MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Some general questions from a book-making newbie

ficbot · 05-30-2011, 06:25 PM

I have been bitten by the ebook editing bug! I started playing with Sigil to do some simple error corrections in a book I was reading, and would up doing a much more substantial edit---creating sections, and adding in some material from a supplementary leaflet into the book itself. I have some general questions if you don't mind...

1) What are some ways I can make sure my book is as 'clean' as possible? I think some of the formatting glitches I have seen in the book I am working on come from stuff like the original creator specifying a specific font size (which makes reflowing the text throw off everything) rather than a tag such as 'heading.' I am trying to use tags instead; is this the right strategy? I want to make sure that if the reader wants edit the book to their own preferences, they have a clean file they can just open up and easily manipulate themselves.

2) Is it considered really wrong to delete things to make it work on a modern reader? For example, the book I was working on had a very large, very clunky index of specific print edition pages numbers, and it choked up Sigil so I just deleted it. I felt a pang about not being 'true' to the book, but a) I could not work with this area of the file anyway since it kept crashing and b) I really think anyone reading it on an ebook reader will have no use for this block of badly OCRd and impossible to clean up gibberish that refers to a specific print edition they are not reading. If they do want to search for a topic, I think they would use the search function on the reader device. Did I do something very, very bad here?

3) Similarly, is it wrong to add things? The two things I added to this ebook were a) to incorporate the leaflet and b) to add some line references. For instance, the leaflet might say 'read page 24-25 of Book X' so I left that in there for reference as part of the text, but also added in something like 'from the quick brown fox...to the lazy dog' so that people could use the search function on their reader to actually follow the reference. Is it very wrong to do this? I guess I figure I am seeing myself as being like the editor of a new edition here, so it's okay to insert such a feature as part of the editing for my 'edition' if it's something really useful, the same way those people who sell the public domain Kindle collections add indexes, tables of contents and other navigation features. But is this really frowned upon?

Feedback is welcome. When I am done with the book I am doing now, I have some ideas for other ones, including a Harvard Classics anthology which will pull together the 15-minute-a-day reading plan and all the specified selections into one volume, and some Wikipedia collections (starting with the complete Wikipedia countries). I also want to make my own poetry anthology of favourite poems.

05-30-2011, 06:25 PM	#1
ficbot Wizard Posts: 2,409 Karma: 4132096 Join Date: Sep 2008 Device: Kindle Paperwhite/iOS Kindle App	Some general questions from a book-making newbie I have been bitten by the ebook editing bug! I started playing with Sigil to do some simple error corrections in a book I was reading, and would up doing a much more substantial edit---creating sections, and adding in some material from a supplementary leaflet into the book itself. I have some general questions if you don't mind... 1) What are some ways I can make sure my book is as 'clean' as possible? I think some of the formatting glitches I have seen in the book I am working on come from stuff like the original creator specifying a specific font size (which makes reflowing the text throw off everything) rather than a tag such as 'heading.' I am trying to use tags instead; is this the right strategy? I want to make sure that if the reader wants edit the book to their own preferences, they have a clean file they can just open up and easily manipulate themselves. 2) Is it considered really wrong to delete things to make it work on a modern reader? For example, the book I was working on had a very large, very clunky index of specific print edition pages numbers, and it choked up Sigil so I just deleted it. I felt a pang about not being 'true' to the book, but a) I could not work with this area of the file anyway since it kept crashing and b) I really think anyone reading it on an ebook reader will have no use for this block of badly OCRd and impossible to clean up gibberish that refers to a specific print edition they are not reading. If they do want to search for a topic, I think they would use the search function on the reader device. Did I do something very, very bad here? 3) Similarly, is it wrong to add things? The two things I added to this ebook were a) to incorporate the leaflet and b) to add some line references. For instance, the leaflet might say 'read page 24-25 of Book X' so I left that in there for reference as part of the text, but also added in something like 'from the quick brown fox...to the lazy dog' so that people could use the search function on their reader to actually follow the reference. Is it very wrong to do this? I guess I figure I am seeing myself as being like the editor of a new edition here, so it's okay to insert such a feature as part of the editing for my 'edition' if it's something really useful, the same way those people who sell the public domain Kindle collections add indexes, tables of contents and other navigation features. But is this really frowned upon? Feedback is welcome. When I am done with the book I am doing now, I have some ideas for other ones, including a Harvard Classics anthology which will pull together the 15-minute-a-day reading plan and all the specified selections into one volume, and some Wikipedia collections (starting with the complete Wikipedia countries). I also want to make my own poetry anthology of favourite poems.