Formating for Sony Reader on a Mac

[kyle_terrizzi]

Hey there. Just received a Sony Reader PRS505 for Christmas. I am a Mac user however and have been loading it up with books from Feedbooks, which in my opinion is the only site with public domain books in a tolerably readable format. I've tried in vain to format .txt files from PG for my Reader, but all the solutions I've found on these forums are for Windows users, i.e. solutions for removing extraneous paragraph breaks and such. Anyone have any tips for someone using a Mac? The only word processing programs I own are TextEdit and a freeware program called WriteRoom.

Appreciate it.

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

We have an awful lot of free public domain (pd) books here (click ebooks on the blue bar, then Sony BBeB (lrf) , all of which are much better formatted than the ones on, say, Project Gutenberg (which are the source texts for many of the books here - the wonderful people who upload them spend ages getting them into a decent layout).

I haven't yet experimented with formatting pd books myself yet, so I can't help with what programs are best.

For converting non-DRMed books on the Mac, Calibre is probably the best choice - it also lets you transfer your books onto the reader.

Also, welcome to the forum!

[kyle_terrizzi]

Thanks for the quick response! I should have mentioned too that I do use calibre to interface with the reader, and I have looked at many, many sites offering ebook downloads. My main interest I should have said would be to format the PG files to my own tastes. Most of the ebooks around the web are sourced from PG but the formats vary wildly, and I haven't cared for most of them. I was hoping to streamline, much like Feedbooks seems to have done by giving all of their books the same, clean format.

Thanks for the response.

[Andybaby]

Well mac Tools are Limited, Book Designer https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11786 is the best tool that i have for book formatting. but its windows only, run it in a virtual box i guess.

book creator tool should work if you have Microsoft word https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28313

but i find it to be much more manually intesive, and didnt like it nearly as much as book designer.

[wallcraft]

I don't think there is currently a good cross platform ebook creation/editing tool. One option you could try is Open Office. It has a very good export to PDF capability, which might work if you use something like an A5 page size. Or, for a reflowable format ebook, Calibre can import Open Office ODT files directly and convert them to LRF or ePub. You would need to setup Calibre's TOC detection to be appropriate for your ebooks (I don't know what the default is for ODT). It is also possible to export HTML from Open Office and then run this through Calibre.

[radius]

What I would do is generate HTML (many ways to do that on a Mac, eg export from TextEdit or use a free editor like Taco) and then either zip up your own epub or convert to lrf or epub using Calibre.