uploading e pub and pdf to my web site for sale

[e.n.d.]

Can anyone help me? new to Calibre and wanting to use it to convert my current books and offer them as e books on my web site. Also, if I can do this, any suggestions as to which formats to offer? overwhelmed by the choice, thanks
eric

[itimpi]

Note that you can only offer books to whch you own the copyright if you do not want to risk being taken to court!

The two commonest formats that now seem to be used are ePub (many ereader devices) and mobi (Kindle).

[e.n.d.]

thanks ITIMPI, I own all material so copyright not a problem. Will work with the 2 main formats. Not sure if Calibre the right software to create the e books though, files way too big.

[sourcejedi]

I would strongly recommend looking for an alternative to Calibre for ebook creation. Although I strongly doubt you can get much smaller files, unless you're doing something really weird.

In my opinion / limited experience, Calibre was created for the purpose of converting & syncing ebooks with a personal e-reader. I would look at special purpose software like Sigil instead.

Search for "epubcheck" and "epub preflight" if you haven't seen them already.

I dunno much about PDF. You should make sure you know exactly what you want of it. Here are some possible questions to think about - do you want people to be able to print it? Or does it need to be readable on a 5" e-reader without reflowing? Do you want reflowing to work?

Spoiler:

I observed that Calibre will convert HTML files with no explicit alignment to EPUB files with a specific alignment (e.g. fully justified). That gives users more control, because many e-book readers don't have an alignment setting. But if your e-reader is like mine and *does* have an alignment setting, Calibre's formatting may effectively disable it.

I think it also does explicit paragraph formatting, i.e. applying either a first-line indent or a blank line between paragraphs (and this has the same effect re. user control and e-reader settings). I believe it even sets page margins (!).

I also observed that it's happy to convert HTML to EPUB, and explicitly mark it as being of language "UND" (undefined), without prompting the user. Again, this won't affect most e-readers, but if your e-reader knows how to do automatic hyphenation (which makes full justification work a lot better), then it needs to know what the language is.

[e.n.d.]

thanks sourcejedi, this is helpful, I suspected Calibre may not be what I needed, will explore the options you mention