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

[Ben McGinnes]

On 3/12/10 8:38 AM, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 
> 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.

Excellent.  I've got a bunch of things that I've picked up from
different places and when I finally do get an ereader, I know I'll
want to convert them into a single, consistent format.  Probably ePub.

> 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).

No chance of that in my case.  I only select the save as Word format
option in OOo when recruiters insist on it.

> 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 Emacs.  I don't do much in HTML, but what I do with HTML and XML
these days is done in Emacs.  Just like this email.  ;)

> 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.

I might have to have a look at Sigil too, cheers.

> 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.

Now that is *very* cool.  A little bit of scripting with things like
wget and you could download and convert the entire contents of Project
Gutenberg to ePub.  Assuming they haven't already done it, of course.

> 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.

Ah, more awesomeness (yes, I can invent words when appropriate).

> 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.

I'm already a big fan of OpenOffice.org (and probably Libre Office
when it has a stable release).  Calibre and Sigil are likely to become
my friends too.

Thanks for all of these tips, Craig.


Regards,
Ben

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