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?

[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.