There are several steps to follow in making an e-book.
1. Selecting an author. Once selected I try to make sure he or she is totally represented
on Gutenberg. You might find that an author wrote ten to twenty books, but some of
the older ones wrote a hundred books or more.
2. Finding out what books that author wrote, which of them are already on Project
Gutenberg, and which of them might well be put there, if a copy of the book can be
found. In order to get a hard copy of a book I use Abebooks, which is a consortium
of booksellers all over the world, with software that enables you to find an affordable
copy. It may also be possible to find a copy using eBay. Some booksellers get the
book to you in little more than a day, while some take more than a week. I have a
list of the latter class, and try not to use them. To answer this question I consult
Copac (a well-presented list of what is in the copyright libraries, and other main
libraries), also NGCOBA (New General Catalogue of Old Books and Authors), as well
as Abebooks and eBay.
3. Scanning the book. Currently I use a flat-bed scanner for books that can be opened
out flat, and the very portable Handyscanner for books that have to be scanned one
page at a time. The flat-bed scanner does two double-page scans per minute, while
the Handyscanner does from three to five single-page scans per minute. Thus the Handyscanner
is not always faster than the flat-bed scanner, and it takes practice to make sure
it is making good scans. But I suspect that very soon I shall be using an even better
scanner.
4. Cleaning-up the scans. I use the excellent and free “Scan Tailor”. This produces
tidied-up images of each page, straightened, and squared up so that the edges of
the text blocks are horizontal and vertical, just as they appeared in the book. Most
of this work can be done in the background, so that you can get on with something
else if you like.
5. OCR - Optical Character Recognition. I use ABBYY FineReader 11, which is way better
both in speed and accuracy than its previous release 10.
6. Checking and editing the text. I use my own software, which works under MSDOS,
and which I put into the public domain some six years ago, with regular updates.
I wrote the first version of this software in 1997. The reason for any upgrading
is to make sure that some class of error not previously looked for, can be easily
found. I cannot say that it invariably produces a totally perfect e-book, only a
very nearly perfect one. I rely on people reading the book when it is on Gutenberg,
and letting me know if they find an error. There are probably two or three per book.
7. E-book formats tested here. First and foremost I make the FB2 format. This is
a Russian design, very easy to make with software designed by myself, and easy to
test using Haali Reader. Most e-readers use the epub format. Until very recently
this was slow and not very easy to make, but now it can be made in literally two
or three seconds. I use Sigil to test the epub. Then there is the RTF format, which
I use to make the PDF format, which is the ideal one in which to read a book on the
Mebook.
8. Sending the book to Gutenberg. There is the plain TXT format, which was the original
one favoured by Gutenberg, whose founder used to call it the Plain Vanilla Ascii
format, or PVASCII. And lastly there is the XHTML version, which is the one in which
you have to present the book to the team at Gutenberg, after it has been thoroughly
tested for a high technical quality.
9. Listening to the book. There are several apps that run on the IPod or other Apple
devices, that can read the book aloud. However, these seem to have difficulty in
making a little pause after each paragraph, which I consider essential. I have no
doubt this will be fixed in the next year. Meanwhile you can either make a set of
MP3 files for use on an e-reader, or you can play the book directly using your PC
or laptop. I used to make a CD for each book, as work on it was finished, and then
when the DVD was available, I could put several books on each one. Listening to an
e-book is an ideal way of improving a car journey.
10. Formatting for the Kindle. This device uses the Mobipocket format, MOBI, which
is the same as the PRC format. There is a Mobipocket web page for making e-books
in this format, from various sources such as your XHTML one. The Amazon Kindle uses
the MOBI format, and also has a private format of its own, AZW, which it discourages
you from generating e-books in. I have bought three Kindles as presents for friends
and relations, and in each case have added over 100 MOBI e-books for them to read.
Some of these I made with the Mobipocket software and some with Calibre, a free e-book-making
program. There is now an online converter http://fb2mobi.com/en/ which is very fast
and very accurate. Kindle have brought out a utility kindlegen, which is behind many
of the FB2 to MOBI and EPUB to MOBI softwares, but I cannot make it work properly
as it does not seem to include the all-important Table of Contents. The online converter
I have just mentioned does make the Table of Contents, and runs in a matter of two
to three seconds.