Formats, Formats, Formats

[Justin Nemo]

I'm trying to find a happy medium (no, not a laughing psychic) in which to base my work on for the short term. We all know about mo-pub and ebi, so I wondered if you could help me out with your experiences in writing in either, both or other formats.

I write and edit a lot of historical material and sometimes there are graphics or line drawings to include. I'm aware of the problems with these on some ereaders, so any help or advice would be appreciated.

[JonathanH]

Create in EPUB, convert to MOBI as necessary.

For pictures, my general rule of thumb is to use PNG format for line-art, and JPEG for photographs or similar (e.g. old etchings). There's some middle ground in the quality vs. space vs. intended audience tradeoff where it's equally valid to use one or the other. In particular, JPEG encoding of the high-contrast edges which are inevitable in line-art tends to cause a "halo" or "blooming" effect, which is more noticeable at lower quality levels. But this halo is often so faint that you won't notice it on an e-ink screen (although it's more visible on the LCD screen of e.g. a Kindle Fire). So, "it depends".

You should also know that until yesterday's release, Calibre would convert ALL pictures into JPEGs when converting EPUB to MOBI, in order to avoid compatibility problems with older e-readers that sometimes had problems with PNGs and GIFs. There's now an option to disable that behavior...

[Justin Nemo]

Hi Jonathan

Many thanks for the information. I had never considered .png before, simply because .jpg has such good resizing qualities without much loss in quality, although as you say it was a little fuzzy on line drawings. Great news re Calibre though.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that mobi is a good medium to showcase reference books. For one thing it is not very easy to refer back to something. I also have problems with the formatting from epub. Line spacings and text orientation get messed up sometimes.

Here's the process I go through, I would appreciate it if some kind soul could let me know where I can improve on it.

I write or edit in a word processor, I then copy it into Sigil and clean up any formatting there and save it as an epub. I then take it into Calibre and convert it to mobi. This is where the problems start. I realise that the Calibre reader isn't perfect, so I open the mobi on my desktop Kindle. Not too many problems here, but when I load it onto my Kindle 3G, the text is all over the place.

Maybe Kindle isn't ready yet for illustrated books, but I believe it is the market leader for ereaders, so obviously I'd like to exploit that fact. It was so much easier in PDF, but then that wasn't mobil.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

...
Maybe Kindle isn't ready yet for illustrated books...

The Kindle format does illustrated books quite well. It's just as easy to build them as to build ePubs.

You do have to understand that the current widely used Kindle format, the one that calibre generates, doesn't support some of the positioning controls available in ePub. The major shortcoming in the current Kindle format is that you can't wrap text around a small image.

[Justin Nemo]

Thanks for that info dwig. So is there a work around?

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

...So is there a work around?

Work around for what ???

If you are referring to the inability to wrap text around and image the workaround is to not do it.

As an example, download Zelda_pinwheel's illustrated ePub version of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome from MR's ebook library and the illustrated MOBI version from my Lakemere Press site. Open each in appropriate viewers (don't use calibre's) and note the design differences.

[Justin Nemo]

Originally Posted by dwig

Work around for what ???

If you are referring to the inability to wrap text around and image the workaround is to not do it.

As an example, download Zelda_pinwheel's illustrated ePub version of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome from MR's ebook library and the illustrated MOBI version from my Lakemere Press site. Open each in appropriate viewers (don't use calibre's) and note the design differences.

Thanks for making that Crystal Clear

[Muckraker]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that mobi is a good medium to showcase reference books. For one thing it is not very easy to refer back to something. I also have problems with the formatting from epub. Line spacings and text orientation get messed up sometimes.

Here's the process I go through, I would appreciate it if some kind soul could let me know where I can improve on it.

I write or edit in a word processor, I then copy it into Sigil and clean up any formatting there and save it as an epub. I then take it into Calibre and convert it to mobi. This is where the problems start. I realise that the Calibre reader isn't perfect, so I open the mobi on my desktop Kindle. Not too many problems here, but when I load it onto my Kindle 3G, the text is all over the place.

B/W illustrations look awesome on the Kindle. Even my 10k gifs look like they were drawn directly on the screen. The only obnoxious part is that it is not possible for an image in the body of text to fill the entire screen. That small margin all the way around is supposedly hard-coded.

I have essentially the same work flow you do. I do all my formatting to the lowest common denominator--MOBI format--and it winds up looking good on all formats. There are tags and features supported by EPUB that aren't supported by MOBI though. I just steer clear of them or figure out workarounds when possible.

