The Random Ebooks Questions Post

[elf]

Ask your questions! Get answers! Maybe even useful answers!

Ask anything! Ask about ereaders, or filetypes, or conversion methods, or where to find books, or which authors don't like ebooks, or what software works on which computers, or anything else ebook-related. Preferably, put the question, or part of it, in the subject line. That way, the questions will be easy to find, and new readers who show up can see if their question has been asked before.

Feel free to post links to your journal where you've spelled out your questions in detail (or just make a new post here; it's totally fine to make a long post about "thinking about ebook readers; what's the pros & cons of these two?")

Answer questions! If you know about a certain aspect of ebookery, jump in with answers!

Comments

Re: html and Calibre?

[eva]

Yes to the second question. I can't tell you the exact name of the menu entries since my system is in German, but you can select the books, rightclick them, and then go to the menu under "Edit Metadata" or similar. There should be an option "Combine book entries" or something like it. Remember which book you selected first and select the appropriate merging option.

Re: html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

Great. I will play around with it more and see if I can figure it out. Thank you!

re: Buy now or wait

[elf]

How much do you like to read? How tight are your finances?

The tech's not going to settle down for several years, and there's going to be an ongoing battle between "what the techies can design to work well" and "what the marketing agents think they can sell best."

In the meantime--the readers available now work very well for leisure reading. They suck for textbook use. (That's probably going to remain true for a while; the obstacles are non-trivial.) For that matter, the readers available 5 years ago work very well for leisure reading; I read for two solid years on a Sony Clié before switching to a dedicated ebook reader, and the Ebookwise is still considered a great reader. (The 128mb max memory card is its biggest problem. And the obsolete filetype support.)

The bells & whistles aren't going to stablize for even longer. If there's a *particular* feature you want that isn't available, or costs too much right now, you should probably wait for it; if it's just a matter of "but if I wait six months, the price will drop by 25%"... well, yeah, but you'll be out of six months of reading time.

A lot of us have been waiting for they mythical $100 ebook reader for years; right now, it only happens when things go on sale. The feature sets have gotten better--but mostly as general tech enhancements (today's batteries kick ass), not because the designers are actually paying attention to what works best. (Almost all the current ebook readers will hold *thousands* of books. None of them have good software for sorting & browsing through thousands of books.)

Mobileread has plenty of European members who can help sort out availability and prices, and there's plenty of support for people who want a reader not sold in their country, or sold for much more in some countries than others. If you want a Kindle at US cost + real shipping cost, that's available.

Did that help?

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

Any notes on which ones failed? I know, can play with it myself. But knowing what fandoms or pairings to look for might help; maybe it's a cluster of authors importing from other archives, and the imports have code problems.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

It's been a variety of authors and either White Collar or SGA fandom.

I'd offer links to the stories I know failed except I've already forgotten which ones they were. I'll start tracking them now, though.

Re: html and Calibre?

[elf]

First question--you convert them to whatever format works best for your ebook reader. If you have an ebookwise (I looked at your profile), you convert to .rb for it.

Official advice is that you never, ever, EVER touch Calibre's database folder & archives; you convert-and-export to somewhere else. Someone who speaks code or database of Calibre's flavor could probably ignore that advice; for the rest of us, Calibre is an interface for changing ebooks from one place to ebooks of a different format (or the same format) somewhere else, and you don't touch its working files at all.

Re: html and Calibre?

[elf]

Followup: possibly the ebookwise only reads .imp, which Calibre can't do; you'd need to use another conversion program.

Re: html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

I am in the process of getting a Sony 505 (OMG, Sony's repair service sucks!!) so eventually that's what I'll be converting files for.

But also to get books on the ebookwise, do you think I could convert files to rtf, then copy the rtf files elsewhere to another folder and use them in my ebookwise software? (Ebookwise is notoriously horrible at reading pdfs. That's the format I have the most trouble with for that particular device and finding a better and easier way to convert them would be awesome.)

Re: html and Calibre?

[elf]

For the Sony, you probably want .epub. (Some prefer .lrf, and I read a lot of just plain .rtf files. Because I'm lazy. But RTF doesn't allow for a table of contents or pictures.)

And yes--you can convert to .rtf or .html, export them to somewhere else on your hard drive, and run those files through ebookwise's library software.

*Everything* is awful with a lot of PDFs. The best PDF readers are things like the Kindle DX--which is only okay because it has a larger screen that leaves them readable.

Converting them well depends on how the PDF was made, not the conversion software; some PDF creation programs keep enough data in the file to convert them (like paragraph breaks and bold/italics); some have stripped out that info so when you convert, you get plain text with a hard return after every line.

Re: html and Calibre?

[stormcloude]

Actually I think the eBookwise is especially sensitive to pdf files-- mostly because it only accepts a limited number of simple fonts, so if you have anything out of the ordinary, it will really mess up your ebook. Lots of times quotemarks and apostrophes turn into gibberish characters in conversions I've done. I haven't noticed that in the (admittedly very few!) pdfs I've looked at in Calibre.

[transcendancing]

I have a Kindle ebook, using Kindle for PC. Can someone tell me how to find out what page is what so I can reference my assignment properly? *fretful* WTFpolarbear are 'locations'?

