Format of Baen books

[radius]

Hanging out at Mobileread has interested me in e-book formats, so lately I've been looking at my downloads from Baen in terms of being in a possible e-book format (eg oeb or epub) instead of just as plain HTML and many times the opf file contains information that looks wrong to me.

For example, in the book _Old Soldiers_ by David Weber, in 1416508988.opf the manifest section shows the table of contents as being 1416508988_top.htm, when every Baen book I've seen uses a ..._toc.htm suffix to indicate the table of contents page. Similarly, there are references to cover images which have no corresponding file and so on.

So some day in the future, when oeb reading tools become popular, is this going to cause the software to not be able to find the cover images and TOC etc? I wonder what software they are using to generate the different formats for books?

[JSWolf]

If you get a Sony Reader 500 or 505, you can use the Libprs500 tools which have code for converting Baen eBooks using Baen's screwy setup. So you'd have nicely setup eBooks from Baen to read.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by radius

SNIP

For example, in the book _Old Soldiers_ by David Weber, in 1416508988.opf the manifest section shows the table of contents as being 1416508988_top.htm, when every Baen book I've seen uses a ..._toc.htm suffix to indicate the table of contents page. Similarly, there are references to cover images which have no corresponding file and so on.

SNIP

It's a bug in the opf files. Report it to Arnold Bailey at Webscriptions. If enough of us report it, he might eventually fix it!

To be fair, he's been busy with higher priority stuff (their forums, among other things), so it might yet be a while. That said, more bug reports raise the likelihood of a fix.

In the mean time, Kovid Goyal has upgraded the latest version of libprs500 to work around these bugs when you use the --baen processing switch.
Kovid!

Xenophon

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by radius

I wonder what software they are using to generate the different formats for books?

The chap who prepares the Baen ebook versions is Arnold Bailey. You might ask him: abailey@webwrights.com
______
Dennis

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by radius

For example, in the book _Old Soldiers_ by David Weber, in 1416508988.opf the manifest section shows the table of contents as being 1416508988_top.htm, when every Baen book I've seen uses a ..._toc.htm suffix to indicate the table of contents page. Similarly, there are references to cover images which have no corresponding file and so on.

Download the LIT version and explode it with ConvertLIT to an OEB e-book. The OPF file is similar to your description, but the TOC is actually in 1416508988_top.htm and FBReader (for example) seems to open the OEB ebook correctly. I have seen reports of malformed OPF files for Baen books, but I'm not sure this is one of them - except that the HTML OPF file appears to be based on the LIT version.

[shousa]

This error seems similar enough to this one for an exploded .LIT which is essentially .html - solution provided below:
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Fix_Lit

Need to use find and replace on the .html in WORDPAD.

For this issue the books read fine in FBReader for me too b4 doing the fix.

I don't have your books - is a similar issue?