eBook Format Fun
Posted: Mon Dec 26, 2011 10:53 am
Hey all,
Prompted by the disasterous attempt to produce .pdf files for BorgCrazy's use and by the Sony Reader my sister and I bought dad for Christmas, I am attempting to put some of my stories in ebook format, specifically epub. The current Halfway to Haven run has been make into individual ebooks, which I may or may not post on the site. The reason for this is that it makes more sense to put the entire season into a single ebook, with the stories marked as individual chapters that can be easily accessed from the table of contents. (Otherwise the five seasons of Silverado would be something like 90 eBooks instead of five...and I don't even want to think about the number of stories The Vexed Generation would fill!)
As a sample, Silverado Season One is available for download on the Silverado Seasone One page. It has some errors, but is largely...acceptable.
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/season1/season1.html
For those interested in making their own eBooks, here are a couple of useful programs along with the challenges I cam across.
Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
This program allows you to edit eBooks at the text level. eBooks, as I've learned, are handled very much like web pages, and the underlying code is xhtml. But you don't need to know html to code the books, you can past text into a Word-like editor, creating a new section for each story/chapter. Use the 'Heading One' font type for each chapter title, auto-generate the table of contents, add a cover and you're largely set.
The problem is that we converted all our stories into .txt format, and in my case I lost some of the original Word documents. When I copied the .txt text into Sigil, all the custom line breaks generated in the conversions came too, which meant all sorts of weird spacing problems anytime a sentance ran longer than the width of the eReader screen. So for those first few stories, I had to go in and manually remove all the extra line breaks. The Word documents paste much easier, but all the handy little corrections Khobrah & BorgCrazy used to give us, along with my changing of the Silverado deck numbering, was only in the .txt. So I had to fix the deck numbers, but the edits have been lost. Hopefully Seasons 2-5 will be easier and quicker!
Gimp http://www.gimp.org
A basic image editor, I used this to make a 600x800 pixel image to use as a cover. Just the pic of the ship from the Season One page and a title.
calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/
This very handy software is good for putting the final touches on your eBook. Although you can set some basic metadata in Sigil, calibre lets you set the publisher (Star Traks Nexus and Corner Grocery Store), series (Star Traks Silverado) along with a numbering system for where in the series that book belongs.
Once your metadata is set, you can copy the eBook over to the reader of your choice and it -SHOULD- work properly. I've been fiddling with the Silverado Season One book for hours, and it's still not perfect, but until I feel like going through a proof read of the whole season, it's as good as it'll get. I've tested it on the calibre eBook viewer, dad's Sony Reader and the Aldiko reader on my Android phone. All worked fairly well.
Prompted by the disasterous attempt to produce .pdf files for BorgCrazy's use and by the Sony Reader my sister and I bought dad for Christmas, I am attempting to put some of my stories in ebook format, specifically epub. The current Halfway to Haven run has been make into individual ebooks, which I may or may not post on the site. The reason for this is that it makes more sense to put the entire season into a single ebook, with the stories marked as individual chapters that can be easily accessed from the table of contents. (Otherwise the five seasons of Silverado would be something like 90 eBooks instead of five...and I don't even want to think about the number of stories The Vexed Generation would fill!)
As a sample, Silverado Season One is available for download on the Silverado Seasone One page. It has some errors, but is largely...acceptable.
http://www.khobrah.net/silver/season1/season1.html
For those interested in making their own eBooks, here are a couple of useful programs along with the challenges I cam across.
Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
This program allows you to edit eBooks at the text level. eBooks, as I've learned, are handled very much like web pages, and the underlying code is xhtml. But you don't need to know html to code the books, you can past text into a Word-like editor, creating a new section for each story/chapter. Use the 'Heading One' font type for each chapter title, auto-generate the table of contents, add a cover and you're largely set.
The problem is that we converted all our stories into .txt format, and in my case I lost some of the original Word documents. When I copied the .txt text into Sigil, all the custom line breaks generated in the conversions came too, which meant all sorts of weird spacing problems anytime a sentance ran longer than the width of the eReader screen. So for those first few stories, I had to go in and manually remove all the extra line breaks. The Word documents paste much easier, but all the handy little corrections Khobrah & BorgCrazy used to give us, along with my changing of the Silverado deck numbering, was only in the .txt. So I had to fix the deck numbers, but the edits have been lost. Hopefully Seasons 2-5 will be easier and quicker!
Gimp http://www.gimp.org
A basic image editor, I used this to make a 600x800 pixel image to use as a cover. Just the pic of the ship from the Season One page and a title.
calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/
This very handy software is good for putting the final touches on your eBook. Although you can set some basic metadata in Sigil, calibre lets you set the publisher (Star Traks Nexus and Corner Grocery Store), series (Star Traks Silverado) along with a numbering system for where in the series that book belongs.
Once your metadata is set, you can copy the eBook over to the reader of your choice and it -SHOULD- work properly. I've been fiddling with the Silverado Season One book for hours, and it's still not perfect, but until I feel like going through a proof read of the whole season, it's as good as it'll get. I've tested it on the calibre eBook viewer, dad's Sony Reader and the Aldiko reader on my Android phone. All worked fairly well.