![]() ![]() Alternative Appsīut what if you’ve downloaded or bought an epub from Smashwords or Lulu? They don’t have designated tablet or smartphone apps that you can use. You’ll be able access books purchased from these sites by just opening their apps on your tablet. Kobo, the Apple iBookstore, and Nook have apps that you can install on your tablet to read their books. So you’ll need an app that can read epubs. ![]() How do you do that?Įbooks that you buy or download for free from Kobo, Lulu, Nook, Google Play, and the Apple iBookstore are delivered to you in epub format. So, you bought an ebook from a distributor other than Amazon, and you want to read it on your tablet* or smartphone. Posted on NovemNovemCategories Ebook formatting Tags epub, how to format an ebook, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Sigil 2 Ways to Read an Epub on a Tablet You don’t have to be a tech wizard to create an ebook in Sigil. (If the suspense is killing you, check out How to Make an Ebook with Sigil, by Paul Salvette. I will discuss the ins and outs of styling an ebook in Sigil in a future post. For now, don’t be afraid to play around a little. Your next step in producing an epub is to style your ebook in Sigil, using Sigil’s toolbar. ![]() You can save your file in both formats, copy them to Sigil and decide for yourself.Ĥ. ![]() So, while it’s possible to save your Word file as Web Page, Filtered, saving it as plain text might be a better option. Don’t take my word for it, though. This will leave your formatting mostly in tact, but your book will look like a dog’s breakfast in places in Code View. This point will become more meaningful in a future post.Īn aside: The Sigil User Guide suggests that you can also save your Word files as Web Page, Filtered. But here’s the good news: if you click on the Code View (the button to the right of Book View), your ebook will have been cleared of a lot of unnecessary code that can give you undesirable results later on. Paste your ebook file in the middle windowīecause you copied your ebook from a plain text file, you will have lost a lot of your formatting, so you’ll need to reapply some of that formatting in Sigil. Now that you’ve saved your document in a form that Sigil can read, copy and paste it from Word into the middle window in Sigil’s Book View. Select “Other coding” and choose UTF-8 encoding (you’ll need to scroll down in the menu), Click OK.ģ. This option strips your Word file of unnecessary code that can mess up your ebook in the conversion process. Go to File, Save As, and save your file as Plain Text (.txt). Here’s what you need to do (I learned this trick from Paul Salvette’s excellent tutorial, How to Make an Ebook with Sigil):ġ. Open your ebook in Word (I use Word 2010). docx files, it only reads HTML, epub and. Your first obstacle to using Sigil is to figure out how to get your ebook from Word into Sigil. Sigil’s Book View works like a Word processor I’ll bet you can guess what some of them do… I would never have believed it if I hadn’t tried it myself. Sigil’s Book View operates like a simple Word processor. Sigil has two views: “Book View” and “Code view” (don’t worry about Code View for now). It’s surprisingly easy to use and if you’re at all interested in having more control over how your ebook looks, Sigil allows you to do a bit of tweaking under the hood. It can help you to prevent some of these quirks. Sigil is a free, open source epub editor that allows you to create an epub file that you can upload to most distributors. Paragraph styling is indented after it’s converted by Lulu conversion softwareĮnter Sigil. Similar quirks occur in Scrivener, as well. While there is a way to trick the conversion software’s annoying tendency to indent automatically, the results aren’t always pleasing. For example, the Lulu and Kindle converters tend to indent paragraphs, even if you’ve applied block paragraph styling in Word (block paragraphs are generally the preferred style for nonfiction books). Sometimes, though, a distributor’s conversion software doesn’t do what you expect. Because many authors use Microsoft Word, this is an attractive option. If your ebook is mostly text and you’ve done a good job of cleaning it up in Word, the end result can be quite acceptable. Ebook distributors make it possible for authors to upload a Microsoft Word document for publishing an ebook. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |