How to confirm if ePub is DRM'ed ? Kobo Aura HD possibly refusing to read DRM-free ePub

I have a different type of Kobo (Glo HD), and no knowledge of DRM
implementation for ePub, though I would expect that a variety of
distinct DRM techniques can be used on ePub files.

I would however expect that an eBook from O'Reilly does not carry DRM. So your problem should have another cause. Which you apparently confirmed by testing on different devices or application software.

What I noticed by experimenting with my Kobo is that, when an eBook
has been loaded and made visible to the Kobo, it may interpret reading
problems as caused by the presence of DRM, though that may not be the
case. And you get an error message that pretends that the book is DRM
protected.

Typically that can happen if some mishap destroys the file or
moves it to another directory in the Kobo memory. That is easily done
by accessing the memory directly, as done by tools such as Calibre,
though this should in no way be construed as suggesting that Calibre
makes such mistakes.

From what I understood experimentally (so I may be wrong) The Kobo
believes it has a DRM problem with that eBook until it does a scan of
its memory, and refreshes its tables, which will then no longer point to a
missing ePub file. I am not sure what is the best way to force that scan.
The way I did it was by using the Kobo browser to download in the Kobo a DRM-free
book (I usually go to http://gutenberg.org for that).

So it could be that your Kobo has some problem reading the file, for
whatever reason, and interprets it as a DRM problem, exactly as it did
for my missing/displaced files.

My idea is not to give you a definite answer on what is wrong, as only
you can do that. It is more to suggest that the Kobo may interpret as
a DRM problem a problem unrelated to DRM.


How to auto-left justify text in personal kindle documents

HTML has to be clean for conversions. Often webpages may use custom/extra styles which confuse Kindle or these plugins.

One idea would be to paste the contents onto a MS Word file and then send the MS Word file to Kindle.

Paste the text of article to MS Word from a web browser. (Make sure to choose to paste TEXT ONLY). Apply only two styles: HEADING1 to the headline and NORMAL to the body. Don't manually style anything.

If you want, you could right-click the NORMAL style button and make sure justified is checked. But I'm not sure it will work (or it is even necessary).

At that point, you can send to kindle. Because Kindle is receiving a clean/unformatted document, it should convert it fairly well.

I actually think that sending a MS Word doc to Kindle is a lot easier than some of these browser-based plugins. Of course, you may end up losing lists, centering, colors, etc.


At the risk of sounding flip and catty, ebook reading devices typically last for a few years -- maybe 5. Also, they are cheaper than ever. I wouldn't think it worth the effort to try to repair. E-ink devices just break down after a while; that's just what happens.

I'm not a fan of the Kindle universe, but their devices are incredibly cheap -- even the tablets.

I would focus instead on keeping an archive of content outside of your devices which you could load on all future devices. Keep the content in Dropbox, Google or a cloud-based reading system.

I personally favor an android tablet because 1)there's a lot to choose from, 2) you can download several different reading systems (including Kindle and Google Play Books and 3)FBReader. I personally don't like Kindle devices because they don't let you download alternate reading apps on them.

UPDATE: I see that the ebook store with iriver is Google Play Books. That's a further reason to find a device with the same GPB store, and you should be able to re-download your storebought content easily onto it. But you can also get the ios version of GPB if you want ipads/iphones.

With regard to troubleshooting, my best guess is that it's a file corruption issue. There's an outside chance that by swapping the sd card or resetting everything and reloading, you can fix it. But is it worth your time to try this?

RELATED: The mobileread forum about iriver https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=219


Safari Books Online on Kindle Paperwhite experimental Browser

Yes, I have tried and it works.

The login process is the same as in any web browser. Navigation within the site is a little difficult but book reading is quite good. However, I couldn't increase font size, but symbols and text were rendered perfectly.

They need to launch some optimized site for Kindle at least.


What device is Amazon basing their error location on?

I've never seen a rework, so I can't be certain what the format is, but my guess is that they are not using display pages, which would be specific to particular devices as you mention. Instead, I would think they are using their location numbers. There is a lot of speculation about where those numbers come from, but the consensus seems to be that each one represents 128 bytes of data.


Any opensource or free css stylesheets for books?

Paul Salvette wrote an ebook formatting guide which I recommend. He wrote boilerplate css which you can view/download here: http://bbebooksthailand.com/bb-CSS-boilerplate.html

His company has produced some epub3 files which you can download for free. http://bbebooksthailand.com/samples.html (You can inspect them by changing the .epub file extension to .zip and then unzipping). I haven't looked at them yet (I just found them when I started to answer your question), but they should be good guides -- especially because the code epub3 compliant.

