Help Rubin convert free Droidmaker PDFS to Kindle?

[andrys]

As many know, Michael Rubin has made available for free, for an undetermined time, his $35 Droidmaker book on Lucas, Lucasfilm and Droidmaker.

My entry on this is at http://bit.ly/kdroidmkr

Rubin added a comment there to say he'd like to make these "appropriately available" in Kindle format, but he's on a Mac and hasn't figured out how he should do it. I responded that I'd ask around.

It's a set of 3 PDFs and these include double photographs on a row sometimes, as well as a lot of footnotes, which are in smaller fonts and on the left and right sides of the text body, which from my own experience would not come out well using MobiPocket Creator.

Any ideas? You could respond where he asks about this or go to his site.

Thanks for any help you can give him. That's a very impressive freebie.

- Andrys

[Elfwreck]

It'd need to be entirely reformatted for viewing on an ebook reader. The captions would need to be moved on top of or underneath the pictures, and the side-footnotes would need to be moved, either to end of the chapter or linked at the end of the book. The shaded sections would need to lose their shading; I don't know if those should be reformatted in some way to indicate "special text" (like indenting, or a lined box around them).

Some of the pictures would need to be resized, and decisions would have to be made whether to keep them all as large as possible, or to shrink all of them to the same relative size. (Should they all be ~75% of their current size, or should the smaller ones stay as they are now?)

These wouldn't be hard decisions to make, but someone has to make them. And there's a lot to decide, even before the nuts-and-bolts of formatting, which would take a lot of time.

It's not an impossible project, and it's likely people would volunteer to help or do it outright if that's desired. (I'd be willing to help, as long as the results weren't going only towards a DRM'd Kindle version.) In order to get that help, the author or whoever owns the rights might need to indicate what scope of changes would be acceptable.

[Abecedary]

EDIT: Nevermind. This is a different book from what I was thinking of.

[andrys]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

It'd need to be entirely reformatted for viewing on an ebook reader. The captions would need to be moved on top of or underneath the pictures, and the side-footnotes would need to be moved, either to end of the chapter or linked at the end of the book. The shaded sections would need to lose their shading; I don't know if those should be reformatted in some way to indicate "special text" (like indenting, or a lined box around them).

Some of the pictures would need to be resized, and decisions would have to be made whether to keep them all as large as possible, or to shrink all of them to the same relative size. (Should they all be ~75% of their current size, or should the smaller ones stay as they are now?)

These wouldn't be hard decisions to make, but someone has to make them. And there's a lot to decide, even before the nuts-and-bolts of formatting, which would take a lot of time.

It's not an impossible project, and it's likely people would volunteer to help or do it outright if that's desired. (I'd be willing to help, as long as the results weren't going only towards a DRM'd Kindle version.) In order to get that help, the author or whoever owns the rights might need to indicate what scope of changes would be acceptable.

Elfwreck,
Apologies. I missed this post though I thought I looked for a couple of days to see if there was a reply.

I'll go to his free download page and add a note to read this entry since the file is still free. I have a hunch he may be getting donations to a degree good enough to keep it there without having people go to Amazon. Thanks!

- Andrys

[Nate the great]

I just now saw this thread. I'll put it near the top of my TBC pile.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

It'd need to be entirely reformatted for viewing on an ebook reader.

Do you think ePub could do this so it would at the least look decent on a 6" screen?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Do you think ePub could do this so it would at the least look decent on a 6" screen?

Sure. It'd just take a *lot* of formatting work, including resizing the images. And, as I said, someone would need to make decisions, about picture sizes, layout, captions, footnotes, and other aspects. They'd even be fun decisions, for the right person. (I am not that person. I'm happy to help with the grunt work of formatting, but I'm rather lost when it comes to design decisions that aren't aimed at my particular preferences.)

I'm attaching a two-page excerpt as a sample (I'm assuming this goes under fair use of "quoting for review purposes"); the text and pictures are often built around each other like this, and some pages have pictures that cover almost the whole width of the page.

It couldn't retain its original layout for a small screen; it's definitely designed in coffeetable book style.

Converting it would be a wonderful project. I'd be happy to help; I wouldn't mind converting (or helping with converting) the PDFs to RTFs with styles properly tagged (I'm very inexperienced with HTML), and resizing the images (to what specs?) but I couldn't advise how to go from there.