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Old 02-01-2008, 04:43 AM   #222
JohnP
Enthusiast
JohnP began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 28
Karma: 10
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Mancehster, CT
Device: Sony Prs505
The REAL issue for ALL of these conversion programs and scripts is how good is the source material. There are seven different formats for e-books: Word Documents (DOC), web brower (HTM), Microsoft Reader (LIT), Sony Reader (LRF), Adobe PDF (PDF), Rich Text (RTF), and finally Text (TXT). There is one for Palm but is almost never found. The 3 most common are LIT, PDF, and RTF. The best formatted books are invariably in LIT format unless THEY WERE CREATED by just quickly converting a TXT or RTF file. Then the LIT book will be badly formatted.
If the LIT book is in really good shape (such as the books available in the BAEN free library), then Book Designer is a snap. 10-15 minutes cleaning up the title and author and the title page, deleting empty lines, changing the parts of the book that were mislabled as titles and subtitles back to paragraphs, and deleting the chapter info at the bottom of the book is really all that needs to be done.
Then there is everything else! There are those crappy coverted LIT books with with lots of broken sentences and lots of empty lines. PDFs can be really bad and I have yet to see one that has worked by directly converting it to LRF by BD (usually the text is way too small). Text, Rich Text, HTM, and Word Docs all seem to have to be put into Word and handcrafted and/or macroed to death before they will look halfway decent when converted to LRF.
So when you decide to convert a book, consider the source FIRST. Is this book available in different formats? Which looks best? Use the best formatted source! If none of them are well formatted, no magic wand is going to do this for you! You now have to consider it a work of love and craftmanship and not a quick and dirty way of getting a free book into your Sony Reader.
E-books are the future, folks. Make no bones about it. Hard plastic CDs are quickly being replaced by digital copies. Cameras just flipped over to 50% digital. Movies will be next. As books are the oldest form of communication and entertainment (except for the play), they are well entrenched. But ALL books put to the Library of Congress today HAVE to also be submitted digitally. Amazon, Google, many other private firms, and the US government are all trying to digitize all books that were ever published. Once automated page flippers and decent OCR programs and thousands of selfless proofreaders come together, books will all be digitized. Then the weight of publishers will DEMAND e-book readers. It WILL happen.
We are part of the inovation wedge, the first users. We deal with constantly changing standards, technology, and formats. Keep your cool and look pitingly on the poor smuck with a hardcover copy of War and Peace propped up on his belly.
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