| I work very hard to publish attractive eBooks every week at esspc-ebooks.com. Believe it or not it takes me about two hours per volume to format the text and create the graphics for the cover pages. Sometimes eBooks are submitted that are excellent, and I publish them. On occasion they come in the .lit format but they do not fit the overall presentation that the reader expects from ESSPC. I usually publish them anyway. Sometimes text files or HTML files are submitted. When HTML files are submitted I usually strip all the HTML from the files and convert them into raw text before I compile them for Reader. Here are the guidelines that I follow for every book that I have published here. Feel free to use them as you wish. 
When I publish my eBooks I use a product that I have written called Electric Quill. As of November 11, 2000 this program is not ready for distribution. I am hoping to have it ready by the end of the year, if not sooner. If you are interested in purchasing Quill drop me an e-mail at kjmatt1@home.com and I will keep you posted. When I publish a book the first thing that I do is convert it to unformatted text. The text file will have a .txt extenstion. I will remove all the HTML from it as well. Much of the time, however the file is already in a raw text format. It may sound strange but once the text is clean it should be converted into HTML, broken into one HTML file per chapter in the book. You'll see why as we continue. The examples below will assume that you are using Microsoft Word to do your formatting. Text Clean Up Set your options in Word to show Paragraph marks. Find What: ^p^p Replace With: @@ This will preserve your natural paragraph breaks. Find What: ^p Replace With: [SPACE] Since almost all lines will end with a paragraph mark after the first search and replace this will replace the heard break with a space. Find What: @@ Replace With: ^p^p this will put back the natural paragraph breaks. Chapter Formatting Now that your text has been formatted it is time to break it into chapters. This is a bit trickier but you can do it. Open up a second word document. Type the following text exactly as you see it. (You must do this for every chapter in your book.)
Save your work as a .txt file, not a .doc file. What ever you do do not convert the file to HTML or you will have just defeated the whole purpose. Spacing of text Formatting verse, such as poems, is hard to do so that it is readable in both the desktop and Pocket PC versions of reader. What I do is to preceed each line with five nonbreaking spaces. If your document has images you would be wise to make two master documents. One formatted for the desktop version of Reader and one for the Pocket PC. the Pocket PC graphics should be no larger than 240x320 as you cannot scroll within the graphic images. That's about it for now. If you follow these simple guidelines you should have no trouble formatting text for Microsoft Reader. Should you wish to submit a book I prefer that you send me raw text and seperate graphic images for the covers. I really do not like to receive .lit files that have been formatted using ReaderWorks Standard because the cover graphics of a book are just as important as the book itself, and I take pride in what I publish. If you have a book, I'll be happy to format it for you, for free! But at least now you have an idea of where to begin. |