KDP EDU
Prepare, publish and promote textbooks and educational content in Kindle Stores,
and reach millions of students worldwide.
Prepare Your File: Amazon’s new Kindle Textbook Creator Beta helps you convert PDFs of your textbooks, course notes, study guides and other educational content that includes complex visual information like charts, graphs and equations into Kindle books. Books created through Kindle Textbook Creator take advantage of features that enhance a student’s learning experience such as dictionary look-up, notebook, highlighting and flashcards. Plus, preview your book across all supported devices. Currently this tool is available in English only.
Publish and Reach a Large Audience: Publish your book through KDP and reach millions of students worldwide across a wide variety of devices.
Promote Your Book: Benefit from Amazon’s powerful marketing tools and global reach. Enroll in KDP Select to get more promotional benefits.
Join the thousands of educators and authors published on KDP. Here are some of their stories…
"KDP allowed us to reach even more students.”
Armando Fox and David Patterson, authors of Engineering Software as a Service
When we decided to write our textbook in 2011, many of our decisions were informed by over twenty years of experience. We were early adopters of eBooks and believers in their future because of potential integration with online resources. Another reason for our enthusiasm for eBooks was speed to market. Our book was going to be about the rapidly-changing field of SaaS development, so we needed much quicker turnaround for revisions and we envisioned being able to make minor changes and have those updates on sale within 24 hours. We knew that an eBook would be the only practical way to do this. We discussed our eBook ideas with some publishers, but we found that in general they were no farther ahead than we were in thinking about how to create interesting eBooks.
We chose to self-publish to keep the price low: the Kindle version costs $9.99 in an era where $100 printed textbooks and even $100 eTextbooks are common. In addition, eBook distribution lets us easily reach readers in countries where distribution of a print book might be impractical or too expensive. As our book ended up being used in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that has had over 100,000 students from 120 countries, this expanded reach was important to us.
We also believed many readers would also want a print book, so we created this and sold the print edition through CreateSpace print-on-demand. Sure enough, when we surveyed our students, the single most requested feature about the book was the ability to purchase a "bundle" of the print and eBook together, so we were excited when Kindle MatchBook went live in 2013.
While doing our own marketing has not been without its challenges, we're happy with our decision. Working directly through KDP allowed us to keep the book affordable and still expect to recover our costs. We continue to improve existing content and add new material. And the global reach of the book has resulted in potential translation opportunities.
“Kindle is the future for educational content and the future is here.”
Richard Corn, author of Ultimate Guide to the Math ACT
About ten years ago I left the corporate world behind and became a math tutor, helping high school students with math and standardized testing (ACT, SAT, AP, etc.). As there are many preparation books for standardized testing, my intent was to use them rather than re-invent the wheel. But as my students and I began working with those books we became disenchanted with what was available. Prompted by my students, I began writing mini-lessons on subjects that they were struggling with, like absolute value, for example. These mini-lessons were well received, so after two years of tutoring and writing, I decided to collect the mini-lessons together to form a book. Eventually I wrote separate books for the ACT and SAT.
If it were not for Amazon's ability to level the playing field, my books would not stand a chance. Standardized test preparation is a multi-million dollar business and the competition among preparation textbooks is fierce, with big companies wielding huge marketing budgets and well known brand names. But on Amazon quality books can compete with the big boys and so far more than 11,000 copies of my books have been sold.
When Amazon came out with the Kindle, I wasn’t sure how my math books would look in digital form. Math books contain text (often in two-column pages), many math symbols (those pesky Greek letters), math equations, multi-column tables and many graphs. My ACT book, Ultimate Guide to the Math ACT was converted to Kindle and the quality is very impressive. It is too soon to predict how well the Kindle version will sell or what impact it might have on the printed version of my ACT book, but the Kindle is the future and the future is here.
“KDP makes publishing, marketing, and distributing so simple, which means I can focus on writing.”
Scott Shay, author of iRef Guides
I grew up in the "Pennsylvania Dutch country" and learned Pennsylvania Dutch (an offshoot of High German) and German at a very young age. That was the start of my interest in languages and linguistics. After spending a year in Germany in high school and college, I eventually got my Masters in German and Germanic linguistics at Berkeley. It had really been my intention since I was in elementary school to some day write accessible books on language and linguistics. It took some time, but once I discovered how easy it was to independently publish books, I tried my hand at it.
My first foray was trying my hand at publishing a "traditional" paperback on the medieval stage of modern High German. Given the small target audience, it was not something that a traditional publisher would ever be interested in. Yet, publishing on my own was somewhat of a daunting task--I was author, editor, illustrator, publisher, and marketer. I published one more "traditional" book, "The History of English: A Linguistic Introduction" and had some success with it. That whetted my appetite to bring to fruition an idea I had had for a long time, but that could only really be successfully implemented using the e-book model: writing truly mobile "quick reference grammars.”
It was not until I discovered Kindle Direct Publishing that I really understood how Amazon was, quite literally, changing the game. They made it very easy for virtually anyone to publish a Kindle book, and my idea of publishing "iRef Guides" for various languages was a perfect fit for Kindle. Instead of having to carry around the clunky, traditional laminated 8.5" X 11" reference grammar cards you find in traditional book stores, with my new mobile quick references, anyone could have English (or any other language) grammar right at their fingertips, no matter where they were--in front of a computer studying for an exam using a Kindle app, on their Kindle tablet while translating an assignment, or using the Kindle app on their smart phone while riding the subway! It would truly allow readers to use these reference guides on-the-go. The added features of e-books (such as searching, bookmarks, etc.) made my "iRef Guides" even more useful.
Amazon's support of authors like me is invaluable. The tough part is writing the book--they make publishing, marketing, distributing, and, of course, getting paid, so simple that I can concentrate on writing something that people will buy and read, instead of worrying about how I can publish my books or how anyone will find them. Without KDP, I can honestly say I would never have been able to realize my dream. I've published Kindle iRef Guides for English/ESL, German, Spanish, and Dutch, with plans to expand to many more languages in the future.
