E-book conversion

Recently I had the pleasure of working with Tim Brownson, a life coach based in Florida and author of several self-development books. Up to now, his books have only been available for online viewing as PDFs. I tackled the task of converting his latest book, “How Do I Set Goals That Work?“, into both MOBI (for Kindle) and EPUB (for other e-book readers).

Tim’s original document came to me as a MS Word doc. Depending on the makeup of the source document, conversion can be trivial or time-consuming. In this case, some hand tuning was required to deduce the logical structure of the book from the visual style structure. I first created the EPUB version using custom scripts, then converted the EPUB into a MOBI using Calibre‘s bundled command-line tool ebook-convert. While EPUB seems to be becoming the dominant standard, MOBI is still an important format as Amazon’s Kindle can only handle MOBI and not EPUB.

The e-book files weigh in at around 100-130kB each, which is about one sixth of the file size of the corresponding PDF (800kB). As the cover image is a 75kB JPEG, the actual content of the book is actually less than 50k when compressed. While disk space may be cheap these days, file sizes are still worth keeping track of as wireless transfer costs may be an issue for some readers.