12-28-2007, 03:33 AM | #31 |
Enthusiast
Posts: 41
Karma: 10
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: San Jose, Calif., USA
Device: Kindle
|
I too want to have a single format for ebooks, and perhaps .mobi is that. I only will read ebooks on my Kindle, and want to avoid DSM books at all cost. I think .awz -- the Kindle format -- might be best, but .mobi appears to be the same thing, or becoming that with new revisions, and Kindle says that they read these just fine.
I want to have one file per ebook. Kindle says this is necessary. I would like all images to be stored in B&W with 600-800 size maximum. But I don't know how to do that. So far it looks like a highly restricted .html is best, but don't know how to do the B&W conversions, as well as restricting size to 600-800. I have a lot of ebooks, mostly in adobe formats. I have a format converter to go to a DOC file, but would prefer to go direct to html instead, as the DOC to html conversion of MS Word is terrible, and creates enormous files. Sorry for such a jumbled post, but don't know how to organize this any better. Charles Wilkes, San Jose, Calif. |
12-28-2007, 07:02 AM | #32 |
eBook Enthusiast
Posts: 85,544
Karma: 93383043
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: UK
Device: Kindle Oasis 2, iPad Pro 10.5", iPhone 6
|
|
Advert | |
|
12-28-2007, 08:35 AM | #33 |
Connoisseur
Posts: 62
Karma: 133
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Minnesota, USA
Device: Kobo Aura Edition 2
|
nairbv, in your first post you asked about the best reader software for windows. In my opinion, it is hands down the Mobipocket desktop reader. It has a built-in importer that can accept doc, rtf, html, pdf, txt. The pdf importer in particular is excellent.
|
12-28-2007, 10:16 AM | #34 | |
Books and more books
Posts: 917
Karma: 69499
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: White Plains, NY, USA
Device: Nook Color, Itouch, Nokia770, Sony 650, Sony 700(dead), Ebk(given)
|
Quote:
http://www.xnview.com/ |
|
12-28-2007, 11:42 AM | #35 |
creator of calibre
Posts: 43,776
Karma: 22666666
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Mumbai, India
Device: Various
|
@nairbv
The only way you can make a format strictly semantic and simpler than html is by imposing strict semantics and limiting the number of tags, in which case it wont be as powerful as html. look at it this way, html allows you to be both semantic and to control presentation if you want to. Semantic XML will allow you only control of the semantic information, not the presentation. Now generally, that is a good thing, but i feel having the extra flexibility is valuable, but maybe thats because I come from a background of TeX where you use a Turing complete language to do markup. Also I write conversion tools for ebook formats and I have to say that parsing HTML is no great hardship. People have already written several tools that "tidy" up html until it becomes XML and then you can use any XML parser to do the trick. |
Advert | |
|
12-28-2007, 11:55 AM | #36 | |
reader
Posts: 6,975
Karma: 5183568
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Mississippi, USA
Device: Kindle 3, Kobo Glo HD
|
Quote:
There is typically no need to convert color images to gray scale, the Kindle will do this for you. I think it will also rescale images bigger than the screen. For PDF's Amazon's own conversion for the Kindle may be as good as it gets. The Windows MobiPocket Reader has a similar PDF to MOBI capability. |
|
12-29-2007, 12:32 AM | #37 |
Groupie
Posts: 152
Karma: 854
Join Date: Dec 2007
Device: Lifebook T5010
|
I've been saving files since the early 1980's. I've seen a lot of old media die. I've seen executables from a Commodore not run on an XT. I've seen .zip files that opened on an XT not open on a !486, because the format changes. I've seen copy-protected 360k floppies not work in a 1.2MB drive.
I dropped DOC, XLS, MDB, etc when Microsoft moved to DOCX, XLSX, etc because Microsoft's data formats are too ephemeral for long-term use. Here are my current formats for my 1TB library: Documents: TXT (& CSV) RTF CHM HTM (& HTML) DJVU (sorry...I had to edit my post to add this) Databases: XML Images: JPG GIF PNG TIF BMP Discs: ISO, if necessary - otherwise just store the files Audio: MP3 (I save them in whatever the encoding is that comes to me, plus I save it as 16 bits per sample, 16k/second, stereo. This is because some MP3 players do not support some formats (for example, 8 bits/sample, 8 k/second, mono.) CD Audio (rare) Video: (rare) AVI DVD Video Executables: x86, on a live disc image Andy Last edited by recycledelectron; 12-29-2007 at 01:14 PM. |
12-29-2007, 07:04 AM | #38 |
Enthusiast
Posts: 44
Karma: 542
Join Date: Dec 2007
Device: Sony PRS-505
|
I think anybody who spends time formatting ebooks should take a serious look at the Daisy DTBook XML element set (which is actually included as part of the epub spec).