If someone can help me with this I'd be deeply grateful and would give you all the internets. *hopeful*

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[amalthia]

I run all the A03 fics through an epub conversion but honestly it's just so I can add this css override code to the epubs.

body { margin: 0; }
a {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
a [href] {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
p {margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; padding: 0pt; text-indent: 15pt; text-align: justify;}
h1 { text-align: center;}
h2 {text-align: center; }
h3 { text-align: center;}
h4 { text-align: center; }
h5 { text-align: center; }
h6 { text-align: center; }

[elf]

Kindle uses "locations" instead of pages because pages change when you increase or decrease the font sizes. And it's a nice concept--works well for discussing the book with other Kindle users, and keeps the number stable when changing fonts--but it sucks for academic work. (There's a *lot* of problems with ebooks for academic purposes.)

I suppose you could use "loc. 124-37" (or whatever) instead of a page number? I'm not sure how to list "this is an ebook;" maybe use the filename the same way you'd use a URL, in whatever ref formatting you're using?

Academic references are going to have to be flexible in dealing with digital content; lots of it doesn't have "pages" in any normal sense.

[elf]

Now you got me curious; hadda go look. Using the citation machine's ebook listing, I get:

Kress, N. (2007). Fountain of age [loc. 64-77]. (Fictionwise Multiformat version), Kress-FAge-mo.prc

There's probably not actually any standards yet, so as long as the format is mostly correct and usable, it should be okay.

[transcendancing]

Thanks! There's options for digital docs and citations without page numbers, but the set up of kindle doesn't easily allow paragraph counting etc :P

This website has also come to my attention via twitter, and thought any other readers may find it useful:

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/how-do-i-cite-a-kindle.html

[transcendancing]

That's pretty much my plan. Footnotes for the win!

Re: Buy now or wait

[eva]

Yes, thanks a lot! It's definitely food for thought.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[valiha]

I think you can shorten your css by combining the header declarations: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {text-align: center} since they're all the same.

And I might be wrong, but I don't think you need the semi-colon if you have only one item.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[amalthia]

Good tip. :) I'll have to try it out. So far I haven't really had to worry about length because that code is the default. But it is good to know that I can merge the headings tags into one line.

I'll look into the semi-colon use. I'm not exactly sure what you mean about having only one item? But what I pasted here is generally what I use on every story I convert and the output comes out like I expect. I suspect there is some wiggle room for error though.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[valiha]

I meant text-align: center; as one item - I can't remember what it's called at the moment (declaration??), sorry! Obviously, if you want to style several things about your header, you'll use the semi-colon between them. And yes, you can combine several things if you want to style them the same way, just add a comma in between.

Say you want all the headers to be centered, but only h1 to have a bottom border and to be in uppercase.

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {text-align: center}
h1 {border-bottom: solid 1px; text-transform: uppercase}

(Gosh, this makes me look like I'm presenting myself as some sort of an experts, which is so far from the truth!)

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

Is good! Do not fear pretending to be expert! I am *utterly oblivious* about CSS, and I can follow that much explanation; any more than that and I'd be lost.

I am almost at the stage of attempting to include statements like these in my epub conversions. If I got suggested code from friends at mobileread, I'd be terrified to change a single character of it; baby-steps advice is very useful.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[amalthia]

I love to learn more and truly I had no clue you could add all the heading tags in one line. All the previous examples I saw online split them up.

I'm thinking to merge h4-h6 into one line since I rarely add anything extra besides centering those headers. It does save space and makes it easier to read the code.

I've been mostly teaching myself css and using the online tutorials but finding best practices and more efficient ways to accomplish the same thing is a bit harder to figure out.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[valiha]

Just have in mind that if you want all of them to be centered, then all should be combined. Then you can "cascade down" and specify the style for only some elements:

All should be centered = h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {text-align: center}
The first three should be centered + uppercase = h1, h2, h3 {text-transform: uppercase}
The first one should be centered + uppercase + have a bottom border = h1 {border-bottom: solid 1px}

The styles listed first are general, and get more specific the lower you go. The general styles are applied to all the elements unless you override them; so if you don't want h4-6 to be centered, you can leave them out of the first declaration, or override it by adding one more line after h1:

h4, h5, h6 {text-align: left}

I mostly used online tutorials too, but the people at LJ's Smooth Sailing Layout comm helped me a lot while I was modifying my layout. It makes a huge difference when you can ask someone to walk you through the reasons why something is just so. The Web Developer addon for Firefox is priceless too.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[valiha]

Baby-steps, and hand holding, which is what I got at s2smoothsailing when I was tweaking my LJ layout. They taught me how to have bullets - actual small bullets - show up when hovering over the header navigation [mine is a Western fandom :) ].

I really enjoy css, and whenever I'm afraid to change something, I just make a copy of the files involved - that way I don't risk the originals. I don't remember seeing css tutorials at mobileread; is there a forum or were these snippets mostly offers from other members?

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[amalthia]

Most of my css help has come from the Mobile Read forums. :) I'm going to have to find this web developer addon and check out the LJ smooth sailing layout comm. :)

You're right it does help to have someone to help explain things because the tutorials don't always go into great depth as to why css works a certain way and piecing it all together is not easy.