Converting iPhoto to .pdf to ePub or Mobi

[KatieP]

I created a book on iPhoto which uses both photos and text. The text was converted to .pdf, then to jpeg and is treated like a photo on the page. I would like to sell this book either on Nookbooks or Kindle, it doesn't really matter which to me since they both have color ereaders now. The photos really need to be in color. I first converted the entire book to .pdf again, then used Calibre to convert to ePub. It looked like it had been successful. I uploaded it to Nook. But when looking at the book on the device, the pages do not center on the screen, and also have about a third of the page cut off. The beginning page size is 6X8 in, the 8in side being the length. On the Nook, the pages will come up squeezed together with the device vertical; it is when then device is turned with automatic reorienting that the above happens, but when squished together it cannot be read. I have tried to convert from DOC, to HTML, etc., to reorient the pages in my application, etc., and nothing works to get all the pages included. Is this not even a possible task? I hate to start over reformatting all the pages in a different application. Thanks! OH yes, I am using a Mac.

[dwig]

If you have your images such that there will be only one per screen in the final version you should be able to build a reasonably successful epub.

Centering: You can center the images left to right, but since epub has no concept of "page" there is no true centering top to bottom. I find it easier to use an epub editing tool (I use Sigil, which has great support in its own fourm here at MR) to tweak thing in an epub. You can do some things with calibre, either through the "extra CSS" field in the conversion dialog and calibre can "crack" the epub so you can manually edit the CSS and (x)HTML files via its Tweak ePub function.

Clipped images: This will be an issue with any full page image based ebook. If your images have the same aspect ratio as the device being used it's not hard to accomplish a proper fit. If they don't match its more difficult. If you create 3:4 ratio images (e.g. 600 x 800 pixels) and set the width of the images to "100%" in the <img> tag in the (x)HTML file they will fill the screen on most ereaders with 3:4 screens (eInk Kindles & Nooks) and will leave a blank area, generally at the bottom, on screens with a 3:5 aspect ratio (Kindle Fire, Nook Color, Nook Tablet, ...). To do this you may have to edit the ePub manually to get a line like: <img src="../Images/page01.jpg" width="100%" />

Also, an all image book is not going to play well with any change in reader orientation. Vertical images will work fine when the reader is used in its normal vertical orientation. Horizontal images will be problematic. If you turn them in your image editor so that they are presented as "verticals" they will read fine with the reader turned horizontal, but only if the reader doesn't have an automatic orientation function enabled.

[KatieP]

This sounds pretty complicated, but I will give it a try. I want the book to be available in color, so will need to format for the Kindle Fire, Nook Color, etc. I have been trying to orient the book so on a vertical screen it looks sideways, so then it can be turned and read correctly (with the automatic orientation turned off), but when I do this in Pages then convert to .pdf or ePub, the pages get turned around again, no matter how I have entered them or set up the page in Pages (iWorks for Mac).

[dwig]

Originally Posted by KatieP

...I have been trying to orient the book so on a vertical screen it looks sideways, so then it can be turned and read correctly (with the automatic orientation turned off), but when I do this in Pages then convert to .pdf or ePub, the pages get turned around again,...

Then don't use Pages.

I suggest that you use Sigil either to create the ePub from the beginning or to edit an ePub created in calibre from a ZIP/CBZ archive.

To get a ZIP archive you rename your collection of page images so that they begin with a page number (e.g. page01.jpg, ...) and put them into a ZIP archive (I believe you just select the files in a Finder window and then CTRL-click and select "compress" from the resulting menu). You can import this into calibre, set the appropriate metadata (author, title, cover image, ...) and then convert to ePub. The result is a decent ePub, but you may want to make adjustments using Sigil.

[KatieP]

I used Pages to reorient the jpg files, then converted to .pdf. The pdf file flipped the pages, which I've never had happen before. And Pages is just the Mac version of a word processor, works better than Word.