It allows semantic markup (ie. you use tags like <author> and <epigraph> rather than presentation tags like <center> and <font>) and inclusion in epub means that hardware readers should support the format natively in the near future. Perhaps best of all; documents that you spend time marking up in DTBook should be accessible to those with vision problems - via text-to-speech and braille converters. CSS (and possibly XLST) used in combination with a DTBook document should allow a visual presentation almost as good as using HTML/CSS, but with the advantages of greater accessiblility and semantic clarity. Also it appears to be a fairly small element set, so it doesn't have the steep learning curve associated with TEI. Marking up something with a simple structure like a novel should be very easy. Last edited by Lexicon; 12-29-2007 at 07:21 AM. |
12-29-2007, 10:31 AM | #39 | |
Feedbooks.com Co-Founder
Posts: 2,263
Karma: 145123
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Paris, France
Device: Sony PRS-t-1/350/300/500/505/600/700, Nexus S, iPad
|
Quote:
I don't really like though the fact that you have to explicitly tell the level of depth. Should be very easy to make Feedbooks fully DTBook compliant, I'll work on this next month I guess. I've been studying other standards too, for example I'd like to use hReview on Feedbooks. |
|
12-30-2007, 12:55 AM | #40 |
Connoisseur
Posts: 88
Karma: 15
Join Date: Nov 2007
Device: still looking for an ebook reader device
|
This DTBook format looks cool.... It looks like it might be exactly what I"m looking in a base format for if I can find tools to convert to this format.... I mean, it seems like conversion from this mostly semantic format should be very simple and so it makes more sense as a "base" format.
I don't really understand though, .. .I mean, it looks like it will hold all of the information in a book, but it's also incorporated into epub, ... what does epub add to this format? |
12-30-2007, 01:04 AM | #41 |
creator of calibre
Posts: 43,776
Karma: 22666666
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Mumbai, India
Device: Various
|
The point is that with DTBook you can only specify semantic information, with epub you can specify presentation information as well as semantic information
|
12-30-2007, 07:28 AM | #42 |
Enthusiast
Posts: 44
Karma: 542
Join Date: Dec 2007
Device: Sony PRS-505
|
Yes, epub is basically a zip file containing a number of different files. If you were writing a DTBook/epub document then one of these files would be the XML source and the other would be a CSS file telling the reader how you would like that XML to be rendered.
I'd hope that the viewer/reader application would be able to replace the built in CSS at the user's command though, otherwise many of the advantages of the separation of semantic and presentation info would be lost. I'd also hope that most viewers would come with some built in CSS files for presenting DTBook XML at various sizes. Actually there is a cynical side to me that is wondering whether reader manufacturers will support 'DTBook within epub' at all, it's not that unusual for standards to be only partially implemented and the manufacturers may just implement the XHTML part of the spec. I think it'd be a real shame if that happens. It won't stop me formatting books in DTBook but it'd mean I'd have to run them through a converter before loading them onto a reader. |
12-31-2007, 05:04 AM | #43 |
Junior Member
Posts: 3
Karma: 10
Join Date: Oct 2007
Device: mobipocket
|
If you images are in .gif or other format then convert those images to .jpg for reducing the size of images, but still you find the process complicated then i can recommend you one ebook conversion service provider who converts any complicated text or pdf format ebook to mobipocket or kindle ebook format at very reasonable price along with providing 100% quality work.
|
12-31-2007, 10:04 PM | #44 |
Connoisseur
Posts: 88
Karma: 15
Join Date: Nov 2007
Device: still looking for an ebook reader device
|
hmm...
