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: AO3 bug with epub files?

[valiha]

Link to Smooth Sailing in an entry above, and Web Developer here! Once added to Firefox, you just click on CSS, then on View style information, then hover over an element on the page. When you click on that, an information window at the bottom of the browser shows you all the details about what css was used for which page element.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[amalthia]

Thanks! This sounds incredibly useful. :)

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

Would you check and see how this file behaves on your ereader?

http://archiveofourown.org/works/110660

It is epub and it causes my ereader to restart every time I try to open it.

I reconverted it from epub to epub with calibre and now it works just fine.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

Haven't tried it yet (downloaded; not installed on reader; don't have the right kind of cord with me at work & will have to track one down), but I suspect the problem is the pictures--that little dragon after the notes & before the main text, and the fanart.

Does the epub-to-epub conversion keep the images?

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

It doesn't but the epub directly created through AO3 doesn't have the dragon in it either so if that is the cause, what we see as a reader doesn't change but something in the code originally created is broken.

Correction: It doesn't show when I view the original in ADE but it does with calibre. But the converted one doesn't have the dragons in the calibre viewer either.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

Can you take apart the HTML and see what the differences are? (I am css-clueless; If I had both versions, I could list the differences but not understand them.)

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

I have not a clue how to do that.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

Epubs are zip files in funny packaging!

Rename booktitle.epub to booktitle.zip, unzip, and look at structure.

Some of the MR crowd hand-codes their ebooks. I have no idea how; every time I've tried to edit something in the unzipped version and then rezip, the resulting epub doesn't work. I don't know enough xml/css to have any idea what I'm doing wrong.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

The AO3 has the following CSS code?/commands? which the calibre file does not have:

calibre6 {
height: auto;
width: auto
}

Also, cool!

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

That shouldn't be it at all; something inside the HTML is probably different.

And is waycool, and why epub is likely to be the dominant ebook format eventually: because really, anyone can make them with a text editor. (And code knowledge. Not even lots of code knowledge, just a bit more than I have.) And because if they're not DRM'd, anyone who knows CSS and a tiny bit of XML can fix them if they're broken.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

Why don't I email you the zipped files and you can take a look? That is the only difference I found but I'm not experienced here at all.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[elf]

Sure! elf @ dreamwidth.org works; I'll see if I notice any differences.

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

Here is another one that has failed. No pictures but there are links to LJ users so I'm guessing it's the same issue.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/131988

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

This one failed. I don't see any pictures or links in it.
http://archiveofourown.org/works/27975

Re: AO3 bug with epub files?

[jumpuphigh]

Update: I've filed a bug report with AO3 linking to this thread.

[havocthecat]

No questions, just a thank you on my part for putting up such a great resource for ebook fans. I really appreciate it!

[beatrice_otter]

I don't have an e-book reader yet, and probably won't for some time; I just use my laptop and Calibre. The majority of the e-books I have (and will be purchasing for some time) are a) Baen free books or b) fanfic downloaded from AO3 and ff.net or c) classics downloaded from Project Gutenberg. When I do get around to buying an ebook reader, I obviously have no idea what kind of ebook reader I will be getting. So there's a good chance I'll have to either convert using Calibre or go back and re-download all my ebooks.

So the question is this: what format should I be downloading the ebooks in, that would either be a format I would likely use or easily convertible into whatever format I end up needing?

[jumpuphigh]

Despite the dominance of Kindles right now, the consensus seems to be that epub is the way of the future. Will it be? I don't know. It is however, easy to convert to other formats.

[beatrice_otter]

Thanks!

[elf]

EPub is probably the most stable of the ebook formats. Mobi is the second-runner; Kindles are popular enough that mobi will be a useful format for a nice long time. Epub allows more complexity, though.

Mobi is proprietary; while the conversion software is free, the format itself is owned (by Amazon), and is also limited--mobi was designed to work on PDA devices when they had very small capacities, and it doesn't allow much in the way of formatting. (Not that most people care. But if there are fancy features--line spacing, tables, indented sections, font changes--epub can support them; mobi can't.)

Epub is a wrapper around a zipped html file. You can take a non-DRM'd epub, change the extension from .epub to .zip, unzip it, and look at how the epub is made. There's a small file that says "THIS IS AN EPUB" and a basic folder structure.

Epubs created by Calibre are more complex than the ones downloaded from AO3. Calibre has a lot more options, and those show up in the epubs even if they're all left with default settings.

Not all ebook readers can deal with all the formatting options of epubs, which allow .css files to be included in the zip set. AFAIK, none of the current mobile ebook devices support all the options; the hardware hasn't caught up with the software capabilities. But the epub file will be able to hold those settings, and eventually we should have devices that support all of them.

Sigil, coding, and breaking files into bits

[adelheid]

I have a file with multiple titles that I would like to be able to break up into the separate titles, provide with tables of contents, and if at all possible, correct the typos (okay, I'd correct the typos if I cared enough, which I doubt I ever will.)

Before I download Sigil (and start learning coding - eek!) I'd like to know how much of that Sigil will be able to do/help me do. Can someone give me a brief rundown? Thanks!

Re: Sigil, coding, and breaking files into bits

[elf]

I speak no Sigil. However, from what I've been able to pick up, that sounds like what it can do. (Not sure what you mean by "break up into the separate titles"--make a TOC in the one book, or convert into several ebooks?)

I suspect that Sigil is the best tool for what you want, even if it doesn't do everything. It may involve weird options like copying the original book several times & deleting everything you don't want, instead of "split into several ebooks," but other than that, I believe it'll work; I know it can put in tables of contents & allow you to fix typos.

The Mobileread Sigil forum is probably a good place to check.

[beatrice_otter]

Is there a problem with the latest Combined Tools Package (i.e. deDRM stuff) from Apprentice Alf? Because I went to update my plugins (de-DRMing on my Nook books wasn't working any more) and I couldn't get any of the plugins to install. Either Calibre didn't see them at all even though they were there, or it said they didn't have a top-level py file.

[(Anonymous)]

You might have to update your Calibre?

~stormcloude too lazy to log in.

[kate_nepveu]

I did have a problem a few months back with Calibre when my Kindle plugins stopped working, and had to update.