Quote:
Originally Posted by Sella174
LibreOffice odt and HTML. The odt is exported to PDF for printing as paperbacks and the HTML is displayed on the website.
I played around with creating ePub's a few years ago, since I have the HTML already, but found the whole format/standard completely lacking for the purpose of publishing books and thus didn't invest too much time in it.
Doing odt -> HTML -> ePub -> mobi is not why we have computers, IMO. I'd prefer skipping the unnecessary ePub step. Seems I can't, so the mobi's will have to wait until I write a simple HTML to ePub program to feed KindleGen. Just need to figure out what information mobi can handle.
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Actually, with all due respect, you are making something of nothing. You're assuming that making ePUB is massively more complex and difficult than "just" making a MOBI. It is, quite honestly, the other way around. Moreover, as you are still using XP, you are probably using a much older version of IE, and therefore, you can use Mobipocket Creator, assuming you can find it. You could, then, build a MOBI without making an ePUB first--but you are undertaking this from a mistaken viewpoint.
As I explain to our customers, on my website, like humans and apes, ePUB and MOBI share about 98% eBook/HTML/CSS DNA. If you don't like ePUB for bookmaking, my friend, you will positively loathe MOBI.
At my shop--where we've built more than 3500 eBooks over the last near-decade--we ALWAYS build an ePUB first, for very good reasons, the primary one being that ePUB is an easily editable format--whilst MOBI is not. An ePUB exists in two ways, simultaneously; as the source material for an eBook, and as an eBook. Using a tool like Sigil, you can pop open an ePUB, make edits, hit SAVE, and voila, the edits are made and the book is saved. You can then spend a whopping 2 minutes running that ePUB through KindeGen (or its GUI brother, Kindle Previewer), and voila, you have a MOBI file. If you want to be commercially picky, you can spend an extra minute and tweak the ePUB a bit to make a better MOBI file.
There truly is no reason to think that making an ePUB is some big detour. It's not. It's the same work that you need to do to make a MOBI, so why the kerfuffle? Just build the ePUB--which, as I said, is 98% the same as any competent, commercial-quality MOBI you'd build--and spend 2 minutes then making the MOBI file.
If that won't get you what you want, then take your HTML5 file and reduce it to HTML 4.2 or so. Create an OPF file and an NCX, and the CSS file, and then feed the OPF to Kindlegen, and that will build a MOBI for you. But again--you're doing EXACTLY the same work that you'd do, to make an ePUB file. Most professional eBook builders consider the ePUB the final source for the MOBI--not some secondary bothersome thing to do.
Offered FWIW.
Hitch