Smashwords - question about buying and formats

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by Joseph Mitchell

I may be wrong, but I think if you buy a book on smashwords, you buy it in all the formats they have available, so you can download the mobi and PDF versions, or even HTML, any time later after you've bought the title.

Very much so. Exactly like Baen in that regard.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

The ePub created by Smashwords' "meat grinder" (yes, they call it that) does not include a clickable Table of Contents. However, I have a standing offer to send a custom ePub file to anyone who orders from Smashwords which does include the TOC (just PM me). That goes for orders through B&N, Sony and Kobobooks, too, since they are selling the Smashwords version.

Once annoyance I have found with ePub files from Smashwords is that the CSS explicitly sets the text colour to black, which means I can't use any night themes in Stanza, as it becomes black on black.

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

Second, for those who buy direct from Smashwords...which is your preferred format to purchase and/or convert?

So far I bought only one book, and my preferred format is ePub because I have an Opus.

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

Is it better to buy rtf or html and convert on your own or are the epub and mobi files pretty good?

In the ePub I bought there are characters, presumably used as bullets in bullet lists, which my Opus displays as question marks. But this is a minor formatting issues, I love Smashwords for its DRM-free ebooks.

[AnemicOak]

I my experience Smashwords books usually always have some kind of formatting issue, at least FOR ME. Maybe I'm picky, but I want a TOC, I want chapter and scene breaks, I don't want spaces between every paragraph, I want a cover (Mobi books don't have covers from what I've found), I want good metadata. So I usually end up having to do some messing around with a book to get it in it's most readable form (again, for me). This leads to me not buying much there anymore as I don't always want to spend a bunch of time reformatting stuff just so I can read it. Some of it's the "meatgrinder", but I think a lot of it is authors not following the formatting guide Smashwords provides. Basically a lot of the stuff I've bought comes of very amateur in presentation.

I love the concept of Smashwords, but would like to see the reality of it improved.

[mr ploppy]

Smashwords titles can also be found on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBook Store. The ones there that came through Smashwords will be the same, but where the book has been uploaded directly it might have different formatting. It could also have different text if they uploaded a fixed copy to one site but not the other.

[khalleron]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

I my experience Smashwords books usually always have some kind of formatting issue, at least FOR ME. Maybe I'm picky, but I want a TOC, I want chapter and scene breaks, I don't want spaces between every paragraph, I want a cover (Mobi books don't have covers from what I've found), I want good metadata. So I usually end up having to do some messing around with a book to get it in it's most readable form (again, for me). This leads to me not buying much there anymore as I don't always want to spend a bunch of time reformatting stuff just so I can read it. Some of it's the "meatgrinder", but I think a lot of it is authors not following the formatting guide Smashwords provides. Basically a lot of the stuff I've bought comes of very amateur in presentation.

I love the concept of Smashwords, but would like to see the reality of it improved.

Some of that is author choice, some the MeatGrinder. The MeatGrinder only allows bookmarks as TOC, no chapter or scene breaks.

My epub has a cover, I haven't looked at the other formats.

Spaces between paragraphs (block paragraphs) is an author choice. I did it to mine because I find that easier to read on my Sony. Personal preference. It would be nice if Smashwords could allow customers to set preferences, wouldn't it?

They're working on improvements - the limitation right now is having one .doc file that's 'ground' into every available format. I can understand why they do it that way, but it's far from a perfect system.