Ebooks

Due to time limitations I've decided to discontinue providing LRF formatted fan fiction on the Ebook Library.

Users who are using the older model Sony devices can still download the Epub format and convert to LRF if necessary.

Count Pages is a very useful plugin that will with a click of a button count the pages in a mobi/epug file and tell you how many words are in the story.

If you already have Calibre you can install this plugin via Calibre.

I installed this about two weeks ago on Calibre and I'm loving it so far. I have it setup to not only count pages in a fan fiction story but to also generate a word count. This is useful for anyone that likes to organize their stories by story length. :)

There are other fan fiction friendly plugins available through Calibre but I haven't tested them all out yet.

I've been reading up on the changes to the comments and it looks like there may be a fix to show subject headings but you have to have a paid or plus account for it to work. I have neither. So it is highly unlikely that subject headers for comments will be coming back to this community on LJ.

This community doesn't generate all that many comments and I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to create a fanfic_ebooks community at Dreamwidth?

I'd appreciate all opinions and ideas.

Hi,

On Saturday I made a few changes to the Ebook Library

In the left column under Most Recent I've added the fandom name for the story and increased the character limit so that more of the summary is visible. I've also done the same for Featured Stories on the Main page.

The other major change is that I removed two of the Skins because parts were broken by the above changes and I won't have time to fix it until next weekend.

The last change is for anyone that is using an RSS reader to recieve updates on the archive. The fandom is now also listed next to the rating.

Someone rightly pointed out that you can't always tell by the summary what fandom the story is in.

I'm hoping these few changes will make navigating and finding stories in your preferred fandoms easier. :)

I'm hoping my changes didn't damage any other part of the site so if you see any weird formatting errors please don't hesitate to contact me so I can fix it.

ETA: There is a LJ rss feed for the most recent updates at the Ebook Library. Go Here to add the feed to your LJ.

Thank you velocitygrass for finding it!

This post is to help anyone who'd like to modify the style or look of the epubs downloaded at the A03 Archive.

I made a new "Extra CSS" code to use in Calibre to convert the A03 epubs to epub. I also found out how to remove underlines on the Chapter links and turn the font back. The purpose of the reconverting is to remove the blank paragraph space and replace it a indent at the start of a new paragraph. During the tests I also found out how to remove the underline on the Chapters so it looks more like a heading and less like a link. That was something I found kind of neat because the links still work. :) But they don't look like links.

Here is the code:

body { margin: 0; }
a {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
a [href] {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
p {margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; padding: 0pt; text-indent: 15pt; text-align: justify;}
h1 { text-align: center;}
h2 {text-align: center; }
h3 { text-align: center;}
h4 { text-align: center; }
h5 { text-align: center; }
h6 { text-align: center; }

And here's more information on the Look and Feel section of Calibre.

I've found that converting epub2epub gave me the best results.

I wasn't sure if I was the only one that preferred indents over the space but just in case I thought I should share.

The Archive of Our Own has released new code for the archive that'll allow users to export stories into epub, mobipocket, html, and pdf.

I've done some testing and I love what they've accomplished. The stories retain the correct metadata, such as author and title, there is a working Table of Contents, and based on your user preferences, the user can select how the file is named when it downloads. (which I thought was awesome.) :)

The only downside at the moment is that I don't think there is any way to customize how the epub will look before the story is exported onto your computer. Though I'm confident in time there may be options to pick your preferred font, font-size, and whether or not you want spaces between your paragraphs or indents. Based on how responsive the coders and the A03 team have been before I think it's possible customization features may already be in the works.

I'm very excited about this new feature because it opens the door to reading a lot more fan fiction without having to go through a lot of effort.

Hi,

This is a notice for anyone using fan fiction downloader to grab fics from fanfiction.net. Apparently ff.net changed some coding and I hear that fan fiction downloader does not work anymore. jane_elliot found a program called Graffer that works with fanfiction.net.

Here is the original post where I got this information from.

This is a poll for anyone that's used or has an interest in using the Ebook Library Archive. I'm trying to get an idea of what I can do to improve the site and know which formats to focus on more.

Ebook Library Poll (poll is hosted at DreamWidth because I can't make polls on LJ)


http://amalthia.dreamwidth.org/603214.html#comments

Edit: I'm not sure if you can fill in polls through open ID or not? But if you'd like to leave your answer in the comments that would be great too. :)

I'm hoping the community can help me decide something.

I'm giving a lot of thought to discontinuing LRF as a format that the Ebook Library would host. I've been noticing some problems. For example, I found that after the end of italics there's an extra space. (it took me about 2 years to notice this so I'm not sure how important it is?) But it's most noticeable when there is an italicized word followed by a comma. I was getting sentences like "Hello , this is a test."

I must add that this does not happen in RTF, epub, or the mobipocket files.

There are other reasons I've considered discontinuing the format.

Calibre no longer supports LRF so if there are any bugs they won't be fixed. Sony has switched over to epub, LRF is slowly but surely getting phased out.

The other advantage of epub is that all the new ebook devices coming out, including the Ipad, support epub. (now if Kindle would get on board...)

Reasons I have not switched over to epub myself.

A) I like the font and chapter headings better.
B) No side page margins (like what you see with epub on the Sony PRS-300/500/505/600)
C) Almost all my files are LRF switching over would be a pain.
D) I like the full text justification.

I'm not sure what to do?

In the meantime, I've stopped converting any more files until I have a chance to learn more about epub. I've spent some time on that this week and I have fixed the parts that I didn't like. But I'm not sure I"m used to the different default font style.

I've learned a lot since I've started converting and each format has it's own quirks and exceptions and I sometimes feel like my brain is going to explode, though that could be grad school stuff...

I'd love to hear people's opinions. I'm hoping most people following and participating in this community use the Ebook Library and have thoughts and opinions on the files I'm creating and how they work on your devices???

And in happy news, there are now officially over 1000 stories hosted at the Ebook Library. :)

EDIT: I forgot to add that I am in the process of re-editing the HTML source files to switch the order of the italics with punctuation so the extra space isn't as noticeable, but it may take a while even using Notepad++ because I'm spending every weekend at the library doing homework and that leaves a limited amount of time to edit files, or reupload them to calibre to re-convert.

I did find out why it's happening and it's a LRF limitation because Sony didn't create full font support so there are no bold or italic fonts for LRF. Instead it simulates something close enough and that's why it adds the space.

I may be a little bit compulsive but I don't like the idea of anyone's works hosted on the archive not being as correct as possible and it's better to fix it now while there are only about 100 LRF files...

Okay I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here but I found two posts of interest for anyone who is converting their Word Docs to html. :)

The first is Convert Word Docs to HTML I haven't tested it, but it looks interesting. :)

The other is People! Stop using Word to convert to HTML! All I can say is AMEN!

I'm officially switching programs that I use to convert documents to HTML. I'm now using WordPerfect X4 instead of MS Word 97.