Here are some other things to think about:

Most publishers use the epub file as input to generate a kindle file, so there are usually  conditional Kindle adjustments to make. Some use a separate kindle css file, while others just combine everything into one generic file.

You can open and inspect css any epub file which is not protected from DRM. That means you can view code from Oreilly Books or Smashwords. Another option is to download any recent Project Gutenberg title. I recently published a title Soldier Boys by Jack Matthews on smashwords which has some up-to-date templates.

I just uploaded my css for Soldier Boys:

http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/private/general-kindle.css

Some notes about my file: Last update was April 2016 not 2013 as I said on the top. I used some default values from a docbook style sheet at the top which would not be relevant to anyone. Also, I did some hocus pocus to make images into chapter titles, so you can ignore the any css classes marked "image-replace-title" or p.pseudo-title. (Also I  figured out some Kindle-friendly image css  which I detailed here).
The cool stuff about my css is my list of breakpoints (which take into account different devices but don't use any kindle-specific media queries). There's no footnotes, boxes or references, but my ebook did have a bibliography. Important: I included a reference to an embedded font -- which you must  delete (I think epubcheck won't validate with a bad font reference).


How do I delete an undeletable book from my Kindle?

Try deregistering and reregistering your Kindle:

Have the Kindle online through Wifi.
Press Menu (three lines stacked).
Press Settings.
Press Registration.
Press Deregister Device and confirm it.
Wait a few seconds for it to take effect.

Repeat the above steps, but pick to register instead of deregister.

My collections had to be added back to the Device from the Cloud, and I had to set the parental control password again.


Wouldn't you just be able to use iTunes to copy the file from your tablet/phone onto your desktop?

It's been a while since I've done it, but after you connect your device and it appears in itunes, you just have to sync it. (I don't think it's going to the cloud, but maybe I'm wrong).

See: https://www.wondershare.com/ios/how-to-export-ibooks-from-iphone-ipad-to-computer.html

Check out this too: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/163131/what-is-the-best-way-to-backup-epub-and-pdf-books-in-ibooks


I use HTML Sandbox. It's from W3 Schools. I get some false positives (easily identifiable) but it works for me. I hope this helps.


How do I get my sideloaded books to appear in the Books section?

Using the Calibre program, you can clear the [pdoc] tag from the mobi file.

Remove the tag from this textbox, and convert (back) to .mobi.

Finish by sideloading the converted files via USB or Dropbox.


Is it possible to share annotations between a Kobo Glo and Calibre Viewer?

Apparently Calibre does already have the capability to capture the annotations from Kobo.

When Kobo is attached to your computer, the "Send to Device" logo appears as a menu option in Calibre.  If you right click on that logo, the bottom menu option is "Fetch annotations (experimental)".  One caution however is that Calibre seems to fetch the annotations for ALL books that are on Kobo (rather than just the book that is currently highlighted), and then copies the annotations for each book on KOBO and appends it to the comments metadata of the corresponding book in Calibre.  All annotations are copied including any auto-generated bookmarks that identify how much of the book has been read on Kobo.


How to send library ebooks from Calibre to Nook

First, I assume that you are referring to "protected ebooks" which when checked out requires some kind of Digital Rights Management. If they are not protected ebooks, I imagine you could just transfer them by USB -- and wouldn't need to answer the question.

Second, I am assuming that you live inside the USA.

Does your library use the Overdrive app? (That is probably the most common ebook distributor for libraries).

If yes, and if you use one of the color Nooks (like NOOK HD, NOOK HD+, etc), you can download an Overdrive app onto your Nook http://company.overdrive.com/overdrive-app-for-nook-makes-library-ebook-borrowing-even-easier/

It is much easier to check out ebooks via the Overdrive app than to transfer the encrypted epub file to your Nook via USB.

On a related note, I think it's worth upgrading to a Kindle Fire or an android tablet or even one of the Kindle e-ink devices -- especially if you use Overdrive. Even if your library uses another service beside Overdrive, chances are that they have a reading app which you can download to make it easier to check ebooks out directly. Nook is probably behind on connecting with libraries.

Did you know btw, that some libraries let you connect your Kindle e-ink device directly to your library, so if you check out the ebook, Overdrive (or another distributor) will send it directly to your e-ink device and then manage the checkin as well. Kindle is light years ahead of Nook.

Just recently Overdrive released a much more user friendly app called Libby which is much more useful than the previous Overdrive. It is available as an app in the Apple, Android and MS store. https://meet.libbyapp.com/


Do non-Windows devices have equivalent of ClearType for ebook font rendering?

