11-25-2007, 12:04 PM | #31 | |
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Where'd you get it, by the way? You didn't keyboard it yourself, did you? That would have been a little hard on the wrists. |
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11-25-2007, 12:07 PM | #32 | |
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The horrible, horrible workaround to some of these problems that some outfits have been using is to back the page images with a dirty OCR. It doesn't work. At all. |
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11-25-2007, 12:12 PM | #33 | |
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1. PDFs are originally and chiefly designed to maintain the formatting of a document for printing. That means it tends to be a large file, especially when images are involved. The first e-book readers and handheld devices were severely limited in storage space and RAM, and PDFs were almost impossible to read on many devices. As Acrobat has developed further, PDFs have become bloated documents that tend to bog down even the best reading devices short of a full PC. 2. PDF is set to a particular size, usually letter or A4, which is rarely matched by an e-book reader's screen size. Some devices, like Windows-based handhelds can reflow and resize the text in a PDF to fit the smaller screen size. But many other devices cannot reflow or resize PDF text. As a result, your PDF page is either a postage stamp too tiny to read when it is "fit" onto the page, or it must be scrolled left-to-right, then down, to read every line. The second point is most important these days. Generally what you find is that someone with a dedicated e-book reader must prepare their own PDF files from the original document, at the size specific to their device, in order to make it readable. (I now offer my e-books in RTF, for instance, to facilitate this process for those who desire to do so.) But most e-book reading people try to avoid the hassle of prepping and using PDFs for e-book reading. |
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11-25-2007, 01:37 PM | #34 |
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Good heavens no . It's a version downloaded from Perseus. I am strictly an amateur classicist, and these days rely primarily on on-line sources for my texts (mainly Perseus for Greek, The Latin Library for Latin).
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11-26-2007, 12:28 PM | #35 | |
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11-26-2007, 12:33 PM | #36 |
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Lack of stylesheet support and embedded fonts is a pretty huge problem for an e-book format.
I wonder if all those publishers who created e-books for the Kindle created directly Mobipockets versions or epub versions of these books. If Amazon asked for Mobipocket instead of epub, this is a complete waste of time for the publishers... |
11-26-2007, 12:41 PM | #37 | |
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Of course, once Amazon has them, they are converted to HTML, so you have the makings of an ePub file anyway. |
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11-26-2007, 12:53 PM | #38 |
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MobiPocket Creator uses OEB as its base format and only produces a MOBI file once the e-book is completed. Similarly, mobigen.exe can take the .opf file from a OEB e-book as its starting point. I don't think major publishers are likely to use Creator exclusively, but it may be at the end of their production chain for MOBI e-books. A MOBI e-book with JPEG images is essentially an AZW e-book, so that may be the "best" upload option to Amazon.
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11-26-2007, 01:20 PM | #39 |
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11-26-2007, 02:21 PM | #40 | |
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I can only guess Mobi was the most convenient ready-made format that they could obtain and use quickly, plain and simple. Last edited by Steven Lyle Jordan; 11-27-2007 at 12:20 PM. |
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11-26-2007, 02:35 PM | #41 |
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Creating an epub file and a Mobipocket file is quite different from a publisher point of view.
For the epub version, they can embed and use fonts like on a real book, add some extra formatting and support a lot more metadata. That's the main reason why it's much better if publishers did create their e-books using epub, and then Amazon converted these files to Mobipocket. Part of the information is lost during this process, but at least these books are ready for epub or any other format. |
11-26-2007, 03:36 PM | #42 | |
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11-26-2007, 03:38 PM | #43 |
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I don't think Mobi was specifically "designed" for small screens. It's just where it was mostly used and that's why most mobi files tend to include "safe-sized" pictures. If you include bigger pictures, it will look fine on bigger screens too.
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11-27-2007, 06:39 PM | #44 |
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If you have a Mobi format book with say images sized for a 6" eink screen and you try to read this book on a PDA, will the images bee too large or will they be resized for the smaller screen?
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11-27-2007, 06:52 PM | #45 |
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MobiPocket's documentation indicates that large images will be resized. I confirmed that this was the case if you made the window very small on a PC, but I don't have a PDA to test on. See Images in MobiPocket.
A related issue is which devices support JPEG images in MOBI files, since these are typically needed to get large images. The "StandMars" PRC files in the above thread should work on the Kindle (mine arrives tomorrow), and can test MobiPocket's PDA reader software for JPEG support. |
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