eBook Projects

[Treamayne]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this topic (so Mods, please move if there is a better location). I've been working on tweaking my eBooks and thought it might be useful to share information if anybody else is doing the same (or considering doing so). I saw the "Pimp my Aether" thread by @Snorkel, so I know at least somebody else does some eBook editing.

I figured this thread could be a way to share tricks, code, css, etc. I am using Calibre's editor to make and edit my ePubs.

So far, in the Cosmere, some of my projects have been:

• Created a "Cosmere Guide" (PM for details) that includes a Cosmere Index, suggested reading order and short Shardworld Summary so that I can give this to friends to help them decide if they want to read some/all of the Cosmere.
• Extracting Short Stories and novellas so they can reside in "Series Order"
  • e.g. Extract Allomancer Jak Story to its own ePub so my Era 2 series order can file it as book 1.5 between Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self
• Fixing all of the annotations links in Warbreaker
  • It annoyed me that the links, for example, end of Ch 1 had a link to "Annotations to Ch 1" but the link to return (to Ch 1) was at the start of the annotations - if you want to proceed to Ch 2 from the end of the Ch 1 annotations you had to go to the CH 2 annotation to select the "return to Ch 2" link.
  • Now, I have it so each title links to the Table of Contents, the end of each chapter links the annotations for that chapter and the end of each annotation has two links, one to return to the beginning of the chapter you finished and one to continue to the start of the next chapter
• I created what I call "The Complete Mistborn Era 1" based on my Secret History Integration thread. What I did was:
  • Merged the "Eleventh Metal" story into the "Mistborn Trilogy Omnibus" ePub and placed it first
  • Extracted M:SH and placed the individual chapters where the referenced thread discusses they belong
  • Further separated some sections from the SH chapters to place some scenes inside the appropriate original trilogy chapter (mostly in HoA - example below)
  • The result is a single ePub that contains all of Eleventh Metal, TFE, WoA, HoA and SH - all in internal chronologic order (recommended only for re-reads, of course)
• Fixed the images in The Rithmatist to properly float left or right and scale on my e-reader (Kobo Forma) without overflow losing parts of images and adapting to landscape and portrait orientations
• Added the Deleted Scene to my copy of The Emperor's Soul
• Converted and fixed the word documents for White Sand (prose) and Aether of Night (as mentioned in linked thread above) into proper ePubs

Example from my Secret History Integration:

Spoiler

From HoA Ch 58 merged with Sh Ch 6-5:

Quote

“Spook,” Kelsier whispered, touching Spook’s soul with his own again. He choked on the words, but forced them out. “Spook, her city is burning.”

Spook trembled.

“Thousands will die in the flames,” Kelsier whispered. He touched the boy’s cheek. “Spook, child. You want to be like me? Really like me? Then fight when you are beaten!”

 

Thousands will die in the flames.

The mists tickled his cheeks. In the cacophony, Spook had let his tin dim, relieving him of sensation, leaving him feeling blissfully numb. It was better that way.

You want to be like Kelsier? Really like Kelsier? Then fight when you are beaten!

“Lord Spook!” The voice was faint.

Survive!

With a scream of pain, Spook flared tin. As the metal always did, it brought a wave of sensations—thousands of them, shocking him at once. Pain. Feeling. Hearing. Sounds, smells, lights.

And lucidity.

 

Kelsier looked up at the spiraling, churning form of Ruin, angered. More of Ruin’s attention was focusing this direction. It would soon rebuff Kelsier.

Beating it here was only a small victory, but it was proof. This thing could be resisted. Spook had done it.

And would do it again.

Kelsier looked down at the child in his arms. No, not a child any longer. He opened himself to Spook, and spoke a single, all-powerful command.

“Survive!”

 

My current project is working on a Definitive version of Elantris. I'm integrating the "Hope of Elantris" short story into the 10th anniversary edition. Since it already had the Mad Prince scenes, I'm also adding the other deleted scenes, as well as the Elantris Glossary from the website. I'm considering trying to clean up the images in the "List of Aons" section so it displays better (possibly breaking each page-sized image into smaller images of each row - so that it reflows better with less clarity loss by shrinking such large images to fit - especially in Landscape). Also considering trying to add the Elantris Annotations (as they were in the Warbreaker eBook).

Edit: I was able to break the images into groups of three so that they reflow correctly in both Portrait and Landscape on the device and don't end up so small you can't read the images. Also, in non-Cosmere land, I created an ePub of the "Year of Dresden" Microfiction (including the comic version of "Everything the Light Touches"), so I now have all of the prose Dresden Files (but not the Graphic Novels or the Audio-only) in eBook.

Does anybody else tweak their personal copies of eBooks? What changes/tweaks have you made?

Also, feel free to ask if you want to know how I made some of the changes.

Edited May 24 by Treamayne
Change/Add, as noted

[Snorkel]

I mostly just fix typos in my ebooks XD

I sometimes remove preview chapters from the ends.

I make the cover picture linear if it is not, I don't know why the trend is to have them as not. Oh, and I use Calibre's magic aspect ratio fix if the cover is all stretched.

In my Pratchett collection, I found the footnote links to be very small and difficult to click on, so I went through the whole of my discworld, made the font bigger and added square brackets around each footnote link.

I made some compilation ebooks. But I don't like to just merge them and have four different books in four different folders with different css files. So sometimes I'll edit them all to have matching css files, styles and fonts and the like.

 

I started a project to collect all of Brandon's online deleted scenes and annotations in one ebook. But I did not get very far with it.

[Treamayne]

On 4/19/2023 at 7:31 PM, Snorkel said:

I started a project to collect all of Brandon's online deleted scenes and annotations in one ebook. But I did not get very far with it.

