E-books: Creation and use

NOTE: This information is SO OLD that you would be crazy to rely upon any of it...

A lot of web sites and web pages talk about how You can make a bazillion dollars and drive a kajillion visitors to your web sites by publishing e-books!

I've been using e-books on my Compaq iPaq handheld computer since I got it in January of 2001, and I've found the option of having a book in electronic format to be quite useful.

Sadly, while there are a lot web sites extolling the virtues of e-books for your business, they're a bit short on the details of making an e-book.

I'm not going to tell you how to make a bazillion dollars with e-books. However, I will gladly tell you how to make an e-book for your own use. What you do with it from there is up to you.

Caveat: I'm a UNIX guy. All the tools I use are for UNIX. If you run Windows, well, I'll try to provide links and information on the equivalent tools. Often they cost more - a lot more. Sorry about that.

Before Creation

Firstly, you need to decide what format you want to use. There are a number of competing formats:

• Microsoft Reader - This is a proprietary format used by Microsoft. Later versions have "rights management", which is PR speak for "we remove any rights you have to manage what you purchased". However, it has some uses and can be convenient. I will make a note that extremely large e-books in Reader format seem to take a LOT of memory on my iPaq, and can be extremely slow to open. If it is like that on a 200+Mhz handheld, I can't imagine how ugly it gets on slower machines. On the plus side it can handle multiple fonts within the same document, and is pretty good about reformating HTML documents into a readable, handheld copy.
  
  
• Adobe Acrobat - this is the now well-known "PDF" format. It's not bad, but it doesn't translate well to small screens because it isn't capable of "reflowing" text - unless, of course, the PDF was created on Acrobat 5 and is able to allow reflowing. Practical upshot: use Acrobat 5 for creation if at all possible...
  
  
• Aportis Doc - a nifty little format supported in the Palm and (now) on the Windows CE/PocketPC platform. It can reflow, can use different fonts (one at a time only, I'm afraid), and is fairly quick to open. File size is bigger than with Microsoft Reader but not so much as to be a worry. I've had a number of e-books that simply were not readable in Reader format but worked fine in Doc format.

My recommendation? Doc format. Plus, there is the handy ability to make Doc files with native UNIX tools. We'll go over each format in turn.

Creation

Aportis Doc

This is the easiest format to use, especially if you are a UNIX user like myself. The program you need is Makedoc; you can find it in the sidebar above. The key is to make sure that you format the files correctly before you feed them to the Makedoc program.

If you are formatting HTML files then the easiest thing to do is to use the Lynx web browser to reformat the page using the page width you want. Using a parameter like -width=30000 is more than enough to make the paragraphs format correctly. Note that the <p> paragraph markers will still format the paragraph sections correctly, but the lynx formatting trick will eliminate hard line breaks inside the paragraphs that can be quite annoying.

So, if you have book.html and you wish to turn it into book.pdb the steps are as follows:

	  lynx -width=30000 -dump book.html > book.txt
	  makedoc book.txt book.pdb "My book"
	  

This will produce the file "book.pdb", and it will show up as "My book" in the Aportis Doc book listing on your handheld device.

You can also use Windows and Macintosh utilities to create Aportis Doc files, and they appear to be free. Click here to check them out.

Also, there is Aportis Converter. This utility will convert Word, WordPerfect, Acrobat and other formats into Doc format (Windows only, I'm afraid). Converter is payware, so be aware that it will cost you. I've not tried it; if you have, I'd love to hear your review of it.

Microsoft Reader

Microsoft Reader is kind of a black box; I can't find any information on the format used; frankly, that isn't much of a surprise considering the company it comes from.

The one saving grace of Reader is that it comes built-in to your handheld (like my iPaq 3630). Since it is in the ROM (Flash RAM, actually) it doesn't take up any more of your precious memory. However, upgrading to PocketPC 2002 makes it move to the regular RAM. Gee, a Microsoft upgrade that makes the OS fatter. Who'd of thought?

My point is that unless you have the 32Mb ROM version of the iPaq you are going to want to think about whether upgrading is for you. You might just want to upgrade, ditch Reader and move to Doc.

Reader files are nice and compact; however, the Reader program itself can take quite a bit of memory when running. Also, I've noted that with very large files (books of more than 500 pages) it can start to get very unresponsive during the later pages. If possible I would recommend that you split the book into parts of 200 pages or less so that you don't have this problem.

The only way to make a Reader document (a ".lit" file) is using the Reader creation plugin for Microsoft Word (or write your own conversion utility using the SDK from Microsoft). So, in a nutshell, you are going to have to have a Microsoft OS, Microsoft Office and the free (for now) Reader plug-in for Word. That's a lot of money for a so-so e-book format.

Also, note that my limited experience with Reader v2.0 was not so good; check out the sidebar to see how well my attempts to read the "free" promotional books worked out.

I will say that the handheld versions of Reader do a very nice job of rendering the text for display, and if you are importing HTML documents into Microsoft Word for conversion to Reader format you will be pleasantly surprised; the auto-format option can also do wonders, but keep and original copy handy just in case it decides to completely mangle the text. I've had this happen a few times.

You can get the Microsoft Reader plug-in for Word here.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat format has been around for a while, and you can get an Acrobat reader for just about any platform you care to name.

Until recently it has been more suited to the desktop than the handheld market; Acrobat 5 solves that problem by instituting a "reflow" API that allows the text to reflow so that it fits on the smaller screens of handheld computers.

This only applies to files created with Acrobat 5 using the Reflow (AKA "tagged") options; older Acrobat format files will still appear to be static, even if your Acrobat viewer supports reflow. Annoying.

I'm told that Acrobat 5 has a plug-in that will re-flow ("tag") an older file; I've not confirmed this myself

However, I'm not putting Acrobat down. It's a nice format for sharing files across platforms. With the proper tools it can be very nice.

I have two Acrobat viewers for my iPaq; one is called "Primer", and it is produced by Ansyr Technologies. The sad part is... it costs about $80.00. Ouch. Now you know why I haven't upgraded my 2.3 version to the new 3.1 version. Also, it doesn't support reflow, and I don't see that feature in the 3.1 version. However, it is quite fast and very, very compact - less than 800Kb in size.

The other viewer I use is the free one from Adobe, the Adobe Acrobat Reader for PocketPC. It supports Reflow. It is free! It is 4Mb in size. On a 32Mb system, that hurts.. Free or small, take your pick.

Creating Acrobat files on Unix is a snap. Simply print your file as a Postscript document and then use the very common ps2pdf program to convert it to a PDF file. It's simply that easy.

It also has a downside. No Table of Contents. No Tagging/reflowing. Not a problem for most, but for handhelds that can be an issue.

For the moment you'll have to plonk down a fair amount of cash for Adobe Acrobat 5 to get these features (Acrobat Distiller might be able to do this, but I don't have access to Distiller).

Creating complex Acrobat files under Unix is still an area of research for me; check back later for more information.

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