You can give up to 4 answers, but please stick to formats that you absolutely need to have for the devices you own.
Rest assured we will not eliminate any format that has a vote. But 13 formats is a big workload when we run a conversion, so if there are any that are absolutely useless, we’d be happy to skip that one. It also would make the FULL download shorter!
I’m so proud of myself: I am NOT the technical person for the sites, but I got the poll up over on Closed Circle, too, and didn’t blow the site off the net. 😆
YAYAYAYAY Thanks for doing it! I was totally oblivious, outside, weeding. Oh, joy….
Weeding the garden — there’s a genteel Sunday morning task 😉
I was planning to get up at dawn and go out to the country and pick the mustang grapes for jelly. But I didn’t get myself out of bed, and now it’s 99°F. Oh, well. Maybe tomorrow.
It might help poll respondents to know what devices use what formats.
.prc // Kindle device and Kindle app on { PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, etc. }
.mobi // Also compatible for Kindle device and app;
.epub // iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch;
.pdf // Adobe Reader;
.rtf // word processors { Microsoft Office: Word, OpenOffice, etc. }
.txt // plain text, unformatted;
Thank you, BlueCatShip. That’s info we ourselves don’t have. You might add: there’s a PC/Apple reader for epub (Calibre),
for mobi/prc (Mobipocket Reader),
and for lit (Microsoft Reader).
Taking this with as much salt as you want, wikipedia has a chart of readers and supported file types that might give you some helpful guidance. It’s at the very bottom of the article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats
Wow…scary! but useful. Sometimes I wonder why we even try! 😀 Most of those aren’t even offered in Calibre. They must be super proprietary! Wonder how they get any product for them.
One format that you didn’t include that I look for first before buying in an alternate format is HTML. Some ebookstores have it just as plain HTML, usually no cover then. Otherwise have HTML zip (PC) or exe (mac?) files. Just my 1 cent, back to lurking then off to work.
Thanks for de-lurking! I thought about including that some time ago, then it went by the wayside for some reason. It’s easy enough to do…every conversion starts with a conversion from Word Perfect to html,so…why not?
Hmmm…can’t a mac handle a standard zip file? (showing my ignorance here.)
Yes, Macs can open zip files. I’ve happily opened the ‘Netwalkers books, as well as plenty of other zipped files, on my MacBook Pro.
Files ending in .exe are PC “executable” files, or programs. Macs can’t do anything with them. Mac OX X programs end in .app, if the extension is showing.
HTML files should open nicely on any device with a web browser, and formatting should (famous last words) be preserved. Font size should be easily adjustable. I don’t know about embedding special fonts, though. Web design is usually limited to a few fonts that come on most every computer, with a generic fall-back for serif and sans serif.
Yes, macs can handle standard zip files – they ship with Stuffit included with the OS and standard apps, which can both unstuff and create zip files.
And the poll over on CC is getting an entirely different batch of responses. Careful: the order of choices is not the same.
It’s looking pretty grim for being able to eliminate a bunch of formats.
I thought prc and mobi were the same format?
They pretty well are: I can’t tell the diff, and I’m sure if you can use one you can use the other, but some people aren’t going to be aware of that, (if you and I are right, and we probably are) so I thought I’d include both so everybody can vote.
I’ve tried most of them but when I voted I just put pdf. It’s ubiquitous. There are two or three nice readers for my laptop, which runs ubuntu, and I have a favorite one for windows too. It’s not Adobe.
I have an off-thread comment to add. I don’t know my way around this site well enough to put it in the right place. It is this: Thank you! Thanks for the freebies–I grabbed them all today, and already finished the S&S one which was a lot of fun. Thanks also for your writing in general, all three of you but especially cc whom I’ve followed since I don’t remember when, at least as early as Faded Sun…
And Thank You for putting together a showcase web site for other writers to emulate.
Chuck Gregory, Fort Lauderdale
Thank you! I’ll be updating the S&S one soon—
The results that showed over on CC seemed mostly consistent with these: mobi, epub, pdf, and one of the plain text formats such as txt or rtf. I did notice the prc here, but several formats are batting .000 on both sites, I thought.
Maybe you could start dropping some of the other formats and leave a notice that any requests for additional format support will be seriously considered? That is a huge list you have there, and most people could probably read any of 4 or 5 of those formats on their computers and 2 or 3 on their handhelds, and just have a preference for one or another based on the UI of the reader they have downloaded.
Actually, this is an important question: should we vote at both sites? Or will you just add the numbers together and see what you wind up with? And finally, since it’s looking like the big 4 and then stragglers, you may want to see if those stragglers are “onlys” or just “yeah, my reader can do X as well” answers.
Go ahead and vote at both sites: I put the other up to catch the people we don’t see in here, but the proportions are also an indicator—and may help a person wondering what kind of reader they want to buy.
I have always liked the portability of the .txt format,
I can use it on every computer I have had since 1976.
I like the fact that I can scale a .pdf up and down to
get a decent size to read.
.rtf and epub allow all kinds of exotic effects, embeddings
and creation of fancy looking work. They also keep Jane
busy…GRIN
The real question is cost benefit analysis, which is the ratio
of income generated to the time to create lots of exotic
formats. It becomes difficult to justify when the file can
be loaded and saved with open office to create other formats.
