[Katsunami]

Even though I started another thread with a rant about how bad some ebooks are formatted, I must say that many *new* books (created since or after 2009 or so) DO seem to be getting better with regard to layout and coding.

Yesterday, I've bought a bunch of EPUB-books from three different stores; 17 books in total. (My goal in 2013 is to eventually re-read all paper books I have as an ebook, and then start selling the paper versions.) Not all stores had all the books I wanted, and sometimes the pricing differences were big: a series costing $6.95 per book in store A, cost $4.75 per book in store B; and for other series, it was the other way around. (And strangely enough, with two series, I had to split them between two stores, because none of them had the entire series. Why would you only carry book 1 and 4, but not 2 and 3?)

I've now looked into 7 of them, and their coding is clean and easy to understand, and their layout resembles the paper versions very much. These 7 books are all very well done; as the other 10 are all from the same publishers as these 7, I've got good hopes for them too.

Now, to get all this stuff organized.... what I do is the following.

1. Remove DRM by importing them into Calibre. Then I pluck the de-DRM-ed version from the library, and remove the books from Calibre again.
2. I save the deDRM-ed, but otherwhise unchanged versions to a separate folder, in case I need or want them someday in the future. I make copies to work with.
3. Used Sigil to remove spacing between the paragraphs of the body text. Calibre removes paragraph spacing everywhere AFAIK, and I don't want that. This is easily achieved by adding "margin-top: 0;" and "margin-bottom: 0;" to the right CSS-classes (and add "text-indent: 1em;" if necessary).
4. If the body text has a font-size set, then I remove this, so the font will not be larger or smaller than the size I've set in the e-reader.
5. Use EPUBMetadataEditor to set the tags as I want them, and to set the publication date to the original date of the paper version, instead of the date the ebook was published.

After editing the book as above, I'll save that version also, in my main library/folder. Then I import it back into Calibre, and everything immediately is set correctly.

I could do part 3-5 in Calibre itself, but I don't want to. I want to be able to, should it ever be necessary, to import my entire main library folder into Calibre and be done with it (except maybe ticking "Update sort order" for all books).

So in the end, I maintain two versions/libraries of my books:
1. The de-DRM-ed, but otherwise unchanged versions.
2. The de-DRM-ed versions I've adjusted to my liking.

There is also the library Calibre creates on its own, when importing the books from my main library folder; but I normally don't touch that.

Basically, I do the same with audio-CD's: I create my own FLAC version from an original CD (just as I create my own Ebook from an original EPUB). Then I normalize the volume to where I want it (ReplayGain), and check if the tags and cover image are correctly downloaded and set by the FLAC creator. Then I put this album into my music library, and import it into Foobar 2000. In the end, I archive the CD.

And of course I've got two backup copies of everything.