The Sword and Laser discussion

Have you guys ever converted something you wrote for use on a kindle or a nook or some other ereader thing? I downloaded this thing called Calibre but it doesn't have the KL8 format which is the new kindle format. I'm not a big fan of what it's outputing. I've tried just importing PDFs into kindle but it's just viewing the pages and not reading like a real ebook. What do you guys use? Where should I go for help?

Daniel wrote: "I downloaded this thing called Calibre but it doesn't have the KL8 format which is the new kindle format. I'm not a big fan of what it's outputing."

Then you have to tell Calibre how you want it outputted, either by formatting the input file (coding in pure HTML is probably the most effective way to go about it) or playing around with the output settings. Calibre will output to .mobi which is, for most intents and purposes, exactly the same as the .azw files you download from Amazon without the DRM. There's really no need to worry about KF8 unless you really want to trick your book out.

PDFs are best for setting up a page to be printed or viewed exactly the way you formatted it, like a photo.

For ebooks, you need the text to flow. I use .rtf for the original text file and Calibre to convert it. RTF (rich text format) is designed for transferring files among different platforms, and most word processing programs have it; you usually do a Save As and select it as the format.

I'd suggest looking on Youtube for tutorials on using Calibre, or Googling or the like if you'd prefer to get your info that way.

I use Calibre all the time, it's pretty straightforward in my experience. I use it to convert books that people send me to "beta read" in Word format, as well as to convert epubs to AMZ Mobi. I've never used any book that has the new Amazon "enhanced" format, so can't comment on that.

Yep, Calibre can convert KL8 and Adobe Digital. Obviously these need to be DRM-free files. Otherwise, it won't do that for you "right out of the box". But you can also easily set-up calibre to automatically remove DRM from ebook files and convert them all with one click. The legality of doing so depends on how you use those files.

Anyway, see, for a useful guide w/ info on formats & links to Calibre plugins:

http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/20...

When I started self-publishing, I spent 5 days teaching myself in-depth how to do the best possible job creating output files for publication, both from scratch (text editors and manual command-line creation of epub files) and using conversion tools, and it's a bit involved to describe completely here.

In short though, create an ePub file and use the Kindle Previewer to convert. It does an excellent job.

How you create your ePub is up to you; I only did the completely from-scratch thing once. After that I switched to using Scrivener's output, which is good. As a perfectionist, I take it a step further and customize that output before final conversion.

Maybe I ought to write a book on the full process... hm...