On devices that use eInk, there are no subpixels like the Red, Green and Blue subpixels that can be separately addressed on color screens. Hence there is no subpixel rendering as such on eInk devices (as stated by Sriram Peruvemba (chief Marketing Officer at  E-Ink Holdings).

3rd generation iPAD has subpixel rendering according to the same article, but it is not supported by every application.


If I update an already published book on iTunes Producer, will those changes be pushed to purchasers?

Yes, this happens automatically.

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12101?locale=en_US

  During the publishing process, you specify whether the book is new or
  an update to a previously published version. If it is an update, you
  must provide a new version number. Readers who downloaded your book
  are notified in iBooks that a new version is available.


How do I export Wikipedia article collections to epub?

This feature was removed as the result of changes of the mwlib that was used for export to ocg that has better support for non-latin scripts for PDF files.

In the process EPUB export was disabled, probably because the ocg library renders to images via LaTeX (that is a guess, I have not looked at the details).

The announcement for the change was made on the wikitech mailing list,

  As part of this change, we will disable ZIM and EPUB export for the
  time being. If you're interested in working on ZIM or EPUB support for
  the new offline content generator, or other export formats, please let
  us know via the above channels.

and it looks like it has not come back yet.

What that "weird" page does is take the source of the wikipedia page, which has the page description, and tries to render it to ePub. That should give  better results than e.g. starting with the HTML version or the rendered PDF.   I normally caution to not use such cloud based rendering services, but since the input you feed it is public anyway, you won't have to fear that the data you upload there gets stored for further use by the website owner.


How can we validate an ePub3 file in Windows 8 system

This error is not related to Windows itself. This means that ePub file is bad compressed. Decompress this file and compress it via this tool ePubPack


To answer your last question, no it should not be necessary to contact support to receive an updated version of an ebook. If a kindle account has chosen to enable automatic updates, these updates should just show up.

Whether the Kindle device does this reliably is a separate question of course. Let's try to troubleshoot the obvious things. Let me say that I use KDP a lot and have never had problems like you have suggested.

Has your dad's account turned off automatic updating?  Possibly the problem is one with your dad's device; can you verify that it has Internet and can download other titles? Most devices have a SYNC button which can force a sync.

You should also try to test this for other accounts/devices. You can do this by making an insignificant update on the title page. (maybe add an extra word or letter). Update that version and then you can download a sample of the ebook on another device and see what happens.

The key thing is to establish whether it is happening to all accounts and all devices, or only your dad's account or only to one device of your dad's. That would seem relatively easy to do.

You should also check to see if there are more than one versions of the same ebook on the same device. This has happened to me before. I will upload one version for testing, and then have alongside it a version available for sale. It may appear that the ebook has not been updated when all I have been doing is viewing an older version of a file which I uploaded earlier.

One other thing. This may not apply to you, but often while testing ebooks I upload ebooks to a specific device using the Manage Personal Documents feature. If you are uploading a no DRM ebook (as opposed to downloading an ebook you have paid for), the device will process the ebook somewhat differently. Also, it can be easy to accidentally specifically a wrong device if the account had multiple devices associated with it. So for uploading Personal Documents (in this case ebooks), you should doublecheck whether you have chosen to send the updated file to the right device.

(Hey, please let SE know what happens. I'm in the middle of updating 3 ebooks right now, and remain curious about where things messed up).


How do I use calibre to create page-numbered ebooks for Kindle?

You could use the Calibre KFX Output plugin, which requires Kindle Previewer, to generate a KFX file with page numbers.

If the original epub contains an NCX pagelist, an Adobe Pagemap or an epub3 NAV page-list, the converter will automatically generate correct page numbers.

If the original book doesn't contain page numbers, select KFX Output > Create Approximate Page Numbers to have the KFX converter insert fake page numbers.


How does Google Play choose page number / how to influence it?

I've promised to write semi-solution to my own question. So…
Empirically, as of 2020-12, Google Play uses the following criteria for PDF books to choose where Roman numbering (“i”, “ii”, etc) will change to Arabic numbering (“1”, “2”, etc):

If the PDF has no table-of-contents in metadata: the first page after ii (Roman two) that has “enough text” on it, will be interpreted as “1” (Arabic one).

I the PDF has table-of-contents in metadata: the first page after “ii” (Roman two) that has “enough text” on it and is referred by the table-of-contents, will be interpreted as “1” (Arabic one).
To be precise, a page must comply to all of the three criteria (not just one or two of them):

It must be not first or second page of the book (probably Google Play just doesn't take into account that somebody could upload a book without a front cover).
It must be referred by at least one entry from the metadata-stored table-of-contents.
It must have “enough text” on it (see below).

