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Old 09-08-2014, 02:16 PM   #1
rosshalde
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why is my epub so much bigger than my mobi

Hello,
I am starting with an epub created in Pages.
when I use calibre to convert this to mobi, it displays great and is much smaller, only about 25% of the epub size. Can anyone tell me what exactly calibre does to pics when it starts with an epub and makes it a mobi?

I have tried starting with an epub and using calibre to convert to epub to see if it would shrink my epub to a much smaller epub, but that did not work.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I have tried adjusting size and resolution of the pics that go to make the epub, which does shrink the epub, but when I take those files and convert to mobi, they are STILL shrinking even more in the conversion.
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Old 09-08-2014, 02:57 PM   #2
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MOBI strips out various info that it does not understand, leaving you with a subset of your book. For instance, if you used fonts they will disappear.

That has the side effect of shrinking the filesize.
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Old 09-08-2014, 03:00 PM   #3
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I did an experiment with just one picture, no text and the shrinking mobi still occurred. does calibre switch the image file type (jpg, png, etc.) does it select a default resolution? How is it taking a simple picture and messing with it so well?
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Old 09-08-2014, 03:05 PM   #4
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he means text other than what would be displayed code and such.
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Old 09-08-2014, 03:12 PM   #5
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ok, so any suggestions for making my epub smaller? I am making a children's book and it is 20 mb. Many of the e-reader only have 500 mb or 1gig so that would be very large for someone to waste so much space. the mobi is only 5mb and I can live with that. Suggestions on this?
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Old 09-08-2014, 03:16 PM   #6
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does anyone know if apple's program Pages adds lots of useless code that was make the epub of one picture so large?
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Old 09-08-2014, 03:24 PM   #7
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Editing the ebook's raw html is the best way to keep out unnecessary bloat.

Every program out there, without exception, adds bloat in the process of guessing what you want. The professional ebook companies touch up ebooks by cleaning it up with something like Sigil, or calibre's Edit Book feature.

I'd be willing to bet an Apple product is more guilty than most.
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Old 09-08-2014, 03:35 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rosshalde View Post
I did an experiment with just one picture, no text and the shrinking mobi still occurred. does calibre switch the image file type (jpg, png, etc.) does it select a default resolution? How is it taking a simple picture and messing with it so well?
Use Mobi Unpack to "open up" the Mobi and check the image. Depending on your Calibre settings it may be resizing the pic to a lower resolution (not always what you want) which will decrease file size a lot.
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Old 09-08-2014, 07:06 PM   #9
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so Pages exports all pics as PNG files when it makes the epub.
Could that be causing my epubs to be so large? Calibre converts all those png files to jpg when it makes the mobi. Thoughts?
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Old 09-08-2014, 08:34 PM   #10
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Why don't you Unpack the EPUB (select book in calibre, press 'u') and the MOBI with Mobi Unpack and compare the image file sizes - PNGs are often bigger then JPGs, but not always so.

BR
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