rickchapman
New Member
Posts: 4 
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Post by rickchapman on Jun 30, 2015 9:10:40 GMT -8
I'm just wondering if anyone has any comment on the quality of the conversions created by the meatgrinder in regards to mobi files. It converted my entire book to Times Roman: the headings, the pseudo drop caps, everything. By contrast, the epub maintained my style formattings in the epub. Chapters, for example, used Helvetica in the Word doc and use it in the epub.
Is this typical of the output created by the meatgrinder in respects to mobi files?
If so, it's fair to say SM is not useful for mobi creation. Even if they distributed the file to Amazon, I wouldn't want this file sent out to the market.
rick
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Post by Julie Harris on Jun 30, 2015 14:49:11 GMT -8
Draft2Digital will give you a better mobi that you can upload to KDP.
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Post by Ted on Jun 30, 2015 15:26:06 GMT -8
Very few Kindle owners download ebooks from any place other than Amazon. Amazon and Apple are closed shops, in the sense that the digital device is designed to access their respective makers website for ebooks, music, etc. So in that sense how your ebook looks in mobi file really doesn't matter that much.
You can use Calibre to convert your file to mobi if you don't want to use Amazon or KDP to convert your file. Calibre is free and is used by other Smashwords Forum members. Calibre is probably the most popular ebook conversion method around.
Rather than going to another third party like Draft2Digital for a mobi file or using Calibre, it might be easier to use the systems provided by Amazon and KDP for conversion.
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Post by jaydax on Jul 1, 2015 6:06:59 GMT -8
I start the conversion process using Calibre to import a Word docx file. I then add cover and meta information and convert the docx file to epub. That is then tweaked in the Calibre editor to make sure the fonts I want are embedded, that Word's unused styles are deleted, and that the aspect ratio of the cover is preserved. If I've used high resolution graphics I'll replace the one the docx file had with high resolution ones. Diagrams are replaced with svg images. Next I use Calibre's 'check' utility and fix any errors. (The most common error is duplicate ids - just delete the second one.) Finally I'll use an online epubcheck service and fix anything it finds. The resultant epub file is then submitted to Smashwords and to Amazon.
I wouldn't start with a mobi file. These are very much cut down epub files and were designed to be readable on e-ink devices where text only was involved. When a document is sent to Amazon for conversion it produces mobi and azw3 files, the latter being sent to devices with better graphic capabilities. Amazon no longer accepts mobi files as a source format.
Apple uses the epub format and, unlike Smashwords, works very well with epub3 documents.
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