Text-wrap around images, or really any text placement involving images, is nonexistent in MOBI. Reciprocal linking is easy as long as you place your ID anchors in the correct places. I did reciprocal linking for every bit of common dialogue between a novel and screenplay and it works as intended on MOBI.

I'm not defending MOBI--it's an incredibly stupid format--but I would say doing anything other than writing to that format is a little crazy as Amazon is going to be where the vast majority of your sales come from.

[Justin Nemo]

Originally Posted by Muckraker

Text-wrap around images, or really any text placement involving images, is nonexistent in MOBI. Reciprocal linking is easy as long as you place your ID anchors in the correct places. I did reciprocal linking for every bit of common dialogue between a novel and screenplay and it works as intended on MOBI.

I'm not defending MOBI--it's an incredibly stupid format--but I would say doing anything other than writing to that format is a little crazy as Amazon is going to be where the vast majority of your sales come from.

Now that, Muckraker, was informative and very helpful.

I agree with you that mobi is really the one to be heading for although I hear the new ipad coming out soon will be a lot lighter and much more ebook user friendly. So what we really need is a good mobi editor. Mobipocket is billed as that, but I don't think it is really.

[anamardoll]

There's no mobi editor on the market that I can find. I looked everywhere for something like Sigil, but for mobi.

My recommendation is to write to epub (Sigil for the win!), convert to mobi via Calibre, and load up the result in the Kindle Previewer.

[pdurrant]

One thing to bear in mind is that Amazon's KF8 format is now supported by Kindle Fire, Kindle for Mac and Kindle for PC. Firmware upgrades for "current" eInk Kindles should be along soon.

KF8 has formatting options about the same as ePub. I know that calibre can read KF8 files, but I don't know if it can create them yet, but Amazon do provide KindleGen that can take in an ePub and produce a join Mobi/KF8 files for upload to Amazon.

Currently, I'd recommend creating an ePub, but taking care that the formatting translates well both to original mobi and KF8. It might need to use of a Amazon-specific CSS file.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

KF8 has formatting options about the same as ePub. I know that calibre can read KF8 files, but I don't know if it can create them yet, but Amazon do provide KindleGen that can take in an ePub and produce a join Mobi/KF8 files for upload to Amazon.

I tested the Amazon epub-to-mobi conversion when I was uploading my book. This was about 3 weeks ago, I think, so not very long ago. The Calibre conversion was far superior because it handled the images more delicately.

I'm guessing that the Amazon conversion isn't creating KF8 files at the moment. My two cents, based on personal experience.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I tested the Amazon epub-to-mobi conversion when I was uploading my book. This was about 3 weeks ago, I think, so not very long ago. The Calibre conversion was far superior because it handled the images more delicately.

I'm guessing that the Amazon conversion isn't creating KF8 files at the moment. My two cents, based on personal experience.

I've no idea what happens if you upload an ePub to Amazon for them to do the conversion. Personally, I'd use kindlegen on a local machine. I know that kindlegen produces KF8 formatting in the output, but, of course, you must view it either on a Kindle Fire, or on Kindle for Mac/PC 1.9.x to see it.

Calibre does do a pretty good job on converting from ePub to Mobi, but for images I'd rather do my own conversion to the specs for Mobipocket images rather than reply on any automated conversion. That is, my source would be an ePub, but I'd also set up an separate CSS and separate images folder for running the ePub through kindlegen.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I've no idea what happens if you upload an ePub to Amazon for them to do the conversion. Personally, I'd use kindlegen on a local machine. I know that kindlegen produces KF8 formatting in the output, but, of course, you must view it either on a Kindle Fire, or on Kindle for Mac/PC 1.9.x to see it.

Sorry, I'm not being clear: I was using their KindleGen program.

I certainly never saw an option for a KF8 output, but possibly I missed it.

[Justin Nemo]

Thank you both for your help on this. I guess we'll just have to carry on as best we can until a reliable mobi editor comes along.

Here's one little thing I tried. I wrote a ten chapter piece in OpenOffice ODT. I converted it to epub via Calibre, This added all the chapters for me and then I tweaked it in Sigil. I found this a lot easier than writing directly in Sigil. Once tweaked I converted to mobi with Calibre. The image alignment is still a problem, but seemed to work better when I hard coded the XHTML.