but epub is more than DTBook+CSS,... it also has XHTML files, which separately store the text of the book. My impression though is that DTBook ALSO stores the text of the book, and some amount of presentation information. I've read that the DTBook element set "borrows heavily" from the HTML spec (which doesn't bother me, I just don't like all-out, separate, semantics-free HTML files that include all their own ways of representing meta-data etc, and then have to be marked up by external XML to hackily tack on book related semantic data). I mean, someone could come up with a "standard" that with some funny file extension essentially a renamed zip file containing TXT or html or rtf file.... and expect all the readers to use if statements. That would have the ability to preserve lots of information and give the authors lots of control, .. and would "draw from existing standards," but ... it wouldn't be a reasonable standard in itself. It wouldn't be anything useful at all. So, if epub is DTBook (which contains the text of a book in an xml-internal html-like format) + the epub XHTML files (which are a separate subset of the HTML spec, stored in individual one-per-chapter files) + epub's XML markup + css all being zipped together... How does that work? implement both and use "if" statements? Reader software implements the part of the spec necessary for the publishers they have contracts with? Or am I miss-understanding the way they "draw from" these multiple standards? Can a book be entirely represented as a DTBook or not? kovidgoyal says it won't hold presentation information on it's own, but if not then why would it borrow heavily from the HTML spec? Searching around I just found a microsoft word plugin that generates DTBooks. If it's ONLY semantic information then how would word generate a book? I wish I had word now to try it out. So maybe DTBook is the format I should be storing all my books in. Are there converters that convert to DTBook? It seems like DTBook would be the simplest format to convert FROM from what I see so far, and that's what I'm really concerned with in a "base" format. There's no sense in converting to a format (or spending time adding semantic information to a new file in a particular format) if I can't easily convert from that format. Converting from a semantically-rigid xml file (regardless of how much html-like markup it has) will be easier in my mind than converting from a mess of real html files + hacked on external xml markup. Parsing a pile of files and trying to guess where the particular author put the semantic information, (or maybe even guessing whether it's a DTBook or HTML file holding the content??)... I just wont put in that kind of effort. Whereas, parsing a semantic XML file with content that's been marked up a bit with html tags, ... for that I could learn xsl and write a basic transformer in a day. Even if DTBook isn't fully implemented in epub, it seems it would be painless to convert from DTBook to epub without losing any information, .. from what I see so far anyways. |
12-31-2007, 10:49 PM | #45 |
Connoisseur
Posts: 88
Karma: 15
Join Date: Nov 2007
Device: still looking for an ebook reader device
|
ooh, I just found this:
"even though OPS 2.0 (which is inside the EPub container) supports DTBook well enough that a DTBook Publication can easily be made to conform to OPS 2.0, this does not mean that EPub requires support for the unique features in DTBook. The only “DTBook” requirement is that all OPS 2.0 Publications must include the DTBook NCX, which is the machine-readable table of contents." from http://www.teleread.org/blog/2007/11...point-readers/ So, epub doesn't really support DTBook, it just uses the same kind of table of contents? What's "can be made to conform" mean? like, DTBook's spec could be tweaked a little? or a rigidly made DTBook could as-is meet OPS requirements? Does that just mean not using any of the dtbook-specific tags so that it was just semantics-free html? I'm assuming a DTBook doesn't start with an "HTML" tag or anything like that though. Maybe they mean calling it "out of line" xml (ops 2.0 #1.4.1.4), ignoring the semantic data in the file, and including a link to a transforming stylesheet? Doesn't sound pretty either way. but then later I see "DTBook is valid markup for use as content (along with XHTML)" Then again from here it also looks like content is an "either/or" of html or dtbook (or maybe xml .. + stylesheet?): http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/OPS_2.0...Section1.4.1.1 they also talk a lot about CSS in this spec, but seem to be referring to it as xml stylesheets. I thought xml stylesheets where xsl, not css? or are they talking about xsl? and then in 2.6.2.3.1 I see "If the Reading System is capable of processing the document format of chapter2.xml then the link resolves to chapter2.xml. Otherwise, the link resolves to the fallback for chapter2.xml, which is chapter2.html" .... so, ... yeah, ... a bunch of if statements to find your content, based on which style of content the particular reader has implemented a way to render. This all seems pretty lame to me. |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Can a JBL read Fictionwise's multi-format books? | GA Russell | Ectaco jetBook | 16 | 06-01-2010 10:32 PM |
Looking for reading software on Android that will read Epub format | CJBarrow | Reading and Management | 1 | 04-14-2010 03:28 PM |
can we read books from the sony store ( or formerly sony store) and read them in the | SDRebel | Astak EZReader | 27 | 01-22-2010 01:27 AM |
Buuying books on the amazon store to read on Sony prs-505 | Mayr | Sony Reader | 3 | 10-08-2009 03:10 AM |
What format do you like to "Store" your books in? | askyn | Workshop | 11 | 10-16-2008 01:22 PM |