Fixing formatless texts

[Darkitow]

Hi! as a first thread I post I wanted to ask something I've been a bit tickled off with the ebooks I've been reading, and that's the text format.

I am (or I'll be tomorrow) a Kindle user, but I've been reading books in my computer for quite a while, my laptop is very small (netbook, actually), so it has been my "almost" eReader for some time. I've gotten many books from downloads, shares and stuff apart from buying them, and I've always found the texts, even in .lit or other eReaders very bad formatted.

For example I got this series, The Hollows by Kim Harrison, which I got the 9 current books some in .pdf and some in .lit, but ALL of them were very untidy. I'm sure everybody here knows what I talk about: chapters one after another without clear distinction, sometimes they don't even have separated the paragraphs, and all of this makes them very uncomfortable to read.

so, my question here is... is there a "better" way to pick a text like that and tidy it other than going to Migrosoft Word and doing it manually and slowly? I'd love to be able to do this, so I can prepare a couple series I have to put in my Kindle tomorrow and read them well.

[HarryT]

Darkitow, firstly let me welcome you to MobileRead; it's always good to see new people interested in creating new eBooks.

The second that I must say, though, is that MobileRead is a strong supporter of the "legitimate" eBook business, and we absolutely will not condone or encourage any form of illegally downloaded material. By far the best thing you can do is to buy these books legally. That way you'll end up with much better formatted versions, and the author will end up with the income that he or she deserves.

[Darkitow]

Actually the books I'm talking about in my example, The Hollows series, I own them in "traditional book" form like many others I wanna fix. I have a very big library and I love to re-read books, so my intention is not actually to get books for free but to be able to adapt them to my new eReader so I don't need to carry the 100+ books I have in my bookshelfs (for example, now I live away from my hometown in an student's apartment and I couldn't carry even half of my books because of space problems).

I don't know how to "scan" books to pass them directly to my device, and I'd rather have them in text format in a reader file than as a picture in a .pdf (and I don't wanna break my books to scan them, of course), so I had to find most of them by looking around internet downloads. I don't deny that I have a couple books downloaded by... illegitimate means, but that has been early in my internet experience, and now I have a nice list of books from Amazon.

But I don't think I'm doing something wrong by getting a free digital version of a book I already paid for, the only difference between that and taking the book, opening MS Word and copying the text word by word so I can enjoy it in my Kindle is just to save time.

I hope I didn't give a bad image of myself. I don't have the intention to do it for piracy, just for comfort.

[frabjous]

I think you might get some help for this by looking through the wiki such as this page. There are links there to some software like ebook-tidy, which might be the kinds of things you are looking for.

The only way to achieve perfection though is the painstaking way, I'm afraid. (Not in Word though. Word pretty much always gives you junk.) Still maybe that's not necessary here.

[Darkitow]

I see, thanks for the information. I don't know well how exactly works an eBook, I mean, how to distribute chapters and things like that so I was trying to keep my books as tidy as possible, but when I open the files I really don't know where to start. x_x

And again, I wanna put emphasis on my intention not being piracy. I do download many digital content, but it's because of my government half-assed laws "against" piracy (and against my legal rights, too, it seems), that I don't feel too troubled for doing it in case of films or music (For who doesn't know, in Spain you gotta pay an extra -a very big chunk- for any digital product like CDs, films and games, because the market "assumes" you'll use illegal means to aquire other material. Yeah, my 89-yr-old granny will eMule all her CDs of Sinatra and Elvis, lol).

I'm sorry if I tickle any sensible armpit with this, but hopefully books aren't included in this and they're cheap and nice so I wouldn't illegally download them, as I said, I just wanted to backup my already purchased collection. I believe the author would feel already supported enough with me buying the book once.