Re: Newbie question on making-editing ebooks

On 05/11/2013 02:16, jrswebhome-/[email protected] wrote:
>
> I have had a chance to review the Smashwords guide this afternoon.
>
>
> Does everyone use Word or Open Office to create ebooks?
>

No, no, no, no no ~ to coin a phrase :-) . Because Word is the WP pushed 
by the Biggest OS supplier (Microsoft) it is used by most people out of 
familiarity through work, or lack of knowledge of alternatives. Thus 
most instructions are addressed to it. But it does have a good level of 
user ease; the only WP that compares with that, that I know of, is 
WordPro, which no longer works on Windows.

But, since the final state for an ebook, apart from pdf, is html and 
css, to do it from there immediately saves a lot of extraneous coding 
that Word, in particular, is good at adding!

>
> I had just never thought about how manuscripts are created.
>
> I just thought I would flow the text into some HTML document and then 
> insert styles and CSS. Guess that's a beginner's thought.
>

No, it is a coder's thought, and is far from beginner in that aspect. 
Few understand and can handle html and css beyond very simple needs. 
Which is why many conversion services options exist.

>
> I do see Smashword's insistence upon stripping everything out, then 
> going back into simplifying the format and styles. Also the insistence 
> upon either a block paragraph style or paragraph indent, but not both.
>

Because there are so many device interpretations, the only safe coding 
is the very simplest [by adding anything you narrow your market], and 
Smashwords receives every possible variation of "coded manuscript" that 
publisher man can devise! Their system is automated, and thus sausage 
factory style. Therefore stripping out all the variations and putting 
their standard in makes a reliable, if unexciting, Smashwords standard; 
this is appealing to sellers [and publishers] since the product is 
reliable for customers.

Joseph Harris