Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
Not always. There are plenty properly formatted self-pubs nowadays. For example, Vellum for MacOS usually produces a nice layout, and many authors use it.
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I didn't say that all self-published eBooks are lousy. I said it's a crap shoot meaning some are OK and some are not.
As for the layout, that's not the issue here. The issue is the code. The code has to be good enough for the conversion to be good. Take a KF8 published by a mainstream publisher. The source of that KF8 will have been ePub. That KF8 can have the code shifted to an ePub with KindleUnpack (just have to fix the errors and there are not many of them). You get an ePub that matches the KF8 which matches the ePub pretty well. Take one of those lousy self published KF8 where the code is not good and the HTML is one big file and the conversion is not going to go well without a lot of work.
As for Vellum, the code it produces is lousy. So do not say that using Vellum produces a good eBook. Others can tell you about Vellum and how nasty it is. Pages is another awful program for creating eBooks. And then there is Word where the author has no clue about styles and the output is a freaking nightmare.
So really, there is no one format that converts well in all cases. Some formats convert better then others when the code is decent enough. That's about the best you can say.