www.bookland.net?

[mdmorrissey]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Yes, but that only works seamlessly if your PDFs are formatted accordingly. The best way to go for you is definitely feedbooks. Take your doc files and create a book there. Or, alternatively, give them to an ePub expert (like jellby, for example) who will use those files as source and create ePubs from scratch.. If you have a little more time and absolutely want to do it yourself, get acquainted with Sigil and use those docs as source per copy and paste.

Thanks, I'll check them out.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

I get PDFs from my Word files from lulu.com,

So use your word file to generate epubs.
Or, even better, copy content from Word to Windows Write program and save it as rtf file. Such rtf file is very good for many book reading devices.
Or use BookDesigner program with the rtf file.
Or ask us - Mobilereaders to help you.

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

and there are a couple of places online where you can convert for free.

I did not ask you how you create pdf file. I was asking if you still have the document you used to generate pdf file.

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

but I thought generally PDFs were pretty much the same (hence the advantage and attraction), but obviously I'm wrong. Still, all the PDFs I download from the net seem to come up in my both Mac and Windows without any problems. That's what I meant, from my non-expert point of view: if only an ereader could just download and read those PDFs as easily as the computer will do...

Yes. Right.
You have 24 inch monitor on your PC. I only have 5 inch screen on my PocketBook.

The main feature of pdf file is that it ALWAYS looks the same. On any computer, on any printer. So if you convert your document to pdf, the layout is locked. Most of the formatting information from the original document is thrown away, and only graphical position of elements on page is retained. This is also very interesting feature. You can publish a manual or a technical specification, and you know that nobody can reformat it easily and pass it for their own work.

pdf file is very bad for ebook readers with a small screen, because it ALWAYS looks the same. The problem is, the 5 inch screen on my PocketBook has less than ONE EIGHT of the area of A4 paper.
The dimensions of 5 inch screen are 75x100mm and dimensions of A4 paper are 210/297mm.

So. If you want to view pdf file that is formatted for A4 or letter paper on a 5" screen you have several options.
1. display the entire page on the screen with letters that are less than 1/3 of the original size
2. zoom the page and try to scroll around on a screen that has reaction time 1 second
3. try to reflow the page.

option 1 is only for people with very good eyes
option 2 is only good for very patient people
option 3 does not work. It can't work properly, because the vast majority of pdf files are not reflowable. They do not contain information where the paragraph ends, so your device had to guess. Make no mistake, the reflow software on PocketBook is very sophisticated, but only a true Artificial Intelligence would be able to reflow pdf file properly.

[mdmorrissey]

Thanks for educating me on this. Makes sense. But a larger screen could handle the PDFs, couldn't it? I wouldn't mind using a larger screen reader if it was light enough and worked as well as the PDF readers on my computers.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

Thanks for educating me on this. Makes sense. But a larger screen could handle the PDFs, couldn't it? I wouldn't mind using a larger screen reader if it was light enough and worked as well as the PDF readers on my computers.

To display an A4 formatted document in 1:1 scale on an e-book reader you would need 14.5 inch screen.
There is no such e-ink reader today.
There are a few with 9.7 or 10 inch screens and those are good (so I was told) for displaying pdf files formatted for A4 or Letter size. Especially if you turn the reader to landscape and view only the top or bottom half of pdf page. You can also set the reading application to crop margins on the document, making it even more readable.

If you read my PocketBook reviews, you will see that what makes this little device very special is the possibility to set many, many various options.
With FBReader on my PocketBook I can set:
- font (I mean typeface)
- size of font (in very fine steps of one point)
- line spacing
- size of margins
- justification
- hyphenation
- other, more obscure formatting options

If you ask 10 people here what combinations of the above they like and prefer you will get 12 different answers. There are people that prefer wide margins, because it resembles a real printed book, other people (including myself) prefer really small margins, because we want to use the entire (already quite small) screen for displaying text and have as few pageturns as possible. It is the same with justification, and with fonts, the situation is completely hopeless. I, for example, can't stand Garamond font, while other people like it very much.

If I have book in FB2, TXT, RTF, HTML, PRC, CHM, EPUB, DOC, TCR, or FB2.ZIP, I can set all options and have the e-book formatted exactly how I want it at the moment (*).

If you provide the book in pdf, I am stuck with your specific format. I know, in a paper book I can't change the format, but one of reasons I prefer to read e-books is that I *can* change the format.

(*) Sometimes I feel I want a different font, or perhaps the light is no good and I want to bump up the font size.

[neilmarr]

I must be doing something wrong, but when I go to www.bookland.net, all I see is the company logo, a map and a search window -- no titles on display, no genre buttons to hit, no product list or other info. The 'more read' and 'more know' buttons produce nothing. Maybe I just popped by at a bad time (10.00am CET July 1). Cheers. Neil

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

I must be doing something wrong, but when I go to www.bookland.net, all I see is the company logo, a map and a search window -- no titles on display, no genre buttons to hit, no product list or other info. The 'more read' and 'more know' buttons produce nothing. Maybe I just popped by at a bad time (10.00am CET July 1). Cheers. Neil

Just click the "Browse by language" link or enter an author or a book title in the search.

