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Old 01-26-2008, 05:32 PM   #1
vinniet
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vinniet has learned how to buy an e-book online
 
Posts: 59
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: New Jersey
Device: Sony PRS-500
How to Format WOWIO Books

I have been trying to find the best way to format the books that you can download from WOWIO. I would assume this might apply to other sites that allow you to download books in PDF. But WOWIO books are also unique with advertisements and digital identifier.

I found there are two ways that work best. One is to use PDFLRF and the other is to use Book Designer. Sometimes it will not format well enough for one so you use the other.

PDFLRF:

This basically makes a image of the page and will let you store it portrait or landscape. In landscape it will split the page in two so its larger. You will have to first find the start and end of the book so that you cut out the advertisements which usually takes up a couple pages in the beginning and end of the book. When you open the book just change the page range.

Next you press preview and it will display the book. Go to a page that has witting and use the trim controls to bring the shaded area right up to the words. You will have to page through to see if the words shift up/down or left/right on different pages. You want to trim off the page number along with the headers and footers.

I usually try the book in portrait to see if its too small. Usually I can get by but I have good eyes. If not try landscape.

Problem with this method is the books usually grow by 5x-10x the original size which means you might be looking at a 10 meg book.

Book Designer:

BD takes more work but with practice you can come up with a nice looking book. Below are the steps I try to use per book. Every book seems to be different so you must adjust to try to remove extras such are page numbers and footers & headers.

Open the book in BD and see it picks up the text. Some books just fail trying to open and others have no text. Also open the book in Adobe for reference.

In the book locate the digital key (or thats what I call it) it will be on every page so its everywhere. It looks like this E1234E8-012B-1223-ABCD-123458A5B9EF Copy this and press F2 to bring up search and past it in the top box. Be sure you are at the top of the book and press replace all. This will remove it everywhere.

Next locate the what is in the header and footer. Its usually the book title and author. Copy the author and press F2 to bring up the search, again be sure you are at the top of book. Paste in the name and be sure check box to match case is on. Press F3 to see if its part of the footer or a write-up on the author. You can skip a occurrence by press F3 or replace it with F4. If you think the rest is from the book then do replace all.

Do the step above again for the book title. Be careful because sometimes the title is also in the book as a word. You might have to use F3 and F4 and go "one by one" through the book.

Next its time to try to get the page number out since they will be mixed in. Go to Tools -> Element Browser. Pick title from the top drag down and press FIND button. This will bring up everything BD thinks its a title. If you lots of spaces along with the page numbers then select all of the elements by clicking on the first hold down shift and select the last. Then change the bottom drag down to title and press the DO button. This will get rid of the spaces. Next change the bottom drag down to delete and block select page numbers and press DO. This is pain but its the only way I can figure out how to get rid of them. Will might also see chapter and some words too, skip them for now. Once done then go back to the ones left. If they are chapter numbers, then skip them. As for the words they might be part of the paragraph. You can skip them or fix them.

Next change the Element Browser top drag down to subtitles and do the same thing. Remove the spaces, then page numbers, then see if you want to fix the rest. Follow the steps above.

Next we are going to remove some of the other extra lines. Bring up Tool -> Book Cleaner. On the bottom left drag down (input file: before editing) change that to RemoveRepeatEmptyLines. The other two drag downs should be set to none. Make sure the radio button is set to whole and press apply. This should clean it up more but there will be a blank line everywhere the real book had a page break. It does not bother me but you can fix this also.

Some other extras I do is remove the junk from the top and bottom of the document. I also copy the cover from the PDF and insert it at the very beginning. I also create a tag for the Book Author and Book Title.

Lastly convert the book to sony format and see what it looks like in eBook library.



I hope this helps other who wanted to convert these books. If anyone has improvements to this, please let me know and I will add it.

Additions

I found a way to locate page number that are in this format: - 12 - They usually get put in as text so you can not locate them with Element Browser. Press F2 (make sure you are on the top of the book) and put this in the search:

- \d* \D

The make sure ReqExp is checked and press F3 to find them. Then press the button replace all. I think there is a bug because it only find 25 or so of them. I repeat the steps again and find another 25. I keep doing it till I find them all.

Might be a better way with ReqExp but it was the best I could figure out.

Last edited by vinniet; 01-26-2008 at 05:40 PM. Reason: Added more info
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