MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How to allow our books to be converted to all ereader formats with calibre?

webfolk · 10-14-2010, 01:21 AM

On our website http://www.thefolkofyore.com/ there are several books available for free reading and downloading as PDF files. Naively, as soon as we discovered calibre, we placed an invitation to our website visitors to use it to convert these files to the ebook reader of choice, including a link to the calibre website. For example: http://www.thefolkofyore.com/2-Sacre...adsacmiss.html

Of course, it's not that simple. The present PDF files don't convert well, exhibiting many of the symptoms described in the calibre manual, such as headers appearing within the text. In addition to a PDF file suitable for reading and printing from a computer, it looks like we need to offer an additional file dedicated for ebooks. To keep things simple, we'd like to offer one file in an optimal DRM-free format*that people can download and convert to their particular ebooks as quickly and easily as possible.

It would be greatly appreciated if someone would recommend a general course of action, starting with what type of file to make available for conversion, and also address a few issues that have come up so far as I've been trying to do this on my own.

The original source files are in Word 2008 for Mac. I'm using a MacBook Pro with OS 10.5.8, Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.2.5, calibre 0.7.23 and have Sigil 0.2.4, though I know little about Sigil and haven't used it yet. Since I don't own an ereader, to check results I'm using Kindle for Mac 1.0.0 Beta 1 (27214) and Barnes and Noble eReader Version 1.1. Eventually I'd like to check results in other formats, but right now it's complicated enough with these 2 alone.

So far, I've gone back into the*Word*source files and replaced direct formatting with styles, removed headers, changed section breaks from "next page" to "continuous" and removed the table of contents (since it didn't seem to be doing anything once the files were converted to ereader formats). I've tried quite a few test files, some in HTML, some in PDF which I placed in calibre to convert.*

I've tried various iterations. Converting ZIP and PDF to EPUB, MOBI, & PDB was completed in under 3 minutes. Many times*EPUB to MOBI & PDB was still working after 10 and up to 20 minutes so I stopped the job in these cases. Why is this happening? I had hoped to use EPUB*as the source format since that's*recommended in the manual and also the format Sigil uses.

The best result I've achieved so far has come from converting Word to HTML, placing that in Calibre, and converting the ZIP file to MOBI. The appearance on the Kindle reader is close to my original, though the text is justified, whereas the original is left adjusted. All the chapters show up in the Kindle Table of contents, however the foreword and preface don't.

All conversions to PDB viewed on the B&N reader are unsatisfactory because all italicization is lost. Also the text is justified in block form, double spaced between paragraphs, whereas in the original the first line of each paragraph is indented with no additional space between paragraphs.

This is a just a sample of what I've encountered. Does anyone have any suggestions?*Thanks a lot for any help you can offer.

10-14-2010, 01:21 AM	#1
webfolk Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 10 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Arizona, USA Device: None	How to allow our books to be converted to all ereader formats with calibre? On our website http://www.thefolkofyore.com/ there are several books available for free reading and downloading as PDF files. Naively, as soon as we discovered calibre, we placed an invitation to our website visitors to use it to convert these files to the ebook reader of choice, including a link to the calibre website. For example: http://www.thefolkofyore.com/2-Sacre...adsacmiss.html Of course, it's not that simple. The present PDF files don't convert well, exhibiting many of the symptoms described in the calibre manual, such as headers appearing within the text. In addition to a PDF file suitable for reading and printing from a computer, it looks like we need to offer an additional file dedicated for ebooks. To keep things simple, we'd like to offer one file in an optimal DRM-free formatthat people can download and convert to their particular ebooks as quickly and easily as possible. It would be greatly appreciated if someone would recommend a general course of action, starting with what type of file to make available for conversion, and also address a few issues that have come up so far as I've been trying to do this on my own. The original source files are in Word 2008 for Mac. I'm using a MacBook Pro with OS 10.5.8, Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.2.5, calibre 0.7.23 and have Sigil 0.2.4, though I know little about Sigil and haven't used it yet. Since I don't own an ereader, to check results I'm using Kindle for Mac 1.0.0 Beta 1 (27214) and Barnes and Noble eReader Version 1.1. Eventually I'd like to check results in other formats, but right now it's complicated enough with these 2 alone. So far, I've gone back into theWordsource files and replaced direct formatting with styles, removed headers, changed section breaks from "next page" to "continuous" and removed the table of contents (since it didn't seem to be doing anything once the files were converted to ereader formats). I've tried quite a few test files, some in HTML, some in PDF which I placed in calibre to convert. I've tried various iterations. Converting ZIP and PDF to EPUB, MOBI, & PDB was completed in under 3 minutes. Many timesEPUB to MOBI & PDB was still working after 10 and up to 20 minutes so I stopped the job in these cases. Why is this happening? I had hoped to use EPUBas the source format since that'srecommended in the manual and also the format Sigil uses. The best result I've achieved so far has come from converting Word to HTML, placing that in Calibre, and converting the ZIP file to MOBI. The appearance on the Kindle reader is close to my original, though the text is justified, whereas the original is left adjusted. All the chapters show up in the Kindle Table of contents, however the foreword and preface don't. All conversions to PDB viewed on the B&N reader are unsatisfactory because all italicization is lost. Also the text is justified in block form, double spaced between paragraphs, whereas in the original the first line of each paragraph is indented with no additional space between paragraphs. This is a just a sample of what I've encountered. Does anyone have any suggestions?Thanks a lot for any help you can offer.