[mdmorrissey]

@kacir, I understand what you're saying, and all that fine tuning is nice if it doesn't cause problems and is easy to do. But obviously there is a lot of work to do on both counts. I don't want to have to do anything to a book that I download to read, except maybe change the font size. Even Calibre is too much trouble. The last thing I tried to read in epub lost the rest of the paragraph after anything in italics. The PDF doesn't do that. I just experimented with my own book, creating a PDF 3x4 inches with Open Office, and ran it through Calibre. The PDF looked fine, but the epub result was a mess, and I have not learned enough to know how to fix it.

The people here may be interested in the tweaking capabilities, but I think the general public wants simplicity. Again, my analogy is the computer. The ereader that can put onto its screen the text (I'm not even considering graphics and color, I don't need that in an e-reader) as simply and easily as on the computer will be the winner, in my opinion. Why fight the format battle? Why not just create PDFs of different sizes -- or just in a small size for ereaders, since it is probably (?) easier to blow up the small PDF on the computer if you need to print it out. (And why else would you need to view the PDF on the computer?) Furthermore, since apparently (?) PDFs can't be changed, the author's integrity is better preserved, is it not?

I am talking primarily about public domain and free books. Commercial publishers have completely different interests. They will make everything as difficult as necessary to make us pay for what we get, and unfortunately it's probably hard for the ereader manufacturers to resist the temptation to make common cause with them (e.g., Sony, Nook, Kindle). But the public domain is huge, basically encompassing everything you can view online, and if I were an ereader-maker my goal would be to make it as easy as possible for somebody like me who doesn't like to read for long periods at the computer to transfer stuff onto my e-ink reader. Period. That is difficult enough, obviously, considering the problems I have had just getting a device to work properly (e.g., turn pages without conking out). I don't know, but maybe those problems are compounded every time they try to work in "better" software. Why not stick with what works, and make it sure does?

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

@kacir, I understand what you're saying, and all that fine tuning is nice if it doesn't cause problems and is easy to do. But obviously there is a lot of work to do on both counts. I don't want to have to do anything to a book that I download to read, except maybe change the font size. Even Calibre is too much trouble. The last thing I tried to read in epub lost the rest of the paragraph after anything in italics. The PDF doesn't do that. I just experimented with my own book, creating a PDF 3x4 inches with Open Office, and ran it through Calibre. The PDF looked fine, but the epub result was a mess, and I have not learned enough to know how to fix it.

The people here may be interested in the tweaking capabilities, but I think the general public wants simplicity. Again, my analogy is the computer. The ereader that can put onto its screen the text (I'm not even considering graphics and color, I don't need that in an e-reader) as simply and easily as on the computer will be the winner, in my opinion. Why fight the format battle? Why not just create PDFs of different sizes -- or just in a small size for ereaders, since it is probably (?) easier to blow up the small PDF on the computer if you need to print it out. (And why else would you need to view the PDF on the computer?)

creating numerous pdfs to fit all the possible screen sizes, or one ePub/mobi (or whatever) that can happily adjust ? which is more work ?

instead of using your pdf as the source file, use the doc ....

[mdmorrissey]

@GeoffC, it is a major operation for a non-expert like me to create an epub file, and Calibre does not do it properly or easily either.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by mdmorrissey

I just experimented with my own book, creating a PDF 3x4 inches with Open Office, and ran it through Calibre. The PDF looked fine, but the epub result was a mess, and I have not learned enough to know how to fix it.

Of course the resulting epub was a mess.
You used pdf to create epub and that is not a good way to do it.

Load the book in OpenOffice writer.
Save it as rtf, or as html file.
Use THAT file to create epub in Calibre.

[GeoffC]

Or use Atlantis Word Processor - it can save directly to epub ...

Or, if you already use WORD - then this might help http://www.aspose.com/community/blog...om-aspose.aspx - It's free - and I've not used it - but ......

[mdmorrissey]

Thanks a mil for the tips, GeoffC and kacir, I'll try them out.

Just did -- the rtf conversion in Calibre went fine, didn't have to tweak anything. Hurray! Won't try Aspose after all because it requires .NET, which I've had on my laptop twice and deleted it twice because it was slowing everything down a lot.

After all this, I just learned about PB 901. I wonder if it will handle PDFs better.

[bear4hunter]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Beginning in September, the Bookland site will be available with a lot of commercial books with as many languages as we can find.

Will that include most of the German eBooks already available through libri or ciando? And - what about prices? Will publishers still dictate "fix" prices? I could not find a single book that has different prices on the german ecommerce sites like libri or ciando....

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by bear4hunter

Will that include most of the German eBooks already available through libri or ciando? And - what about prices? Will publishers still dictate "fix" prices? I could not find a single book that has different prices on the german ecommerce sites like libri or ciando....

German books: yes, definitely. There is a law in Germany that prevents us from selling books at different prices.

[Logseman]

Beware if you want to sell Spanish books. Absurd will ensue...