I'm doing something similar, in that the official Warbreaker eBook has the annotations already. Inspired by that, it's my goal to have a version of Era 1, Elantris, and Emperor's Soul with the annotations and deleted scene's added (Elantris Glossary and Deleted Scenes complete).

Quote

I sometimes remove preview chapters from the ends.

I also remove most of the Chaff, and I created my own "Also by Author" Cosmere list that I exported and import into each Cosmere book (so they all match and are all up-to-date).

Quote

In my Pratchett collection, I found the footnote links to be very small and difficult to click on, so I went through the whole of my discworld, made the font bigger and added square brackets around each footnote link.

May I ask if you did this with in-line code or by altering the CSS for the class used on the text?

Quote

I make the cover picture linear if it is not, I don't know why the trend is to have them as not. Oh, and I use Calibre's magic aspect ratio fix if the cover is all stretched.

I'm not sure what you mean by "cover picture linear;" but if you mean setting it to not overflow and always show the full image in both portrait and landscape modes, then I also make that change.

[Snorkel]

On 01/05/2023 at 1:38 PM, Treamayne said:

May I ask if you did this with in-line code or by altering the CSS for the class used on the text?

I'm not sure what you mean by "cover picture linear;" but if you mean setting it to not overflow and always show the full image in both portrait and landscape modes, then I also make that change.

Footnotes - I added square brackets in the text, and in the CSS I altered the footnotes rule to increase the font size.

Linear cover picture - In calibre, if you import a book and run a check, one of the common warnings is "non-linear items in spine". If you click to see the warning location, I think it's the content.opf file(?) the file where all of the html / xhtml files in your book are listed with their links and their titles. They're listed in the order they will appear in the book. Sometimes there is a cover page at the front, and it will have the tag "linear=no". That tag means that you can't view or scroll to the cover page while you're actually in the book. The cover will be used only as a thumbnail for the book in your ereader library. I change it to "linear=yes".

I think there's also often a contents page at the end of the book that's non-linear, and from memory it's a kindle thing. I don't make those linear.

Edited May 5, 2023 by Snorkel

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, Snorkel said:

Footnotes - I added square brackets in the text, and in the CSS I altered the footnotes rule to increase the font size.

Do you move the notes to the end of the file, then uselinks to move to/from the footnotes "annotation?" Here's an example of what I mean from my edits to Dresden Files:

Spoiler

Quote

    <p class="ToCHang" id="aba_2"><span class="bold">1 —<span class="underline">Storm Front</span></span><span class="superscript"> <a href="ABA.html#aba_n2">[2]</a></span></p>

<snip>

    <p class="Note_Text" id="aba_n2"><span class="bold"><a href="ABA.html#aba_2">2—</a></span> Available in Prose and Graphic Novel Form</p>

I used superscript here and and have each link reference the other.

I'm working on a version for my soon-to-be-updated "Cosmere by Sanderson" xhtml which will replace all of the "Also by' pages in each Cosmere eBook so they are all up-to-date. In theory there is a way to have this act as a pop-up on a Kobo device, but I think I have to make the file a kepub for that functionality.

Quote

Linear cover picture - In calibre, if you import a book and run a check, one of the common warnings is "non-linear items in spine". If you click to see the warning location, I think it's the content.opf file(?) the file where all of the html / xhtml files in your book are listed with their links and their titles. They're listed in the order they will appear in the book. Sometimes there is a cover page at the front, and it will have the tag "linear=no". That tag means that you can't view or scroll to the cover page while you're actually in the book. The cover will be used only as a thumbnail for the book in your ereader library. I change it to "linear=yes".

I was unaware of that setting (and still am, to an extent, since I can't seem to find it) but I move "hidden" covers to the start of the book, use "set as cover" and add it to the Table of Contents - which is probably a more convoluted method to get the same effect.

Quote

I think there's also often a contents page at the end of the book that's non-linear, and from memory it's a kindle thing. I don't make those linear.

Yeah, I usually delete those pages. I often don't keep any Contents page, since the ToC feature does it better. I usually only keep them when there are nonlinear elements (like Illustration index, or the Annotations in Warbreaker).

[Snorkel]

23 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Do you move the notes to the end of the file, then uselinks to move to/from the footnotes "annotation?" Here's an example of what I mean from my edits to Dresden Files:

In the Discworld books the footnotes were already set up like that. I can't remember if the notes are at the end of each chapter, or in a separate file called footnotes.xhtml, or a combination of both within the series. I just left that how it was and changed the font size.

I really like the ebooks that bring up the footnote in a little dialogue box on top, those are fancy.

25 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

I was unaware of that setting (and still am, to an extent, since I can't seem to find it)

That linear tag isn't there in every ebook, only some.

[Treamayne]

Draft 3 of The Cosmere Guide is complete - now with Sanderson's Laws essays added to the end. PM if you want to beta-read for errors (or want any of the xml/css code).

Edited August 5, 2023 by Treamayne

[Treamayne]

Update (double post due to age): I have now added the Annotations from the website to Mistborn Era 1 (mimicking the Warbreaker set-up, with some tweaks I made to all four books)

So now, if you just page through normally, it will go through the whole book, Ars Arcanum, then all annotations. But if you want to jump back and forth (Prologue, annotations to the Prologue, Ch 1, Annotations to Ch 1, etc) then a link at the end of each chapter will take you to that annotation, and links at the end of each annotation allow you the coice of returning to the chapter you left, or proceeding to the next chapter. 

Now, I have added Hope of Elantris to Elantris 10th anniversary and am working on adding have added those annotations as well. Also included in my updated "Elantris Complete" will be:

• Glossary
• Deleted Scenes (Mad Prince was already there, but not the others)
• Pronunciation Guide
  • Essay on Creating Elantris Languages
• Form and the Fantastic

Edited May 24 by Treamayne
Updates