Quote:
Originally Posted by northstar7
Hi. I have been working on converting a publisher's list to ebooks. The books will be for sale on Amazon, iBook, iPublish and so on.
So far I've converted about 100 books to the mobi format with minimal problems. But the epub format is giving me a lot of headaches.
The book I have started with is a simple presentation of 150 short stories, some with line drawings as illustrations. I produced it by starting with a Word doc, which I saved as filtered html in Word. Then I used Calibre to create the epub from the html.
The problem is that each flavor of ebook software displays the book in different ways. ADE displays it well. So does the ebub extension for Firefox.
Lucidor displays only the first 50 entries in the TOC, but if you scroll down, the stories and illustrations are displayed well. Same for RBReader. Koolbits will only display the first 50 stories.
Azzardi displays only the first 50 stories in the TOC and while the stories not in the TOC are there, any story with an illustration is chopped off at the point where the illustration should be. Sigil does the same. Stanza doesn't display any formatting.
So I'm wondering how to deal with this situation. Is using Calibre from filtered html a good approach to creating an epub?
Is there a reader that's accepted generally as the standard, so that if a book reads well on that reader, it's the best you can do?
I'd be grateful for any suggestions, insights, etc.
|
Forget Lucidor, forget Azzardi, forget Koolbits and forget RBReader. Those are minor players and don't make a bit of difference at all. Most people don't even know they exist.
That said, what format is your original in before you moved it into Word? Word puts in lots of garbage that you don't need and you don't want and can make things look off or not work properly. Since your books are something you can load into Word, I recommend that you use Sigil. It will help you create the ePub such that it won't have all the Word garbage that Word loves to put in. Even filtered HTML is nasty.
As for Mobi for Amazon, you don't want that. You want to get your ePub looking good and then you want to run the ePub through Kindlegen so you can generate a KF8/Mobi combination file. Use Kindlepreviewer to view how that looks. Use the Kindle Fire setting to view the KF8 and use a Kindle setting to see how it looks in Mobi. If both look good, that can go to Amazon.