Seeking to connect with experienced Calibre conversion techies

[obarz]

Hello,

I know the traditions of printed book pages inside out. Along with being a professional book designer, I have spent my life as a publisher with special focus on book production--design, typesetting, printing and binding.

My present study involves creating ebooks that look and flow in a manner that mimics the expectation that a reader of an ebook has learned from having absorbed the tradition of hundreds of years of book design development.

There are reasons that flow from usefulness and legibility about how the "rules" of book design have grown over the centuries!

A difficulty in ebook preparation seems to be in making today's state of ebook technology mesh with the hundreds of years of tradition one expects to find incorporated into the viewing of an ebook page.

I am seeking to establish developmental dialog with individuals who know Word and Calibre inside out, the purpose being to bring to the table what I know about what a book page is supposed to look like while we work together to manipulate the data to make it do that.

[Manichean]

Use Sigil or Writer2ePub. Forget the concept of a page.

What's a "conversion techie"? I'm curious.

[Agama]

Originally Posted by obarz

I know the traditions of printed book pages inside out. Along with being a professional book designer, I have spent my life as a publisher with special focus on book production--design, typesetting, printing and binding. etc.

If you intend to produce eBooks in ePub format then you can apply your expertise to the style sheet which controls the 'look' of the ePub. So, if you are not already familiar with cascading style sheets, (CSS), then there's your starting place.

You can then use calibre's conversion facilities to control the structure of the books - chapters, contents, pagination etc. Calibre has a good user manual and this forum is a great resource for further information.

When you're ready, prepare and post a book on this site and thus share your knowledge with the eReading community.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by obarz

Hello,

I know the traditions of printed book pages inside out. Along with being a professional book designer, I have spent my life as a publisher with special focus on book production--design, typesetting, printing and binding.

My present study involves creating ebooks that look and flow in a manner that mimics the expectation that a reader of an ebook has learned from having absorbed the tradition of hundreds of years of book design development.

....

guess what - technology just made you about as as useful as a blacksmith, or a man who knew how to slot hot lead letters into a rack...

there's not a lot of demand for typesetting ,printing & binding skills in the e-book world, actually.

I had a John Bull printing kit from Woolworths (UK) when I was a Kid - lots of letters on black rubber squares, a wooden block to slot them into & some ink - wonderful stuff but the world has moved on now.... the days when book prouction ground to a halt because you'd dropped the last "F" & couldn't not find it are over, thankfully

I think the makers of John Bull (UK) printing kits met the same fate as the owners of Woolworths


so to sum up -
isn't that look n feel stuff already sorted & put to bed -

what's wrong with how ebooks look already ???

( we can quibble about pros & cons of indents vs blank lines - have been doin so for most of the day on the sigil board actually, but anyone with a bit of nous can make their ebooks look exactly as they'd like them to look already )

& what's your "reader expectations" stuff all about - the average reader just wants their e-book to look like .... a book.... - but with real page numbers , if you go read the Kindle board!

its just words on a screen, in a readable layout - not rocket science.

that's enough troll feeding for today.

[Bather]

Can I use Calibre's Ebook management download to convert an RTF document into epub so that I can put it on a website? If so, how? I have looked through the manuel and there doesn't seem to be anything to explain how this is done. (Sorry for hijacking your thread, obarz)

[Manichean]

Moderator Notice
Please start a new thread for this. This has absolutely nothing to do with the thread's topic, and your apology for hijacking doesn't make it better.

[obarz]

Ok, then, folks. No one seems interested in making ebooks look better or more useful than they presently are. I'll keep at it though. That the art of making better looking books, regardless of the package they come in, may become superfluous remains to be seen.

If anyone, however, wishes to pursue this topic I can be reached at pubsyn@mindspring.com

Thank you agama, for your useful response. It appears you may be unique in this group in having a positive attitude and a helping nature.

[Archon]

I would like to disagree with you obarz just to say that there others who care about books looking good.

I started out here posting something along the same lines that you posted and Agama's response I think is on point.

I have downloaded some feedbook epubs from their web site and I like the look of the chapter headings with some stylized text and lines.

I am currently pursuing learning more about HTML programming and eventually CSS to better understand how I can make up templates to convert books into formats that are attractive as well as legible.

