We are probably going to be able to eliminate 2 formats, .pmlz and .tcr, but we need to add .html. Which saves us a little bit of work. But not much. The reader-situation is still not settling into a handful of formats.
The pretty clear winners in the format race are epub and mobi/prc in that order, closely followed by PDF. I have a feeling once we offer .html that’s going to be a popular choice also, since with it you can do conversions either in mobi software (Mobipocket Creator) or Calibre and arrive at just about anything. (While nobody here is using FB2, voters over on CC do ask for it.)
So my personal recommendation if you’re to buy a reader, something with epub or mobi/prc looks like a good choice for wide selection of books. Either one of these formats offers graphic options as well as pretty good functionality. Certainly a PC can handle epub, mobi/prc, rtf, txt, pdf and a number of others with no problems. But there is still going to be support in the e-book market for many different formats, and we will continue to do it so long as we have one person who needs that format.
Any of you who are new, do read that left sidebar: we have links to sharewares that can do e-book conversions, among other things.
And don’t forget the Closed Circle Bazaar, our Cafe Press site, available over on CC, where you can buy t-shirts and mugs and bags all with our wonderful designs.
On the face of it, HTML should be a good idea. But the file to be displayed cannot exceed 100KB or the browser will freeze up on that amount of continuous text. This means that a book has to be broken up into a number of files of about 80-90Kb and supplied as a .zip. So a book would be an index page and the corresponding chapters as the separate files.
There is also the complication that the HTML files must be of the most basic type, since the converters to other formats will ignore any tables, indents, .css, etc.
The Ring of Lightning .PDF looked good, but it could have done with smaller top and bottom margins, a running header after page four, and page numbers, for those who choose to print it out.
I don’t know what kind of browser you are talking about, but I have read 1MB and larger html-files of continuous text without any freezes.
Calibre as well as MobiPocket Creator do actively use the .css file specified in the html-file when converting text. They don’t understand all of .css, but the parts useful for ebooks (margin, indents, padding, font, etc) were no problem at all. Indents aren’t a problem at all. Tables are possible, too, Calibre even offers an option to treat tables which got abused for layout.
Yeah, html-files should be treated with ebooks in mind, but they don’t have to be as simple as your are trying to make them appear.
And, see, with html you could have changed the margins yourself, and told the browser to provide the running header and page numbers upon print out, or generated a new file from the html-source
The purpose of the HTML is not to read directly on a browser, but to convert from HTML format into something useful to your reader-software. Immediately on getting same, (and this is only useful if you have a reader we do not otherwise cover) you use your HTML editor to reshape it physically to your needs. Then you take it to Mobipocket Creator or to Calibre and Sigil or to your reader’s proprietary format software to put it into whatever format you like.
The purpose of providing HTML is to cover some readers we might not otherwise handle, since all converters I know of take HTML as a starting point. If you don’t have an HTML editor, I recommend NAMO for its ease of use and features, but there are others out there, including the Open Office HTML Editor, which is a shareware, and which should enable you to manipulate those large files. Trying actually to read a novel in a browser, however, is not going to be optimum on several fronts. We provide links to 2 shareware reader-emulation softwares (Mobipocket and Calibre) and one freeware, the MS Reader; Kindle has a PC Kindle-emulation reader; probably the Nook does; and we also provide links for the Apple system on the shareware reader-emulation softwares.
There are two kinds of HTML editor, WYSIWYG and Not-WYSIWYG. (What You See Is What You Get)…ie, displaying the text as it would appear in a browser. NAMO is WYSIWYG. I’m not sure the Open Office one is. If you aren’t fluent in HTML, a really indispensible aid is HTML for Dummies…it’s a nicely readable listing of the codes and how to use them to manipulate text. But before trying that, consider the possibility your proprietary conversion software (which came with your device) can already cope with what we put out, so just try converting our HTML before ever getting into the intricacies of trying to alter it.
Formatting…for any file type: if there’s a way we can improve the format, such as the header or margins…please let us know. We can’t change it if we don’t know you want something else. I have put headers in some…I thought I’d done it in all of them, but hey, I’ve redone the files so many flipping times (sometimes CJ’s as well as mine) I lose track. After I get my covers for the new books done and get back into the reformatting groove, I’ll make sure they’re as standardized as I can make them, then offer new downloads to all who have bought them. I think I can do that in WP-estore.
