Under the hill and far away

Ebooks can be fun, too. But creating them is still a bit tricky.  I have been playing a bit around with the formats, and tried to convert a couple of books set in Word and PDF into kindle/mobi and epub (for iPad, Sony and everything else). It turns out this was pretty tricky without having Office/Word or InDesign installed — and I have neither at my private computers. Neither can I install any converters at my locked-down work computers.  It turns out that all the cool converters I tried required one of those packages installed. No juice for Apple Work or Open Office users.

The solution was to use a little known shareware word processor called Atlantis, and use the Word-formatted originals (not PDF).

So step by step, on a Windows computer:

1. Download and install Atlantis (full, time-limited version,  shareware). Once installed, it is portable and can be put on a USB drive just by copying the entire folder, by the way.

2. Clean up your original Word-file, so it is neat. Remove comments, auto-indexes etc — all automatic fields should be normal text insted. Do this in your favourite word processor.

3. Open the Word-file in Atlantis.

(At this point, you may also want to edit a bit inside Atlantis to make sure you get a nice cover page picture and a working table of contents — as well as general clean up. Here is how.)

4. Choose “File..”->”Save Special…”->”Save as eBook” from the menus in Atlantis.

5.  Give it a name, fill in whatever information it asks for and you want to include, and click save.

Now you should have a workable epub-file.  However, this file will be  basic, and no images will be included, except for possibly the cover image. Images work well, and all my test files passed epubcheck-verification nicely.

You can add more niceties after this by using a dedicated epub-editor.  Here, the choice is much better. I guess Calibre should do the trick, so would eCub, Sigil and many more. Check this page out for a list: http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/how_to_create_epub

The optional final step is to convert the epub into mobi and Kindle format, if you want to publish for that platform as well.  For that you can use Mobipocket Creator and Kindlegen, which require some command line skills. Some of the tools listed above may make the process easier though — once you have your epub-file. These steps you could also do on a Mac.

1. Download and install Mobipocket Reader.

2. Download and install/unpack KindleGen.

3. Open Mobipocket Reader — then drag and drop your epub file onto the Reader’s main window (opening other ways often fail). The file is automatically converted and saved in your default ebook-folder (usually My Documents->My eBooks). Quit Reader.

4.  Then find the converted ebook-file, now with a “.prc”-suffix, in your ebook-folder,

(optional: to edit the ebook for kindle, making it better, download and install Mobipocket Creator, and open the .prc-file with creator here)

5. KindleGen is a command line tool, so you need to copy the .prc-file to the kindlegen folder.

6. Then just run “kindlegen [FILENAME.EPUB]“.

Voila: You have a Kindle-ready file, a mobipocket (prc-file) as well as an epub.

Update note: For publishing on the Kindle store, you do not need to convert to Kindle format using Kindlegen: Uploading the PRC-files directly works very well.

Welcome to the world of competing ebook-formats.  And if you have a reader, you could check out how a result of this process woold look  right here: Surrendering to Symbols, epub-version (with Adobe Digital Editions)

Be Sociable, Share!

•