Making an ebook

It is trickier to make an ebook than to make a traditional book. It took me almost all day today to make an ebook edition of my book "Defensive Driving - the Japanese Way". The problem is that the ebook publishing system is extremely sensitive to the encoding - I had the wrong stuff in some places, and that was not popular with the conversion software. And you did not get much help from the software making the conversion at Lulu either. So I had to go back and do it over again several times. And in the process I had to remove a lot of Japanese characters, although they may have worked anyway.
Reading a book on an iPad or other ebook reader is more like reading a traditional book, before it became cheap to stick a lot of pictures and stuff in there. So maybe it is actually a better reading experience.
What I have learned is that it is smarter to make the ebook version first, and then add the bells and whistles which go into the paper version. So that is what I am going to do next. I already started....