and needs to be tweaked in another tool.

Once you have your HTML document you submit it to one of the eBookstores. I tried four of these:  Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iTunes iBooks, Smashwords self-publishing. 

• Amazon has a good publishing center: http://kdp.amazon.com. you can publish to the USA, UK and German stores.
• My books have sold two copies per month on Amazon. 
• The Kindle is Black & White, but many Kindle books are read on kindle for iPad, iPhone or Desktop.
• If you want to publish old-fashion black & white text, Kindle is probably the most important Marketplace for you.
• cons Be warned, amazon pays crappy royalties is you price your book under $2.99. this is an issue for me because I am focusing on the long-essay market, so 99 cents sound great to me.
• They place severe limits on photo sizes, so it is impossible to use a photo which looks nice on an ipad.

• The Nook Publishing tool is the easiest one http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/. They accept ePub which is great. You can have your first book up in a couple of days. My updates went live in less than half a day. 
• I sold a few copies on Nook, about 1 per month. I could probably sell more if I could find a way to market to the Nook audience, but how? The Nook is a color tablet and thus good for rich media. 

 

• Smashwords sounds great (http://www.smashwords.com/). It lets you publish one document, which is then republished in all the major and minor formats. They have a premium program which submits your book to many different bookstores. 
• Sounds great, but here are the cons. You have to submit your file in Microsoft Word. Behind the scenes smashwords converts into HTML. This gives you very little control. Also, existing Word files will not work. They have to be really, really simple, just like the HTML.
• Smashwords puts a 5 megabyte limit on all eBooks. This is a problem for multimedia.
• Smashwords homesite looks amateurish
• I have not had a single paying customer through the Smashwords homesite. It just does not generate traffic
• The Premium program has delivered 1 customer per month, All on the Apple iTunes store.
• The premium program has a two week wait time for review.

• http://itunesconnect.apple.com/ has a good self-publishing interface 
• This is Apple’s eBook bookstore for iPad and iPhone.
• iBooks are great for rich media, they support up to 200 megabytes.
• iBooks support video and audio, and I think they have plans to support javascript (geo-enabled books!)
• Apple publishes your iBooks in Australia, France, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom and USA.
• I sold 18 books in the one month for which I have figures. This is better than all the other channels combined.
• On the negative side - they are the hardest channel to get started. I had to get an ISBN number for my book. They make you ‘sign’ contracts. It took two weeks to get the first book published.
• For my Rich Media books this seems clearly to be the best option. And I intend to focus my effort here in the future

For a rich media publisher, looking at making iBooks in the Summer of 2011.

• Bet on Apple and the iPad. Steve Jobs is a very good partner for small media producers
• Use ePub standard html. (you have to if you go apple)
• Embrace hand-scripting HTML with a minimal html tag set. I think I used about twenty tags. It won’t look like your graphic designer wants.
• use Calibre (or similar) to import your html and spit out ePub or Mobi, or whatever else.