Tips

My (not very long, but enthusiastic) experience with PDA documents shows me that the small screen really affects the way you read, and thus should affect the way you conceive the eBook.

By the way, I use eBooks mostly for general-purpose documents - I don't use them to publish poetry or prose...

Chapters

For me, user experience with eBooks is about two main things: getting to the place you want in the document and knowing where the hell you are in the document. Difficulties in doing any of these two things are extremely frustrating, since there is a limit to the amount of page-ups and page-downs the average user is willing to make.

This is where I think eReader really stands out when compared to Documents To Go or Pocket Word. Of course the ability to edit your Documents is a killer feature - if you need it. But if you don't, if you just want to read the document or find stuff in it, the document map (or chapter index, or table of contents) is the real killer feature.

So, if you use the "Heading" styles in Word and convert the document with Publish eBook, you get this easily. You can tap the "chapters" button in eReader, and jump to any chapter in the book's hierarchical table of contents. And if you just want to know where you are in the document, you can also tap the "chapters" button and eReader will show you your position in the table of contents.

Links

Another important thing to add is the right amount of in-document links, that is, links that are in the middle of the text and take to other places in the same text. If the table of contents is large, I think it pays to have Word create a Table of Contents in the beginning of the eBook (set the options to use hyperlinks and not include page numbers). Although this is redundant, it repeats the "chapters" eReader will recognize from Headings, it might compensate for the rather poor user interface that eReader uses for the "chapters" list. It' is easier to page-down through several pages of links than using the "chapters" list.

Also, links are useful for navigation: links to return to the top at the end of each section, links to skip a section at the beginning of each section, etc. Create these by defining a  bookmark at the destination (if the destination is a Heading , Word automatically creates bookmarks you can use) and then insert an hyperlink to that bookmark.

Flexibility

The really difficult part about getting the documents just right is to allow for all the different situations your eBook will encounter: different screen sizes (the square screen or the longer one, among others) and different font sizes (small and large defaults, among others you can install). Try to test all the situations in your PDA if they are available. Don't assume your users will all use the same options and modes, and avoid using the "Force Large Font" or "Force Small Font" formatting - respect your users' options. However, these can be useful for small amouts of special text in your documents (for example, Forcing Large Font for Titles, or forcing a specific font size in pages that include images so they layout correctly).

If you have any comments or any tips of your own, don't be shy: post in the Forums.