Building an Eco home in Hockerton construction and performance details

Thinking of how to build a low carbon home? Our new eBook can help. Packed full of useful detailed information based on our experiences of living here. It will inspire you and enable you to understand how zero carbon houses can be built. Available on kindle Buy Here.

Luke Risdon has edited the book and says;

“A fascinating factual guide to the construction and performance of the homes at Hockerton Housing Project.”

Luke describes the editing and publishing process for our eBook.

The eBook is fundamentally based on a series of information packets created as handouts for visitors to the project. These were then formatted into a rudimentary non editable PDF and editable word document. However, the editable word document version was lost. This meant using the non-editable PDF. To circumvent this issue, we chose to purchase Adobe acrobat. This allowed us to easily edit the PDF and fix any formatting issues that arose.

However, once the PDF was formatted to our liking, we discovered that formatting for a kindle Ebook is vastly different. This required a new, free, piece of software called “Kindle create”. Kindle create allows you to format your project directly for kindle and general Ebook publication. But it is not as simple as uploading your finished PDF into Kindle create. Many issues arose such as the fact that the PDF was in a two-page landscape layout and kindle only accepts portrait.

Once the document was finally formatted to Kindle’s criteria, came the task of self-publishing. This was remarkably easy compared to the formatting stage. Amazon has an entire self-publishing pathway known as Kindle Direct Publishing. It is open to anyone to encourage independent writers to publish on kindle. They will even print paperback copies for free. Once you have uploaded your document and cover all you have to do is jump through a few more hoops and you have published a digital book.

We then pulled out of Adobe as we no longer needed it and they refunded us the full cost which was very kind of them!

Luke Risdon