Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That is precisely the way that "BookDesigner" - the tool that created most of the books available for download here works. It stores the book in XML and you simply choose your output format - Sony Reader, MobiPocket, LIT, or whatever.
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I don't believe bookdesigner is open source, nor multi-platform. If it were, then it would be a good idea to post ebooks in bookdesigner's XML format so people could convert as needed, regardless of their device. What I think would be great is a small fool-proof utility with two boxes, one for the input file and the other for the output file and format. You plug in the XML file downloaded from mobileread, and click "convert" and out comes the same file in LRF, PRC, LIT, whatever you want, and exactly as it should look.
No tweaking. A command-line version of this utility could even be used by the site to output the source xml in whatever format the web user asks for. Fooling around with font size, margins, etc., is a job for an editing program and would be a question of personal preference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Balok, what you describe there is pretty much what ePub is, and how it should work with any reader. ePub is XHTML-based, and so it should be easy for any reader to run conversion instructions to assemble the ePub files into a book.
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Ok, so there's the right source format. Now let's hope some programmers will take advantage of it right now instead of everyone waiting for reader devices that can read ePub natively.