[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

So I'm guessing that the book I'm working now -- that has a character portrait per chapter -- is likely to hit a snag in conversion.

And the book I'm working next year -- a Choose Your Own Adventure style book that has dozens of pictures and hundreds of links and cross-links -- will probably not convert cleanly either, no matter how closely I follow the guidelines.

Those should both work fine--with the guidelines.

The guidelines that is AN ENTIRE BOOK. Full of prose trying to scare you into not messing up. And which is not easy to follow as a reference material, imho. Because it's AN ENTIRE BOOK OF PROSE.

I agree. Is ridiculous. And while it may be a lovely book in ePub, I don't want to read formatting instructions in ePub; I want them in an easily-edited format that I can arrange for easy printing, and highlight the sections I'll need help remembering... and for some reason, the RTF output from the Meatgrinder is about the worst of its output formats. Which makes NO BLOODY SENSE, given that it's starting with Word docs; it shouldn't have to "convert" anything.

As an author and as someone who buys from Kobo more often than I do from Smashwords, I would prefer they fix the submission process.

Fair enough. It wasn't a bland rhetorical question.

As a reader, I notice the lack of ability to find stuff I'd like a lot more than poor-quality formatting of what I get. (And the stuff that irritates me the most--lack of page breaks before chapter headings, lack of formatting for indents/quote sections--are likely to stay, because they indicate an uploader who flat-out wasn't paying attention to any of the specs.)

Indie e-publishing already has enough "ew, the books are badly formatted!" bad press. Word conversions aren't going to help that.

I don't mind the poor Word conversions as much as that the Meatgrinder is a least-common-denominator tool... it doesn't support a lot of formatting that ePub *can* do, because the other formats don't support those features. (Tables. Text wrap around images. Drop caps. Font embedding.)

You can't have it both ways -- you can't assume that in the Meatgrinder process, all the authors conscientiously format their Word document perfectly for conversion, but with a "and epubs are allowed too", the authors will universally be careless idiots. Either the idiots exist in BOTH processes, or NEITHER.

I assume the same number of idiots, with the caveats that (1) indifferently-formatted Word docs, with no particular errors but lacking functionality (like chapter breaks), are more likely than similarly indifferently-formatted ePubs and (2) badly-mangled Word docs are likely to provide readable, if ugly, exports; badly-mangled ePubs are likely to provide files that don't open on the user's machine at all.

However, I do think we're rapidly getting to a point of general awareness of & competence with ePub that not being able to submit download-ready files will set Smashwords up to be another "early groundbreaker that couldn't keep up with tech changes."