Notes on ebook file conversion

Rupert Dreyfus, cool-name-haver and author of Spark and The Rebel’s Sketchbook (and one of the guys who, quite rightly, has passively encouraged me to plug my own books a bit harder because we indies should snap up most opportunities to do this without apology- but I’ll point out that I’ve written this without asking Rupert if he agrees and also select this post as one of the necessary handful of non-self-plugs) asked me about ebooks and file conversion. Likely someone else is wondering too. I hope they find this, then :)

Calibre is a free program that can convert between file types. MOBI
is the same as a Kindle file. EPUB and MOBI formats are essentially
identical, so you can convert between them with ease. There’s another
free program called Adobe Digital Editions that allows you to read EPUB
files on your computer. I use Lulu (you can use CreateSpace or some other service) to convert a
word file to PDF, then you can create the Kindle file (which is MOBI)
and convert that to EPUB using Calibre, and then you have EPUB, MOBI and
PDF. Or if you use Lulu, you make an EPUB from a Word file and convert that to MOBI with Calibre- either way is fine. That’s really all you need, because EPUBs are the universal ebook
file of sorts. Colour images in the file appear on a computer or iPad,
but will appear in black and white on an e-reader- is just something
I’ve forgot to consider sometimes.

Calibre is good for
converting EPUB to MOBI and back again, but it does bizarre things when
converting to PDF (makes 4000 pages of massive-sized font text and
similar useless things.) I convert PDFs to EPUB for personal use, but I
wouldn’t do this for something I was selling, as you can never guarantee
that you’ve removed page numbers and headers/footers from the PDF, so
you get stuff that looks like:

“Your father’s right,” she 103 said. “Mockingbirds don’t
do one thing but make music
HARPER LEE TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
for us to enjoy … but sing their
hearts out for us.
GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING
That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

You
can ask it to remove “HARPER LEE”, “TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD”, numbers
“[0-9][0-9][0-9]” and “GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING” prior to the conversion
process, but then, does the book’s title appear in the text? Will it be
removed? Are there numbers in the text or do all numbers appear as
words? Pfft- would I even be able to answer these questions about my own
books? No.

There’s a free Kindle app for computers
you can download to view MOBI files- but I’ve never done this: as far as
I know you can always trust that EPUB files and MOBI files, apart from
their format, will look identical on an e-reader :) 

Hope this helped! Feel free to share your own tips on ebook formats, marketing, or whatever you’ve found useful of late :D