Re: Thanks for your help

morganmandel wrote:
>  
> 
> Hi everyone,
> Thanks all for your help about converting to ebooks. Looks like I have 
> my work cut out for me over the weekend to get Killer Career out there 
> in more formats.
> 
> It would be so nice if they all had the same one. Maybe some day....

Actually, we're 90% of the way there already. The answer is HTML.

The problems with HTML are all perceived rather than real. The biggest 
problem is that too many people believe that HTML files are only 
appropriate for use in a web browser, like Firefox, Safari or Internet 
Exploder.

Not true.

There are several User Agents (the technical term) on the market today 
in addition to web browsers which display HTML files, including the Sony 
reader, µBook (www.gowerpoint.com), and, believe it or not, the 
Mobipocket reader. Those applications which are geared specifically to 
reading e-books in HTML format also handle details such as pagination 
and navigation.

What many people do not realize is that most of the other popular e-book 
formats in the marketplace are just encapsulations of HTML. The .epub 
format is just a ZIP file containing HTML content and a few other 
metadata files, most of which relate only to those User Agents which 
display .epub natively. Get an .epub file, rename it to .zip and open it 
with the unzipper of your choice, and you'll see what I mean.

The early Mobipocket format (.prc) was just minimal HTML encoded in Rick 
Brams PalmDOC format. The new Mobipocket format (.mobi) is still just 
minimal HTML encoded in a newer proprietary (but still well-understood) 
format.

Microsoft's .lit format is HTML encoded in yet another proprietary format.

Free tools are available to create all these formats, but in every case 
you start with HTML. Even those which claim you can use other file 
formats simply internally do a conversion to HTML under the covers 
before embedding it. (Some of these tools don't do a great job in their 
HTML conversion, so I would recommend starting with what you know is 
good HTML). My hunch is that once you have created a good, clean HTML 
file (and have obtained the necessary software tools) you can create 
zipped-HTML, .ebub, Mobipocket, and .lit files in about 15 minutes. 
(This assumes no DRM - if you want crippled files all my estimates will 
be off.)

The second great myth about HTML is that it's "programming," and hard 
programming at that.

It's not.

My guess is that only the rarest of e-book would involve more than 20 
unique HTML tags, and most would be acceptable with less than a dozen. 
If you're smart enough to write a book, you're smart enough to learn 
simple HTML. I'm certain that it's easier than learning how to use 
Microsoft Word. A good essay on how to format HTML for e-books can be 
found at http://www.dysfunctionals.org/~networker/HTMLeBooks.html.

HTML: learn it, love it.

On the other hand, if there're people out there who just can't give up 
their hold on the myth, I'll happily convert any Microsoft word file for 
you to e-book ready HTML for a mere $300.

The two outliers to the general rule of HTML is the eReader format which 
uses the "Palm Markup Language" PML, and PDF which uses the Adobe 
extensions to the PostScript printer language.

Of the two, the eReader format is the easiest to deal with. PML is an 
extraordinarily simplistic markup language, and it is relatively easy to 
convert from HTML to PML with just a few search-and-replace macros. I 
have also see a number of programs on the 'net that purport to do the 
conversion automagically; see 
http://www.dysfunctionals.org/~networker/html2pml.zip. Create your HTML 
file, run html2pml, drop it into eBookStudio (available from eReader.com 
for $30) and you're done, no muss, no fuss.

PDF is the most problematic of all the formats. PDF was originally 
derived from Apple's PostScript printer language which was designed to 
draw pictures on a printer. The fact that what was being drawn was a 
letter which human being might combine with other letters to infer 
words, sentences and paragraphs was incidental the the drawing. PDF took 
it a step farther and said, "if you can draw it on a laser printer we 
can draw it on a screen, and you'll know exactly what it will look like 
on paper."

This feature is important if you're doing desktop publishing, and 
especially important if you're doing print-on-demand. You have a fixed 
size "canvas", and you know the quality of the media. You only get one 
chance at it and you want your drawing to be acceptable to the greatest 
number of people possible. The greatest good for the greatest number.

BUT...

If you don't have a fixed size canvas, and you don't know the quality of 
the media, but you do have a virtually unlimited number of opportunities 
to reformat your document for different media, knowing what it will look 
like when printed is just not that useful.

HTML was designed from the outset to be a flexible format that could be 
rendered in many different ways on many different devices. It wasn't, 
and still isn't, perfect, but it /is/ good enough, and does give you the 
flexibility you need to reach the maximum market penetration.

Because PDF is a single-instance format, and HTML is a multiple-instance 
format, I recommend always starting with HTML, and using HTML as my 
"master" format. Conversion from HTML to almost every e-book format is 
trivial, and even conversion to PDF is not /that/ difficult.

The flip side is that conversion from PDF to just about anything is 
onerous at best. I have found that the best conversion strategy is 
actually to open the PDF file in an Optical Character Recognition 
program and "recognize" the file just like you had actually scanned in a 
paper book--which is not that surprising when you realize that the whole 
point of PDF is to produce a printed version in the first place.

Unless part of your target market includes print-on-demand, I wouldn't 
even bother with PDF.

A word of caution, though, about HTML.

As a general rule, Microsoft Word follows the PDF philosophy: the 
document being prepared will ultimately be printed, so it has to be as 
inflexible as possible. When you save a file from Microsoft Word in HTML 
format Word saves enough extraneous HTML tags that it can reloaded with 
exactly the same presentation as it had when it was saved. As a 
consequence, HTML files saved from Word are frequently twice as large as 
they need to be. Usually this is not a big problem, as the Microsoft 
cruft is largely ignored by most e-book software. Saving as "web page, 
filtered" will remove some of this cruft, but not enough. My general 
strategy has been to save as unfiltered HTML, then use Tidy 
(http://tidy.sourceforge.net) to remove the all the Microsoft cruft. I 
then use either Wordpad, TextPad or (if the document is small enough) 
the Microsoft developer studio to clean up the rest of the document by 
hand. Perhaps in the next week or two I'll try to write a short essay on 
how to use Word to create HTML e-books.

Adobe Pagemaker is even worse than Word. Avoid it altogether.

Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/) has always shown great promise as an 
HTML editor, but I've never felt comfortable using it. It may be a 
personal thing, so you should probably check it out.


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