I'm doing some testing for AO3, the
Archive of Our Own fanfiction archive. They offer downloadable ebooks in mobi, epub, pdf and html. The epubs sometimes have problems, and I'd like a bit of help sorting out the details.
From what I can figure out, any story with an image link is unreadable on the Sony readers; the image link makes the software freeze up. I don't know if this is true on other types of readers, but people with different Sonys have confirmed the problem.
Am attaching samples. Warning: sample fanfic is "explicit crackfic." Actually reading the story is not recommended unless you are fascinated by the idea of Cthulhu/My Little Pony romance. ("Romance" is a euphemism.) Pictures, however, are entirely non-explicit. Potentially funny, if you like tentacles.
I've got 2 epubs & a mobi of the same story (one of mine, because those are the only ones I'm sure of permission to distribute); the "no imgs" epub I unzipped, removed the <img src="url"> link, and rezipped; I made no other changes. (I don't know how to change the metadata for the title from inside the file.)
When I opened the mobi on the Kindle for PC program, there were no pictures; I've no idea if there's some other conversion method that could allow them to be seen, or if mobi just has no way to connect its viewer to the web. (So, the pics might have to be embedded somehow to work, and that might not be possible for most images.)
I'd like to know:
1) Does the "imgs" epub work on other portable readers? Does it work on something with wifi that can access the internet to get the pictures?
2) Does the "no imgs" epub work on other readers? (It works fine on mine; it's included for comparison.)
3) Is there anything weird about the mobi? (Other than the contents, that is.)
The needing-brain-bleach shouldn't kick in during the first couple of paragraphs. The first picture is before the first paragraph of actual story, right after the headers/intro; reading more than that isn't necessary. (Is fine, if you'd like, but I'm not asking people to read my crackfic; I'm asking for formatting checks & advice.)
ETA: Original story is at
http://archiveofourown.org/works/133797