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

patshaughnessy.net

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

#31

Post by ilamont »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #24
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.

There are a few issues that I encountered when I tested Scrivener ePub output:

- Chapter suffixes not being properly appended

- Extra spaces appearing after headings/subheadings/sub-sub-headings

In addition, I like to look at the HTML and CSS associated with images to make sure they are not being reduced in size during the ePub compile process. This was an issue I encountered with Word and Pages. So far it hasn't cropped up in Scrivener, but I need to manually confirm this for peace of mind.

Regarding Kindlegen: Scrivener incorporates Kindlegen into the compile process for .mobi files. It's nearly seamless, and generates good output when I test in Kindle Preview and the Kindle app for iPad.

KF8: I wasn't aware of this issue until you pointed it out. It might explain a spike of returns I experienced this month. See http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&#... for more information.

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

#32

Post by kroger »

Interesting. I agree that using something like Pages or Scrivener (I love Scrivener) can help you to focus on the writing and I wish I could have used them to write my book [1].

However, I'm curious to know how he handled code examples; did he just pasted them in Pages? One advantage of using something like Sphinx is to be able to include code examples from external files. This makes it easy to update and test the examples. Another killer feature is pyobject: it allows you to include only a Python function or class from a larger file. It'd be nice to have this feature for other languages, though.

I blogged about using Sphinx to write my book here: http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/

[1] http://musicforgeeksandnerds.com

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

#33

Post by kroger »

arocks wrote: post #9

It would be interesting to compare this with another author's experience [1] using Sphinx. He also notes that EPUB and MOBI outputs are more challenging than PDF ones. [1]: http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/

I'm the author of this article. The main problem I found with EPUB and MOBI is how they are implemented in each reader. For instance, kindle 2 doesn't format tables correctly, while kindle 3 does. iBooks has some undocumented bugs that makes you want to cry. If your book is simple (just text) there's no problem; but if you have source code, tables, images, etc., you may run into problems.

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

#34

Post by r4vik »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #28
__mharrison__ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I suspect they are using pandoc at the backend to do something like pandoc -lean.pdf lean.markdown?

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

#35

Post by pat_shaughnessy »

kroger wrote: post #32

Interesting. I agree that using something like Pages or Scrivener (I love Scrivener) can help you to focus on the writing and I wish I could have used them to write my book [1]. However, I'm curious to know how he handled code examples; did he just pasted them in Pages? One advantage of using something like Sphinx is to be able to include code examples from external files. This makes it easy to update and test the ex…

FYI I used a Ruby library called Coderay to handle code highlighting. This wasn't integrated with Pages, but instead with the Bookshop Ruby gem after I moved the text into HTML files.

The code was inline in the HTML, but set apart using pre tags.

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

#36

Post by pseingatl »

neoveller wrote: post #21
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,…

www.pen.fm yields an ''Internal Server Error".

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

#37

Post by arocks »

kroger wrote: post #33
arocks wrote: post #9

It would be interesting to compare this with another author's experience [1] using Sphinx. He also notes that EPUB and MOBI outputs are more challenging than PDF ones. [1]: http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/

I'm the author of this article. The main problem I found with EPUB and MOBI is how they are implemented in each reader. For instance, kindle 2 doesn't format tables correctly, while kindle 3 does. iBooks has some undocumented bugs that makes you want to cry. If your book is simple (just text) there's no problem; but if you have source code, tables, images, etc., you may run into problems.

Agree. As I was looking into various ebook production tools that are commandline based, Sphinx and pandoc struck me as two very good solutions.
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