![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Nook: Reformatting the File
May. 9th, 2011 09:03 pmSo, technically speaking, Nook (and pretty much everyone else under the sun except for Kindle) uses the Epub format. Kindles use .mobi (or .prc) format. Both are based on XML and so I thought, honestly, that I should be able to repurpose my Kindle files without too much trouble.
Barnes & Noble lets you publish direct to Nook using PubIt. I signed up for a PubIt account without too much difficulty. PubIt will take files in Epub OR you can upload in Word, HTML, RTF, or TXT and it will convert them automatically. So, I uploaded the HTML file I'd used, and took a look in their Nook emulator. Problems I've noticed:
1. The page breaks don't work. This shouldn't be surprising, because they were done with a Mobi-specific tag, I think: <mpb:pagebreak />
2. On the Kindle, all paragraphs indent automatically unless you suppress the indentation. On the Nook, apparently they do NOT indent automatically so I'll need to put that in.
3. My blockquoted sections don't indent at all.
4. My section breaks are three asterisks, centered: I put them inside a set of paragraph tags that refer to a style called secbreak, which is centered. Despite the fact that I close the paragraph tag, on the Nook, the next paragraph after each section break is also centered. I find that really odd.
5. The TOC links don't seem to work.
The emulator lets you see both the Nook and the Nook Color; these problems seem to be the same on both.
Things that do seem to work:
1. The small caps look fine.
2. The Czech characters (which are UTF-8, IIRC) are showing up correctly.
Emulators are really limited but I am not optimistic that looking at it on Nook for the PC (or an actual Nook) would be an improvement. I don't think this solution is going to work. I may try Calibre next (I think the whole point of Calibre is that you can convert files into other formats so that if something you want is in Kindle format and you have a Nook, or it's in Epub and you have a Kindle, you can move them around.) I will embrace the fact that converting from Word to HTML-to-be-turned-into-Mobi requires coding by hand, but having optimized the HTML for Kindle it really seems to me that SURELY there is a tool that will automatically turn it into an Epub. I have a bad feeling I'm going to have to go through and put in indents, however.
Barnes & Noble lets you publish direct to Nook using PubIt. I signed up for a PubIt account without too much difficulty. PubIt will take files in Epub OR you can upload in Word, HTML, RTF, or TXT and it will convert them automatically. So, I uploaded the HTML file I'd used, and took a look in their Nook emulator. Problems I've noticed:
1. The page breaks don't work. This shouldn't be surprising, because they were done with a Mobi-specific tag, I think: <mpb:pagebreak />
2. On the Kindle, all paragraphs indent automatically unless you suppress the indentation. On the Nook, apparently they do NOT indent automatically so I'll need to put that in.
3. My blockquoted sections don't indent at all.
4. My section breaks are three asterisks, centered: I put them inside a set of paragraph tags that refer to a style called secbreak, which is centered. Despite the fact that I close the paragraph tag, on the Nook, the next paragraph after each section break is also centered. I find that really odd.
5. The TOC links don't seem to work.
The emulator lets you see both the Nook and the Nook Color; these problems seem to be the same on both.
Things that do seem to work:
1. The small caps look fine.
2. The Czech characters (which are UTF-8, IIRC) are showing up correctly.
Emulators are really limited but I am not optimistic that looking at it on Nook for the PC (or an actual Nook) would be an improvement. I don't think this solution is going to work. I may try Calibre next (I think the whole point of Calibre is that you can convert files into other formats so that if something you want is in Kindle format and you have a Nook, or it's in Epub and you have a Kindle, you can move them around.) I will embrace the fact that converting from Word to HTML-to-be-turned-into-Mobi requires coding by hand, but having optimized the HTML for Kindle it really seems to me that SURELY there is a tool that will automatically turn it into an Epub. I have a bad feeling I'm going to have to go through and put in indents, however.
