How are the mobi and epub files at Project Gutenberg?

[ficbot]

I am enjoying transferring via SD card with my new Libre, which I have almost talked myself into keeping In the past when I have downloaded from PG, I have used the HTML because it seems to convert the cleanest, but one of the advantages to transfer via SD is not needing to be at home necessarily. I could DL at work, for example, and then transfer the files to Calibre for backup later.

I know the plain text files have weird line breaks in them and stuff. I think the HTML does not. So what do they use to make the mobi and epub files? Will these look as nice as converting the HTML myself? Of the two (mobi and epub) is there a difference in which looks nicest?

[calvin-c]

I haven't seen any common problems with the mobi, except the typical typos. But I haven't tried HTML, yet. (Don't remember exactly, but it seems to me that my connection timed out whenever I tried to download an ePub. I suppose the main questions are 1) what is the basic format in which PG books are stored? I'm sure the other formats are generated by conversion from the basic format and that leads to question 2) what conversion software are they using?)

For epub files from the meta information:

<meta content="Project Gutenberg EPUB-Maker v0.02 by Marcello Perathoner &lt;webmaster@gutenberg.org&gt;" name="generator"/>

I've not found them that useful in trying to do clean up to a nice epub format. Usually the same mistakes to be found in the raw text are still there, the format is sort of funky, and sometimes additional errors have been added. That and like all automatic generators a lot of unnecessary tags are added that are just a pain to go through and remove. But if you are just looking for a epub version to load onto your reader, it is a good source.