For instance, I spent a few hours reading about different fonts and which one would make the best ebook font. I found out that sans-serif fonts are used as eye-catchers for titles and headers but serif fonts are used for the main body text because they are considered more legible and psychologically pleasing for long periods of reading. I also learned 'Georgia font' was specifically designed to be read on a Computer or other electronic device versus 'Times' that was designed before the age of computers.

The upshot is... I am with you and would love to learn more about designing the optimum book for flow, readability and to be psychologically pleasing. I think your experience in the paperbook world is greatly germaine to designing ebooks since it comes from that same concept of designing something attractive out of something ugly. I mean who would want to read a book in Courier 10 point that the author wrote the manuscript in?

Keep posting. Like minded people will soon see your posts and you will get more positive responses.

Happy Tuesday
Archon

[bfollowell]

obarz,

I'm not too worried about the way most "decently" formatted ebooks look these days. That being said, there are too many ebooks that aren't decently formatted. There are major inconsistencies within a single publisher and even within a single series of books. Some standards would be nice, though I doubt we can do much to improve the industry as a whole. Like many businesses in this slowly improving economy, many publishers are focused on the bottom line and are laying off whole ebook departments, if they ever existed at all, and farming this work out to the lowest bidders (at least this is what I'm hearing). This shows through in many ebooks.

While I certainly don't consider myself a "conversion techie", I have picked up a few skills. In the process of converting ebooks from one format or another for use on my Kindle, I have become fairly proficient with Sigl and Calibre and have started to create my own set of standards for ebooks I own. I'd be interested in helping you in any way that I might be able to.

Feel free to send me a private message and let me know if I can be of service.

Good luck.

- Byron Followell

[cybmole]

hey don't me me wrong - I'm all for better looking books but that is mostly in the hands of the hardware makers, they control the price and availability of e-screen real estate.

I'd love a A4 sized e-ink + colour screen for reading in bed at about the price of kindle 3, but the tech. ain't there yet. e-ink locks us into grey, and A4 e-readers are scarce + v expensive.

but once I'm immersed in a story I really don't care much about fonts & styles. I think e-books already look as good as most paperbacks .

high on my software to-do list would be improvements to navigation, dictionary look ups etc though they are there already to some extent. (mouse controlled dictionary look up in Kindle for PC is much slicker than in actual Kindle and its just one click to from there to go on line to wikipedia or whatever ). oh - collection management on Kindle is pretty rudimentary also but that's part of the book owning/collection aesthetic, not part of the actual reading immersement experience

there's a couple of things that are easier to do with paper than e-book right now - one is to stick a finger on the current page, then flip back & reread some earlier bit of the plot that you've forgotten. to do that on e-book you have to mess about with bookmarks or writing down your location numbers. another paper trick is to flick ahead too see how many more unread pages are in the current chapter & thus assess if you'll get there before falling asleep!

I'd want e-book publishers to prioritize eliminating ALL typos / scan errors / line feed errors, and to implement a robust system of providing free upgrades of purchased books after errors like that have been corrected. lets get ALL the words to be correct & in the right order before we fret more about the layout!

this talk about optimum flow & psychologically pleasing etc seems like pretentious waffle though,
I am sorry to say.
optimum flow for me is just left to right followed by top to bottom, it does not need a design committee or a panel of experts to improve it.

& read all you like about fonts but the hardware makers have already decided which fonts to support - that is not open to debate now.

a good story is psychologically pleasing; a badly written one isn't - even if it's beautifully formatted.

just give the reader the tools to set line spacing & font size & words per line options ( already all done on Kindle) and to set iindenting preferences, not available on Kindle but is there in calibre

[Bather]

Moderator. Excuse me, but this thread does say:Seeking to connect with experienced Calibre conversion techies. So I thought I'd ask. Since it does have to do with Calibre conversions. But I do see your point.

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by Bather

Moderator. Excuse me, but this thread does say:Seeking to connect with experienced Calibre conversion techies. So I thought I'd ask. Since it does have to do with Calibre conversions. But I do see your point.

Yes, it says so in the title. However, read the first post. You're of course free to ask your questions, just don't go hog other people's unrelated threads for that.