Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

patshaughnessy.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#21

Post by neoveller »

zio99 wrote: post #16

It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for. *I wrote about my pipeline here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-e...

I just shot you an invite to the PenFM beta, because you hit it on the head. www.pen.fm is taking on that end-to-end publishing challenge, and then some. Having worked in epublishing for a few years now, I think I've finally come up with a way to automate the hell out of epublishing--and the results show up. At any point in writing in PenFM, you can click download and get your work formatted perfectly in epub, mobi, or pdf. Formatting improvements are coming rapidly, and mostly present already for mobi.

The biggest problem I've recognized with epublishing is that you have to get the formatting down perfectly, and usually that requires a lot of work by hand making sure your input HTML file is exactly as it should be. When you control how content is inputted to a platform, it's much easier to automate perfect-formatted rendering of that input HTML file, including TOC by inference.

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#22

Post by robomartin »

Thanks for sharing. I recently launched into writing an ebook (educational, kids). Even though I use Word for tons of stuff I became concerned that it would insert all sorts of unwanted junk into the file. I looked around and decided to start the process on Sigil. My reasoning was that I could easily move the text into just about any other platform if I wanted to.

My first impulse was to simply write it all in a plain text editor and deal with formatting and producing all the various file types later on. One file per chapter, etc. However, with Sigil I can deal with images and TOC from the very start, which might be an advantage.

It's interesting to read about how other's have approached this. It sounds like the toughest part of the job might very well be getting the various formats to look the way they should.

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#23

Post by __mharrison__ »

robomartin wrote: post #22

Thanks for sharing. I recently launched into writing an ebook (educational, kids). Even though I use Word for tons of stuff I became concerned that it would insert all sorts of unwanted junk into the file. I looked around and decided to start the process on Sigil. My reasoning was that I could easily move the text into just about any other platform if I wanted to. My first impulse was to simply write it all in a plai…

If you are doing ebook only (no pdf) and it has limited formatting it should be pretty simple to get it to work on most devices.

Though I've yet to actually publish physical books (only have proofs), I'm not willing to commit to using HTML as the base format. (Sounds like princexml might help though if you decide you want to go the physical route later).

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#24

Post by __mharrison__ »

ilamont wrote: post #11

Great review. I was not aware of Bookshop, thanks for sharing your deep-dive into using it and other tools. I began writing ebooks over the summer. To date, I have written four educational/reference titles around a theme -- "In 30 Minutes". The idea is to let newbies quickly understand a mildly complex topic. The most recent title is The $10 Small Business Website In 30 Minutes (1). Not only do these books contain lo…

I'd be interested to hear what cleanup the ePub files need after the scrivener export. Is it just tweaking styles or does the ebook not render correctly on some devices. Am also curious about how the scrivener mobi export compares to kindlegen. Does it do KF8?

[EDIT] - From looking at the scrivener site, they require kindlegen for mobi generation.

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#25

Post by __mharrison__ »

zio99 wrote: post #16

It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for. *I wrote about my pipeline here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-e...

http://pressbooks.com/ and you don't even have to pay for it (if you have less than 6 books)

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#26

Post by davidw »

This article is a great example of why LiberWriter has been doing fairly well. Most of us here understand it and think it's pretty cool. Imagine your mother or father, who have retired and decided to finally write that book they've always thought of trying to parse all of that. Gems? XML? Say what?

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#27

Post by peterarmstrong »

pat_shaughnessy wrote: post #19
dangoor wrote: post #15

I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point. I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1], which is really a great tool. All of the editions that I have in the major online bookstores come straight out of Scrivener (though I obviously used an image editor for the covers). I wanted to also mention out awesome Leanpub[2] is. Write your files in Markdow…

The only complaint I've heard about Leanpub is that they don't give the author access to end user email addresses. I don't use email as a marketing tool much (almost never) but I would guess this could be a show-stopper for many eBook authors who are considering their solution.

(Leanpub cofounder here.)

We changed this very recently: readers can new choose a checkbox to share their email with the author, and this checkbox is on the purchase form as well as on the reader dashboard.

(And, being Canadian, I feel the need to apologize. So, we are sorry it took us so long to get this feature right!)

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#28

Post by peterarmstrong »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #18
dangoor wrote: post #15

I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point. I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1], which is really a great tool. All of the editions that I have in the major online bookstores come straight out of Scrivener (though I obviously used an image editor for the covers). I wanted to also mention out awesome Leanpub[2] is. Write your files in Markdow…

I'll be interested to hear how the Leanpub output compares to Scrivener. The Scrivener pdf looks decent. There are a few line spacing issues though on the example I saw on Amazon.

Here's an example:

https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.pdf

https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.epub

https://leanpub.com/s/0DZeiyt-T53wahAxB34u4E.mobi

It's my book so I can do this :)

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#29

Post by peterarmstrong »

zio99 wrote: post #16

It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for. *I wrote about my pipeline here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-e...

We do this at Leanpub (http://leanpub.com). We're free to use, and pay 90% - 50 cents royalties. Chances are you've seen a few of our books on HN :)

Re: My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

#30

Post by acabal »

zio99 wrote: post #16

It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for. *I wrote about my pipeline here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-e...

My service, http://bookspry.com, does something like that. It's still in semi-beta (which means I'm taking paying customers, but the "do-it-yourself" plan is still very much the "I'm-doing-it-for-you" plan, since you'd be shocked at the bizarre formatting options people put into their Word document that have to be cleaned).
Post reply on HN