Dear MobileReaders,
I am shortly going to be publishing an eBook online, which is a first for me. I'm a fairly experienced developer, and have a decent grasp of HTML/XHTML/CSS, but no much experience (except as a reader) of ebook formats.
I'd like to offer the book in as wide a variety of (non-DRM!) formats as possible to make it easy for readers to use on whatever device they have; at the least PDF, ePub, MOBI and AZW.
What I'm wondering is how best to go about the conversion process? I'd like the book to be at least as high-quality as those you buy from Waterstones or B&N, so I'm not averse to a little hand-editing, but I'd rather not have to manually edit every format.
So, given that the manuscript is a Word 2003 document:
- What is the best approach for initially "typesetting" the manuscript, i.e., getting it into a form suitable for conversion to ebook; normalising chapter headings, setting up table-of-contents, removing extraneous metadata, headers and footers... What about the Book Creator word template?
- What would be a suitable "master format", i.e. a format from which I can generate all the others with minimal hand-editing. XHTML? ePub?
- Having created a master document, what is the best conversion software to use? Calibre?
Thanks in advance,
Misha