I am having an adventure.

As an experiment, I am making Todd’s Story more friendly for eBook readers.  My experience with  my wife’s Nook has told me that pdf files and eBook readers are not exactly the best of friends.  So, after some Googling (yes, it’s a verb now, shut it), I decided to go with EPUB format.  It seemed to be the most cross-compatible.

I downloaded a copy of Calibre, and off I went.  Okay, converting from pdf was terrible, but converting from low-formatting formats like .rtf is better.  rtf it is.  The next hurdle came in variable-width formatting.  Normally, not a problem, but both Calibre and my wife’s Nook interpret hard carriage returns as a double space, which is on top of the 1.5 spacing it already gives text.  Okay, no problem, I went through and changed my paragraph separations.  There was nothing to do with the song lyrics, so I left them as-is.

The next step was to make sure that the cover image would show.  Calibre puts the EPUB file, the source rtf, and the cover graphic all in the same directory, so I couldn’t be sure if the image was included in the EPUB file or not.  More Googling ensued, and Aldiko ended up on my Android phone.  I moved the EPUB file over, imported it, and… success!  Cover graphic!  I won’t have to archive multiple files into a .zip or whatever to distribute it!

So, I start flipping through the pages in Aldiko.  All of the formatting is gone.  Centering, bold, italics, everything.  Carriage returns are normal.  This looks like it was written in Notepad.  Not exactly easy on the eyes.

On top of that, my wonderful WordPress install is telling me that it won’t allow uploads of EPUB files into its Media section, because it poses a security risk.  Yeah, XML based files would.

Geek note – Yes, I could host and link the file manually, but that’s not what I’m trying to do here.

My next steps include checking if Lulu will allow me to upload my own EPUB file instead of paying them more than I can afford to convert it for me and testing my EPUB file out on an iPad 2 and any other eReader that I can get my hands on.

Wish me luck.