Wednesday, March 06, 2013

A Blog Post For Future Reference

I just finished the 2nd draft of my 3rd novel, and Vicki was eager to get it onto her Kindle so that she could be the first person (other than me) to read the current version.  I mentally estimated that I'd need about 2 minutes to complete that task, and then... I realized that none of the software I've used for converting my books into ePub and Kindle format in the past is installed on this laptop!  Oh, the joys of having a compute die on you, even months after you've supposedly recovered from it.  Anyway, the news that there's a 2nd draft ready to go is the only thing that might interest non-Matt readers of this post, and you all can stop reading now.

The hardest part in completing the task, which stretched it out over an hour or more, was trying to find the names of the software I used before, as I simply didn't remember them.  So to make that easier in the future:

Mobipocket Creator is the app that takes in an HTML version of the book and converts it to Kindle (.prc) format.

KindlePreviewer allows you to see what the .prc file will look like on a Kindle.

Calibre will input the HTML version of the book and convert it to ePub format, and then give you a way to send that ePub file to a device such as Kobo.  I've actually made fairly detailed notes on how to do the Kobo install, and they're in the Books folder I have under "Documents" (which gets backed up daily).

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