Getting back on formatting books, I have some questions
 

Hi everybody! I'm sorry if I'm asking something that is brought up very often, but I've been searching a bit and I didn't find anything clear.

A while ago, right when I bought my Kindle 3, I got into formatting e-books so I could adapt my collection of "real" books into it. I remember using BookDesigner, Mobipocket Creator and Calibre to do the work, which was satisfactory for me. My reading habits go somewhat erratic, and sometimes I read many books for some months, then I don't read for another while. Since I had adapted many books, I didn't touch these programs for almost a year or two except for some random fix.

After a hardware revamp to my computer, and prior to my summer vacations, I just decided to reinstall these programs and add some new books to the collection, but for some reason, they don't wanna work well anymore (except Calibre). I suppose the reason is simply that they're somewhat outdated and they might require older software to function, because for example, BD keeps popping me a "run-time error 339" about some dhtmled.ocx thing, and MC crashes when I try to add some tags like the "start reading" one for no reason (I've been using HarryT's guide to do all this work).

My question would be if there's any easier and/or more updated way to do this work. I don't need to adapt any scan since I just download them if I liked them the first time I read them "IRL". I've been seeing names like Kindle Previewer, Sigil, MS Word add-ons, etc, but I'm not entirely sure about their uses in the whole proccess.

What I wanna do is basically pick a text and format it properly (adding titles, page breaks, chapter tags, TOC, etc), to produce an e-book that I can read in my Kindle. Which would be the best programs to use for this?

Thanks in advance!

I would use Sigil to create/edit the book as an ePub and then once you have the formatting how you want it use Kindle Previewer/KindleGen or Calibre to do a quick few seconds conversion to Mobi or KF8/AZW3.

Thanks for the reply! Is there any good guide for Sigil? I downloaded it and tinkered a bit with the program but I'm a bit confused on how it works. Usually I just open a file in BD and work on the text but I'm kinda lost with the way Sigil divides the book in different html files.

The sigil userguide should help a lot. You don't have to split your book in more files, but it is useful to split per chapter.
For export from Word I use my own add-in of course...

To export I don't really have any method in particular. When I used BD I would simply open the original file with Calibre and convert it into whatever would work in BD (usually FB2), and then fix whatever mess the conversion makes.

There's a way to make BookDesigner work in Vista/7, have a look at the wiki
here. There's a paragraph that deals with the dhtml ocx problem.

According to what other members say, Mobipocket Creator works well under Windows 7.

What OS are you using?

Depending on the source of the books you want to send to your Kindle, there might be an even easier route. If you can get them into MS Word, create the Table of Contents, format everything using styles, and save the document.
Install Send to Kindle for PC.
When you are finished with your Word document, open Windows Explorer, right click on the document file and choose Send to Kindle. You are done!