[LINK] ebook creation software (was Re: Book monopolies)

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 12:28:52AM +1100, Ben McGinnes wrote:
> On 3/12/10 12:10 AM, Frank O'Connor wrote:
> > 2. Publishing books in e-publishing formats isn't especially
> > difficult. Nab a copy of the freebie OSS package Calibre if you
> > want to try it. It translates books between different formats quite
> > easily, and you can take a basic RTF, Word, PDF or other text format
> > files and generate an ePub (iBook format), Mobi (Kindle format) or
> > whatever at will.
>
> Ooh, thanks for mentioning this little beastie, I'm definitely going
> to have to have a play with it.

Calibre[1] is good software, but it's primary purpose is managing a
collection of ebooks, converting them from one format to another, and
transferring them to/from your ebook reader device(s). it can be used
for creating new ebooks but that's a secondary purpose.

if you want to use Calibre to create new ebooks, your best bet is to
start with HTML or XHTML and CSS files - the epub format is essentially
a zip file containing XHTML, CSS, image files (cover, illustrations,
etc), a table of contents and meta-data.

BTW, if your book is in MS Word format, *DO NOT* use Word's Save as HTML
feature to create the HTML files. that produces truly abysmal HTML code
and will result in an ugly ebook (and one that is bloated to many times
the size due to all the unneccessary html cruft inserted by word - it
can mean the difference between a lean 200-300K epub and a 1MB or larger
epub).  You'd be much better off using Save as Text and then add the
HTML markup with a general-purpose text editor like notepad (or vi :).
or an ebook editor like Sigil below.  You could use one of the many GUI
HTML editors too, but they generally produce HTML output almost as bad
as Word.

Alternatively, use Save as RTF because Calibre can convert RTF files
easily and will produce quite good results from an RTF file.  You
get best results, however, with hand-crafted HTML & CSS than with
auto-generated or converted html.

as well as a GUI interface, calibre has a suite of command-line tools
so the production chain of converting a book from HTML (or RTF, Word or
OpenOffice, etc) can be completely automated.

Speaking of OpenOffice, there is an OO plugin called Writer2Epub[2]
for converting documents to epub books - a relatively straightforward
conversion because OO's native format is also a zip file container for
XHTML & CSS. the generated epub is of reasonable quality (fine for
quickly converting a document for reading on your ebook reader) but will
require some editing to get it to publication quality.



BTW, there's another open source program called Sigil[3] which is
an epub editor, designed for creating epub books from scratch. it
lets you switch between a WYSIWIG view for editing the content like a
word-processor and a code view for editing the underlying HTML, there's
even a split mode for viewing both in the same window.

it's also good for doing final edits to epub books created (or
converted) by calibre or OO.


[1] http://calibre-ebook.com/
[2] http://luke.simplicissimus.it/writer2epub/#english
[3] http://code.google.com/p/sigil/

both calibre and sigil are cross-platform and run on pretty much any OS,
including Linux, Mac, & MS Windows. writer2epub runs on OO so is also
cross-platform.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>