Polling the group here might skew your view, since most seem
like they know too much about comp (or like Jane are learning
it the hard way). Since it is your living, your efforts should
enhance the part where you get to buy food.
You’re welcome. 🙂 I haven’t tried Calibre, but I do have Stanza on my iPhone, which I’ve used for ebooks from Smashwords.
My impression is, you can probably do away with several of the formats you are putting out, and provide others as separate downloads. — Some standard(s) will have to emerge, though those will morph and evolve over time.
—–
HTML is a good, widespread, open format. There are caveats, however, that might make it undesirable for an author. — However, as someone who’s edited and posted pages for amateur web authors, I’ve certainly used it and like it.
1. The text is right there, open to copy and paste. But then, that’s true of .txt and .rtf as well.
2. When exporting from Word or OpenOffice Writer, you *must* be sure your settings do not include personal/private information, or track-and-change editing information, or the exported files will include extraneous nonsense no one wants publicly available or showing up, either visible or hidden in the coding. — When exporting from Word or Writer, I *always* use “remove personal info” and “save as web page, filtered,’ and then have to manually clean up a bunch of junk that Word (and therefore Writer) leave behind, to give clean, compact HTML. — I’d give a lot for something that made the “word processor to/from web page” process painless.
3. The best way to use HTML is with .css stylesheets for formatting and style. A basic yet comprehensive .css stylesheet can cover an entire site or a book series or an individual story, poem, or web page (file). It can give very good results, though not some of the fancier options in layout and graphics and type that, say, a magazine or coffee-table book might have. (Those, however, can be done. It’s just a bit more work.) The .css for a novel or series is not terribly hard. — If one of you is already versed in .css, you can probably do it amongst yourselves as a cooperative.
4. Images and such, including audio and video, can be included just like on any web page, and all the resources (HTML, CSS, MP3, JPG, PNG, GIF, MOV, etc.) can be bundled up neatly together, or referenced such that, say, an audio file can be separate for download, but bundled with “all the rest” of the project for convenience. With a wifi connection, that’s not really an issue. On 3G, it is a time-and-space (and sanity) saver. — Everything goes in folders per a given project (novel or collection in one book, or else a series of books) to keep things organized. (Keeping web resources versus the original source files separate, though, is more mind boggling, though I need to see what Dreamweaver now offers in that regard.)
5. Fonts are external and not transportable. Your stylesheet(s) must take into account that your audience’s computers / ereaders may not have that certain special font, and provide a usable alternative. Or, you’d need to render the text into graphics (not a great idea) or provide some other means, such as Flash (not supported on iPad/iPod/iPhone) or PDF, of bundling the fonts you want for the project.
6. For vision-impaired or legally blind readers, best practice is to avoid, as much as possible, converting any text to graphics, and when that is done, to provide the alternate descriptive text (via title=”blah” or alt=”blah” or an audio file) so they can read what’s embedded in the graphics. This is also important for searching and note-taking, both for you as the author and they as the readers. “Vision-impaired” includes anyone who needs glasses, older folks, as well as folks with eyesight handicaps.
The major caveat is whether having that text right out there is OK with you as an author. But then, anyone can potentially scan and OCR a book text, or extract text from a digital file, or presumably go speech-to-text and capture that. It’s a hazard of the honor system or of honesty, and a compromise for any author, because of course, you *want* your work available for readers to enjoy, even while you want to put food on the table.
Note that Project Gutenberg often has HTML versions of its recent ebooks on offer, and these are more enjoyable for readers than plain text.
Provided you understand what’s involved with those caveats, and work with them, HTML is a fine format, and I’d certainly recommend it.
I agree with @tyr… 11 formats must take substantial time and effort: time and effort which could go, if not on writing, at least on relaxing! Glancing at the other e-book stores I use, most seem to provide 2 or 3 formats: even Baen only do 7! If it were up to me, I think I would cut down to about 4 or 5: A super-pretty format (.pdf), a couple of readable by the vast majority of current devices formats (.epub, .mobi /.prc) and a user-convertible to anything else under the sun format (.rtf or .html). That this list covers all the formats I personally use is, of course, a mere happy coincidence! 😉
I’ll add my tuppence for .html format, please – I have a couple of reader apps for my Nokia 5800 but the clearest/best format I’ve found is to simply dowload .html and use the built-in reader.
The Kindle and Sony readers will accept .PDF directly, and convert them to their native format for reading. Caliber will accept a .PDF and export it as a mobi, etc. Indesign (CS5) will export a publication to .PDF or .epub.
@Charles: The new K3 has enhanced PDF support. I’ve tried converting PDF for my old K1 and it doesn’t do a decent job at all – possibly the fault of the creator of the PDF. I prefer Mobi or PRC for Kindle reading and they’re the only 2 I marked on the survey.
@Charles. In order to get consistently readable .pdf files for Kindle 1 & 2 you have to send them to your Kindle email account and pay for the translation (it’s not expensive, but the results are not stellar either). I’ve tried reading on an iPad and it is terrible in sunlight. Since I am not allowed to put software or ebooks on my work laptop, and I must travel with the laptop, my only viable alternatives are to carry a dedicated ebook reader such as a Kindle, or read from a smartphone. Ebook readers cannot and will not be replaced by computers, and formats that do not support the functionality of ebook readers are not suitable as a sole or even primary document file type.
You all are being very helpful: I think HTML is on the eastern horizon and a few others are in sunset…