InsaneJournal

Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	ebooks:all, ebooks:content-creation, ebooks:sample-content, techytalk:ebooks

Ebooking once more

Yes, I know I started ficpdfs and let it languish. But that doesn’t necessarily mean things are always going to stay that way…I think :P

Today, though, I went out on a limb and decided to try cobbling a tiny ebook together out of one of my shorter, quasi-unfinished fics. I threw the united power of Textmate, Parallels, Mobipocket Creator, Markdown, CSS and the really rather helpful Mobipocket content generation guide at one short story, and these are the results:

• Mobipocket (i.e., un-DRMed .prc file) download, first pass of editing. Here via Box.net.

  • The good: You don’t know how tasty this looks on my Kindle, despite a few missed typos and that sort of thing :D.
  • The bad: This is put together using a couple html files I made myself, for all intents and purposes. And I still missed niggling errors— I don’t want to imagine how time consuming it will be to error-check a longer source text.
    Also, I have to sort out the table of contents and the cover image so they look okay on my Kindle. The TOC chapter/part summaries need to be separated from the chapter links so that they’re easier to click when browsing with a device. And, I dunno, my image looks okay, but could look better.

• HTML “download”, after second pass of editing. Here at my website for easy access.

  • The good: Satisfying to make everything look pretty. Primitive but working (and prettyish) nav bars, yay.
  • The bad: Again, thinking of sorting out longer works this way makes me shudder. I’m definitely going to do splits into shorter sections if possible— it’s just easier to work with that way, as Textmate, my text editor, tends to start choking when you feed it anything really long. And besides, you miss stuff editing even a short file.

Check both formats out (if possible, for the .prc) and let me know what you think.