Chief,
How much would you charge to convert a manuscript into a mobipocket ebook. I can do much of it myself, but I'm not a pro. www.simondrake.com

Chief,
How much would you charge to convert a manuscript into a mobipocket ebook.

Nothing. I'm definitely not a pro but I do know how to produce a "proper" Mobipocket version. Being a Cybook reader, I benefit from Mobipocket books which were properly formatted/structured, so I'm only happy to convert a manuscript to Mobipocket. It should be an interesting manuscript, however :)

Welcome to MobileRead Simon :bigwave:

Check out the Wiki. (Link at top of page.) There are a lot of tips here on creating MobiPocket through Mobi Creator (considered the best method) and BookDesigner (good, but I am told that Mobi Creator is better.) I have created hundreds of ebooks using BookDesigner; however, I have seen the dramatic improvements in the ebooks that Harry has produced in Mobi Creator vs. the same books created in BookDesigner.

Your three titles sound interesting. I enjoyed reading the tips.

Once you have the book looking nice in Book Designer, it takes literally 5 minutes to create a "real" Mobi book in Mobi Creator. I've written a tutorial (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17914) explaining how to do it.

It's very well worth doing - a Mobi book created with Mobi Creator (or tompe's equivalent PERL toolset) is hugely better than what you get out of BD. BD is great for Sony Reader books, but it's not very good at all for Mobi books.

Thanks for all the tips and offers.
I come from a desktop publishing background, am a writer, and keen to get serious with eBook production, so I've bitten the bullet and read HarryT's great works (Book Designer is a MUST) and reached into the deep corners of my brain for what little HMTL knowledge stagnated there, after learning it in the previous millenium (1994), to polish off the ebook files in PFE. I don't mind hard coding the important things.
I never had luck with the Mobipocket TOC wizard.
The eBook I'm making is one of my own, The Art of Office War, and it has about 12 x images, 12 x H1 and about 80 x H2 and H3, plus other assorted fiddily formatting. As for the images, I'm working on having them variable for the end readers' gadgets, ie using the code img hisrc="cover480x640.gif" src="cover220x300.gif" losrc="cover140x140.gif .
If I had more time I'd trawl through Project Gutenberg and dig out some 16thC, so I must express my respect to all of you that do that. One of my next projects is to dig into PG, extract texts, cut them up and collate them into a new title. Just like DJs mashing, I guess.