What's the best way to release a new title as an ebook?

(Won't you basically need an epub anyway, if you ever plan on selling for Kindle?) Personally I know I greatly prefer epub or other HTML-style formats when available. Reading PDF on even an iOS retina display comes with some major annoyances. IMO formatting can take a hike, as long as all the imagery is generally where it should be, and the text can be highlighted, etc.

It's totally worth it to have both a pdf and an epub. The key thing to do is to prep your InDesign files before you make the transfer to epub so that things will convert the way you want them to. Cari Jensen has some guidance for dealing with InDesign to epub issues http://carijansen.com/category/publishing/epub/. Were I you, I'd focus on getting the pdf out there as soon as you can, and follow up with the epub when it's ready. The audience for the two is likely to be somewhat different, so you can go ahead and get the pdf market while you're getting the epub up to snuff. Once you've got both ready, you might think about adding an option to buy them as a bundle for slightly less than it would cost to buy them both individually, so that those who buy the epub but might be interested in the fully designed pdf have an enticing option.

There are a significant number of people out there who are in demand for their skills formatting to ebook format. A couple weekends ago, I heard http://www.loridevoti.com/, who is a fairly popular romance author, talk about her successes with her own e-publishing -- so much so that she's now in that category of helping others. She's very friendly, so although she's probably too busy to help you do it herself, she might know some other people and resources. Working with someone who has experience doing this kind of work will be huge, especially if you don't already have an established name in the publishing world.

You can spend hours trying to convert files and learn plenty in the process. There's also companies like http://www.smashwords.com, which handle the conversion into many different formats. They warn against lots of formatting, however. For my last e-book (search for Chris Backe on Amazon if you're inclined), I started with a Word, which eventually became a PDF. The Word file also allowed me to go back (with a copy) and make the formatting a bit more bare-bones. On most electronic devices, content is king - design gets broken or badly shown too easily on the many devices.

Depending on your target device - you might not loose alot of formatting - http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2011/02/fixed-layout-epubs-for-ipad-and-iphone.html. However I am not an author - let me talk to you as a reader/consumer: - I want ePUB format - ePUB will work across multiple devices, ePUB will let me, the reader generally override the size of font I need - until we get devices with DPI's of 3600 or higher, sometimes when my eyes are tired, I need bigger fonts... (I treat ePUB the same as MP3 mentally - if I keep my music library in MP3, it will be available to me everywhere) - I want your diagrams/images - if technical, I want them in a vector format (SVG) so they can be resized. - I DO NOT WANT - PDF - fixed-layout PDF files are only good if your screen matches the same size as a peice of paper. The first thing I do when I get a PDF, is dump it into http://calibre-ebook.com/, convert it to ePUB and then manually tweak it, until it becomes useful. - I DO NOT WANT DRM, unless it is transparent like the Apple store and my purchases will flow across my various Apple devices (at home, the entire family has iPhones, two of us have iPads and they are all sync'd to one master library/account - so our purchases are available across everyones' device) I *love* ebooks so much, that I recently got rid of most of my physical technical library. You're best bet might be to work in a "master format" (i.e. http://www.docbook.org/), and then target specific outputs. You know about the free "http://code.google.com/p/sigil/" editor for ePUB?