Book People Archive

e-book creation study successful

Further to my earlier email(s) on this topic of creating e-books to be 
read on a handheld device, I reported that there were two stages in the 
study that I had not at that time yet completed successfully.

I have now completed these two stages successfully, and will await any 
comments from Valerie Gorman.

The first concerns the creation of an e-book when you have only a plain 
text file to work from. The Mobipocket e-book creator works only from an 
html version of the book, as does the ReaderWorks program for creating 
Microsoft .LIT files. There is a very sophisticated program, 
AscToHtm.exe, which analyses the text, and sorts out chapters and their 
headings, which it marks up with the required h2 (etc) tags, finally 
creating an html version of the e-book. The html version enables the 
e-book creator program to create its table of contents, and then build 
the e-book. This program is quite inexpensive, and is in fact the only 
component in this work which has cost me anything at all.

The other move which has worked successfully is to load the Mobipocket 
reader onto my Compaq iPaq. This proved quite easy and intuitive. I have 
also loaded onto it all the books that I generated today.

I hope this small success has not annoyed anyone. I am well aware from 
experience that when people imply that something cannot be done the last 
thing they want is for someone to actually do it.

I believe I have handed out enough information regarding the names of 
these three programs to make sure that anyone who wants to will be able 
to create their own e-books from Gutenberg Project books, at a very low 
once-off cost.

Kind regards to all Book People
Nick Hodson