[ficbot]

I am putting together some ebooks off of a public domain website (The Baldwin Project) for my own reading and use. I have found that the book chapters, which I am cutting and pasting straight into Sigil, are blessedly composed of good, clean HTML. They are pasting in as <div> </div> paragraphs; I have been replacing the <div> tags with <p> tags and adding heading formatting to use for the table of contents, and the books are coming out looking very nice.

The only problem I am having is that these books cite a lot of poetry in them as brief little quotes at the top of the chapter. When I import the books into Calibre, I re-convert them to epub to remove the spacing between paragraphs and add an indent, and this is messing up how the quotes look.

If I can use special formatting on these before I convert them to set off the text as a blockquote, will they stay formatted as I want to once Calibre adds the indents? Or should I convert them as I have been, then go back and edit the quote parts after, as a blockquote or centred line or something? What is the best practice for this sort of thing?

Finally, not related to the above question, but I am wondering if its okay to share the books here. The website posts books which are all in the public domain, so technically the text of free for grabs. And I am doing my own formatting and tweaking of it. But the site's editor did take original page scans, clean them up and put in her own work on them. So should I just keep them for personal use, or given that the texts are public domain, is it ok to share them?