File readability and conversion: I test all my html files on Firefox and Explorer before I begin conversions. I’ve never ever had a problem with freezing.
But I honestly don’t know why anyone who reads an ebook on their computer would even bother with a browser when they can download mobireader, which gives a terrific two up display wonderful on larger screens, or put an epub reader into their browser and read the epub file complete with fancy fonts.
We would, as CJC says, include the html file primarily with the thought of conversions to other formats in mind, or to people facile in conversions who have their own idiosyncratic formatting that they prefer. It’s an added benny that’s not really intended for those who want a plug and play file…tho why any conversion software doesn’t have an option to start with epub, which is a really good html style format, is beyond me.
Most of the formatting problems mentioned really have nothing to do with novels. Remember, books are simple files with nothing but words and a few pictures. Not a table in the mix in any of ours.
CSS is limited in the html that comes out of WP, and most of it I wipe out because it frankly doesn’t display properly in the html editor or the browser (I’m talking about image centering, not much else.) Don’t know why, don’t care. It’s easier to wipe it and write the code myself then to figure what’s going on in the conversion. My knowledge of CSS is limited and I’d rather some program that knows what it’s doing write it, then I’ll edit the details.
The most significant CSS in the whole process is actually added by Calibre during the initial conversion to epub. If you open up the epub file with something like Sigil and open the “style.css” file, you’ll see that most of the CSS code calls are .calibre# Others are added by Sigil when I add the fonts.
epub is actually a zipped bundle of html code. It contains a folder of smaller html files, a folder of images, a folder of fonts, and a folder of style code, with a little “gatepost” file that alerts the reader to what’s been loaded into it and how to handle it.
Foolish consistency time again…I have been including a set of HTML files in my “full” offering, though not in the “mini.” Project Gutenberg always has an HTML version, so I figured it was a good idea. For myself, when I’m downloading facsimiles of old embroidery books, if there’s no PDF, then the HTML is the next best option–because it preserves the illustrations, even if it doesn’t always display them properly.
(which, btw, may be happening with my CC HTML files — I may need to make further generalizations in the “in line”-naming-conventions)
The HTML embroidery facsimiles are often several megabytes in size. They’re not beautiful in Firefox, but they’re functional and, most of the time, that’s sufficient.
HTML has three huge advantages – it’s trivial to convert it to [ebook format of your choice], the formatting is end-user accessible without specialized tools, and it can be read on pretty much anything – even if you don’t have a Web browser (or other program that will display the HTML markup properly), most ebook HTML is clean enough you could read it in a basic text editor in a pinch.
Why ‘would [anybody] even bother with a browser when they can download Mobireader [or something else; personally I far prefer MS Reader or the desktop Kindle app to the desktop Mobi app, but chacun a son gout], or put an epub reader into their browser’? From personal experience, because they can’t even if they wanted to: they may not have an Internet connection on the machine they want to read on or may be forbidden from installing software (or browser add-ons).
Ah, the furtive lunch-hour/coffee break novel-read. NOW we get it. Note Hanneke’s suggestion, the flash drive app/data, too.
I’m someone would could run something other than html. There are both a mobi reader and an epub reader on my system, but I’d still prefer html.
The reader programmes simply go against my accustomed PC reading habits. They are slow while scrolling and skip and reload on chapters. Depending upon format/programme, there’s not enough text or too much blocked text and too little margin. The space between paragraphs is smaller than I’d like for reading long text on screen. The text looks over all weird.
My PSP can’t do any of the ebook formats, but’ll happily display html via its browser (not that I’d use it for such, screen’s too small, battery live’s too short and I’m not taking it out of the house anyway).
From my side of the fence, the question is more why anybody would bother to download extra software, plugins and convert to an ebook format when a browser can already handle things perfectly fine. (People using ebook devices and not their computer for reading are obviously excluded.)
😆 after I spend all day reading and writing in 8 1/2 by 11 format, I need a new format to convince me I’m no longer working and I can sit down, lean back, and enjoy somebody else doing the work. Otherwise I have my fingers near the keys and a terrible desire to edit.
If you’re running Acrobat 9, there is a header and footer option which should get around having to run off the whole file again, just to add a running header and page numbers.