Terry White has an article in Adobe how-to magazine Layers looking at how to export documents from InDesign into EPUB format for use with Adobe Reader or other e-book devices. I don’t have nor have I used InDesign so I can’t really say how good the instructions are.
However, the first half of the article talks about the rise of e-books and e-magazines, discussing the Kindle, the Kindle app for iPhone, and the Zinio e-magazine reader. White doesn’t really mention many of the other e-book options apart from these, but at least he does agree that the PDF format really isn’t best for reading e-books on portable devices.
He seems a little more optimistic about the efficacy of Adobe’s DRM than I would be, though.
At this point InDesign’s ePub’s aren’t all that great, at least not the one’s I’ve tried making. Supposedly there was going to be a point release for CS4 to make things better, but that was a while ago so I wonder if it got pushed back to CS5 or something. What they need to do is make exporting from a publishers prepress files to a high quality ePub seamless. Right now it’s easier to use Sigil along with Calibre IMO.
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“He seems a little more optimistic about the efficacy of Adobe’s DRM than I would be, though.”
I suppose you can’t expect anything else in an Adobe article, by Adobe. You can’t expect him to say that Adobe’s DRM is as ineffectual as everyone elses even if it is.
I agree with AnemicOak. InDesign does a usable conversion to ePub, but a pass through Sigil and some CSS tweaks are desirable to get a more usable end product.