05-25-2011, 01:49 PM | #211 | ||
Books are brain food.
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Quote:
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When I'm working with HTML to create an e-book, I insert this code in the HTML wherever the em-dash appears: Code:
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05-25-2011, 02:38 PM | #212 |
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Windows users can also use the nifty (free!) ``All Chars'' program which emulates the ``COMPOSE'' key on old DEC word processors. Highly recommended:
http://allchars.zwolnet.com/ William |
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05-25-2011, 04:37 PM | #213 | |
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05-25-2011, 04:38 PM | #214 | |
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05-25-2011, 08:03 PM | #215 | |
Books are brain food.
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I created another ebook by adding all the HTML code by hand. It was very time-consuming but rather fun, actually. |
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05-26-2011, 04:50 AM | #216 |
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Amazon/Kindle do no editing at all, Michael (nor do the other ebook retailers). It's up to the publisher to prepare flawless files. That's why your own books with us, for intance, are -- after the full editorial process and thorough proofing by many sets of eyes -- painstakingly prepared at the technical end four times over: for print, and then individually created for all three morst popular digital formats, including Mobi for Kindle. Files are then checked for flaws on several in-house reading platforms BEFORE uploading to retail. When digital formatting is automated or when a for-print PDF (often containing occult errors that don't show in print but do in ebook form) is used for auto-conversion, anomalies will invariably creep in. Bestests. Neil
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05-26-2011, 12:48 PM | #217 |
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Thanks to everyone for all your helpful advice. The em-dash problem sounds so minor, yet, when you're writing books, the time consumed in overcoming it is considerable.
Thanks for the information about preparing an e-book, Neil. |
05-28-2011, 07:35 AM | #218 |
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What bothers me is that publishers are using the cost of converting to ebook as justification for not relaxing ebook prices, yet many of them are clearly not doing anything other than OCR (i.e. no humans are proofreading these books).
I'm reading an excellent ebook at the moment that has lots of silly typos. One person in the book has the surname 'Horne' and it alternates between 'Horne' and 'Home' constantly. This is obviously an OCR error. And like others noted, there are hyphenation issues on most Kindle books I've read to date, all of which should be easily picked up by a human proofreader. |
05-28-2011, 12:06 PM | #219 |
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If there are large numbers of ludicrous typos, I have a policy of returning the book and asking for my money back. Actions speak. If enough people did this, it would send a pretty clear message.
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05-28-2011, 12:47 PM | #220 | |
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05-28-2011, 01:22 PM | #221 |
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The way I would create eBooks is to first create the ePub and get it looking just how I want it. After it's been looked at and proofed and is ready to go, convert that to Mobipocket. You won't have to worry about typos or whatnot creeping in as all that's already been proofed. The next step would be to see how it looks and if it looks good, then that's done.
One problem we have with publishers can be worse then OCR. They sometimes use a PDF source. |
05-28-2011, 02:04 PM | #222 | |
Books are brain food.
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05-28-2011, 02:11 PM | #223 |
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If you want to do it by hand, notepad++ is very nice. You can load the CSS and all the XML files in separate tabs and use search/replace to search & replace in all the tabs at one go. Also, it supports regex search/replace. It's what I used to do a lot of ePub editing.
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05-28-2011, 02:12 PM | #224 |
Can one read too much?
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I bought a Kindle book that had atrocious formatting -- truly unreadable. Amazon refunded the money, and I posted my experience as a review. The (self published) author responded with, "Gee, I had been wondering why there were so many returns!"
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