Creating Sony e-books for fun
By Paul Biba
Got an email from Marcel Bischoff: I just wanted to let you know that I have finished formatting and setting my first PDF eBook for the Sony PRS-505 Reader. It’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, set in Adobe Garamond Pro and looks quite alright I think. Maybe your readers are interested, too. I plan to add more free books in the same fashion from time to time.
I think it’s great that the reading community is trying to do these things themselves and don’t just rely on other people. MobileRead comes to mind, of course.
So I played around with my new favourite workflow for creating eBooks from Project Gutenberg texts. This includes using the free TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software to clean up the raw text and smarten the quotes as well as the excellent Mellel text editor which I use for formatting and output. If you have any kind of writing to do, I strongly suggest Mellel over anything else. Trash your crappy Microsoft Word and breathe in the fresh air of simplicity, speed and power. Seriously.
In the past I have tried different approaches and different formats on my Sony Reader. ePub in particular looks like a great format but Sony only supports it only in a very limited way. The standard size ePub content is displayed in is too small for my taste, unfortunately the next bigger setting is too huge already and the biggest one is truly humongous. There are only a couple of set fonts, font embedding does not work and there is no support for justification. Therefore the best bet was PDF. You can completely control the output and it looks great on the device.
Editor’s note: If you have something interesting, and e-book related, going on, let me know. It may be worth a post.
January 16th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Did he follow these guidelines?
Reference: Optimize PDFs For Sony Reader
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/reference-optimize-pdfs-for-sony-reader/
January 17th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Look for yourself. The reference you link to on your blog is for the older PRS-500 by the way. This is relevant because the new model does support more gray levels for example.
Let me know what you think!