Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Before I purchased my first Kobo ereader, I used multiple tools to clean up the ebooks I was reading. For the most part, to give them a consistent appearance with the margins, line spacing, chapter titles, tables of contents, cover images, paragraph indents, etc. set the way I wanted them. Transferring those cleaned up ebooks to a Kobo reader has resulted in me seeing very few problems with reading ebooks other than minor issues such as the original Kobo ereader firmware not liking apostrophes in file names. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court was acceptable. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court triggered a DRM error.
As for spending a lot of time and effort learning these tools? Sigil has a learning curve mostly related to learning the ins and outs of it's regular expression parser which makes cleaning up a crap ebook an expletive deleted lot faster. FlightCrew and epubcheck with GUI front ends have (in my opinion) virtually no learning curve. Batch checking does require a bit of experience with batch/script files but for single files, it doesn't get much simpler than dropping a file on the application and looking at the error messages (if any).
Other people's opinions may vary -- we each have our own skill sets and experience.
Regards,
David
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I think making them nice and shiny is a good thing if it enhances your enjoyment of the book.
For me it doesn't so much. I will remove page numbers and format the way I like a book to appear and fix up obvious ugly things, but I don't care about the underlying CSS unless it gives me huge line spacing etc.
Many old PD books I have do not go well on the Kobo. Probably there was no epubcheck when someone kindly scanned them in, probably there was no epub even. And I have even encountered newer books that have problems uniquely on the Kobo readers. Most of these can be fixed in under a minute so this is what I do
I did 'fix' a few books with Sigil, but found myself reading while fixing and couldn't seem to stop
and I don't like that. It seems to spoil the book for me.
I rarely reread and it felt like I had read the book already even if only 25% or so.
So now I fix what I can do fairly quickly (under an hour perhaps, but preferably under 5 minutes) and if it is not that simple I put it aside until I have no grass to watch growing.
I like the look of nice shiny books, with things like caps drop etc. but rarely notice such things while reading after the first page or so.
In fact I am soooo lazy I will look up the odd missing word or paragraph in calibre if the Kobo refuses to show it to me even when I change the font
but leave the book as is.
Still if you reread a lot or find the odd extra line break etc., disturbs your enjoyment it is a good thing for you to do.
Helen