Quote:
Originally Posted by foosion
In the context of editing commercial books for personal use, there are some sections in epubs (especially in the front before the actual text) that don't seem very useful and often seem more a legacy of paper books.
Why not just delete (or move to the end), so you can get to the actual book faster? Am I missing something?
Title, half title: These typically duplicate information from the cover, which has title and author. Sometimes they include publisher, but you can find that elsewhere.
Inline TOC: The epub TOC seems more useful.
Index: Often lists print page numbers and suggests using search. In any event, search seems better.
Index of maps, illustrations, etc. Perhaps useful, but search could work. If useful I'd move to the end so you can get to useful text faster,
Copyright page: Important, but fine at the end.
Praise: Why bother - I've already decided to get the book.
Other books by author: Move to end or nuke. Can be out of date and if I want more from the author I can search the web.
Next reads and other publisher ads: Nuke.
Introduction: Often useful in non-fiction. In fiction it's seldom useful and can contain spoilers - moving to the end seems best.
Dedication: Almost always more for the author than for me.
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For your own use, you can do whatever you want... although there may be some specific country laws that prevent changing a product, YMMV.
Some like to emulate the print version as closely as possible and tapping a couple extra times to skip those pages isn't a big deal. Obviously, the rules change if you are trying to publish as you need to make all those people/agencies happy.
Personally I nuke most of the extra stuff, but keep things like title page, appendix/index, copyright, about the author, also by, and move them to the back as much as makes sense.
Code:
Cover
-Dedication (out of respect to the author)
-Title
--Intro/epigraph/maps
--Chapters
--epilogue
-appendix/glossary
-index (maybe keep if it provides value added...)
-acknowledgements
-about the author
-also by the author (I like to see next books in the series and click the links)
-copyright
back cover (if it adds anything special)