E-books are the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry. Every year, more and more new and established authors are publishing their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenplays, and screenplays digitally in eBook form.

One of the most common hurdles authors face is how to make their eBook readable on as many eBook reading devices and platforms as possible. There’s Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Apple’s iPhone, and the iPod Touch, just for starters.

Here are five desktop publishing and eBook formatting tips to help make your book as successful as possible:

1. The page is dead – In the traditional printed publication, the notion of “page” is essential. All of your pages have page numbers, and these page numbers are probably referenced in your table of contents or index. With electronic books, the notion of a page is literally reversed. All eBook readers have a different idea of ​​what constitutes a page, because they can have different screen heights and widths, or the number of pages can change depending on whether your reader holds your iPhone vertically or horizontally. The number of pages can also change if the reader increases the font size or changes the font style, or chooses to read your book with double spacing instead of single spacing. In short, try to avoid page numbers, especially for long-form narrative. If you MUST include page numbers, then limit your eBook output to PDFs, because PDFs do a pretty good job of maintaining formatting (although PDFs are a horrible e-reading format).

2. Keep the format simple – Readers buy your books for the words and stories, not the format. A complicated format can prevent the reader from consuming the words of your book. You want to make sure that your book is optimized to read as plain text, which is how most e-readers display your book.

3. Avoid Common Bad Formatting Habits – Print publishing is very forgiving, because as long as your manuscript looks the way you want it to on screen, it usually prints just fine. E-books are less forgiving. Some of the most common eBook formatting errors include: Using tabs or spaces instead of Word’s indentation feature; use multiple paragraph returns to designate page breaks (creates blank pages in your eBook); and the use of multiple body text styles instead of just “normal” text (creates inconsistent looking text).

4. Publish your book in as many ebook formats as possible – It is impossible to predict what e-reading device or platform your reader will use to read your book. You can read it online through a web browser, you can download it to your home computer to print, you can read it on your Kindle, or maybe you want to read it on your iPhone or Blackberry. They may also want to read the same book on multiple devices simultaneously. Therefore, you need to publish in multiple eBook formats so that the reader can read your book in their own way. Popular formats include HTML (readable in web browsers), .txt (plain text, readable in almost everything), PDF (good for books for which strict formatting is essential for reading enjoyment) [picture books, books with charts, graphs, tables of contents and indexes]), epub (an open industry e-book format used by more and more e-reading devices and applications), and .mobi (used by Kindle).

5. Avoid DRM – DRM, or “digital rights management,” refers to schemes that seek to prevent illegal copying or piracy of a digital work, such as an e-book or music. Customers hate DRM, because DRM treats them like a criminal and prevents them from enjoying their book the way they want to enjoy it. Do not use DRM with your ebook. Market research shows that DRM cannot prevent piracy and only makes your customers angry. In fact, research shows that books without DRM outsell books with DRM.