So, returning to my specific case:

Initially, the book was uploaded without its front cover and back cover. I was unable to make all page numbers Arabic – at least first two pages must have Roman numbering. Thus I prepended the PDF with the front cover and an empty page (obviously, being forced to have two extra pages in the beginning anyway, I preferred to have meaningful ones; but see notes about the automatic empty page below).
I have several internal title pages at the beginning of the book (the book is a Ukrainian translation of an English book, so it has Ukrainian title page, then English title page, then more detailed Ukrainian title page); after I inserted the front cover and the empty page in the beginning of the PDF, the internal title  pages are still there (right after the front cover and empty page). From Google Play's point of view, these internal title pages have ”not enough text” (and, besides that, were not pointed by table-of-contents entries), so it was a puzzle for to force Google Play to reduce amount of Roman-numbered pages to two (it tended to have 3–6 of them). To force Google Play to have only two Roman-numbered pages, I needed to apply both of the following measures:

I created a fake table-of-contents entry (I named it “Title and technical pages”) pointing to the first internal title page.
I added almost-invisible fake text on the first internal title page.

About “enough text on the page”/“not enough text on the page”
I didn't experiment with it a lot. I know that adding white (invisible unless user clicks on it and displaying text layer is turned on in the book settings) text of normal/large font size in such amounts that it covers most of the page space, works. I know that adding tiny-font-size text (even huge amounts of it) in the middle of page doesn't work. Finally, I've ended up by adding white text that doesn't intersect with the proper (visible) page content but covers most of the page space and is somewhat-meaningful (like “sorry, this text is here for technical reasons” and etc).
About an empty page after the front cover
Google Play has feature to automatically add an empty page after the front cover page (“Book info” / “Settings” / “Show advanced settings” / “Insert a blank page after the cover?”). Theoretically, I thought that, when using this feature, it would be enough to prepend only one page (front cover) to my PDF (the empty page would be inserted automatically, and the rest of the pages of my PDF would be numbered as “1”, “2”, etc if I add fake TOC entry & fake text on first of them). But in practice, turning this option on doesn't decrease number of forcefully-Roman PDF pages from 2 to 1 but instead seems to increase it from 2 to 3. I have no idea why, maybe some bug. So I've ended up by inserting an empty after the front cover into PDF manually and not using this option.


Can I increase the volume of *Read out Loud* in my Adobe Reader?

Check Adobe Reader's internal volume:

Go to the Edit menu, then Preferences....
On the left, 2/3 of the way down, is the category Reading. Click on that.
You should see a box labeled Read Out Loud Options.
There is a Volume selector ranging from 1 to 10; make sure that is high enough.


In general, there is not a software solution to this problem because you have to design a responsive solution that works in various display sizes. Fixed layout solutions like Kindle Create may work in one display but not others. It is designed for simple ebooks; images involve some sophisticated css.

I wrote a code solution for the problem of image size on Kindle: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish/comments/991c1h/what_is_the_ideal_image_size_for_kindle/e4t5oca/


Is there an epub reader for a PC which lets the user take notes?

You can read books and add notes with Microsoft Edge. However, you can't export them.


Where can I find custom dictionaries for my Kobo Glo?

Apologies for replying as an answer, I have no sufficient reputation to comment.

I am the creator of Penelope. I thought about this for a bit, but the main problem is that I am continuously asked to "convert" materials that are clearly pirated from copyrighted, commercial dictionaries --- which I always refuse --- and hosting them onto a public web site would yield to legal issues.

Probably the best option would be creating a thread in MobileRead, but clearly only for public domain or CC-licensed materials.

EDIT: I created such thread: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2755188

EDIT 2: I posted directions on how to install custom dictionaries on Kobo devices in the Penelope GitHub README: https://github.com/pettarin/penelope


Without ebook creation software, can I fix formatting issues on an epub?

Depending on what you mean by ebook creation software. You can always:

Rename the epub to a zip (change the epub suffix of the filename to zip)
Extract the zip file.
Manually edit the extracted HTML files with your favorite text editor - this assumes that you have an understanding of formatting with HTML
Repackage the files/folder to zip again
Rename the zip to epub again. (As user3019828 pointed out in a comment: you need to use a zipper that won't compress the mimetype file. For Windows, ePubPack is an option; for Mac, you can use ePub Zip.)

The above steps does not involve any specific ebook creation software... But you should give a try to Calibre's heuristics fixing capabilities too. And Calibre also has a GUI to refine ebook contents...


Would extracting the Kindle highlights from the 'my clippings' file break some usage policy?

I am not aware of any Amazon or other usage policy regulating the use of this file.

The highlights are excerpts (quotes) from the book's content, so the copyright to those excerpts belongs to whoever owns the copyright of the content of the book.

However, in most jurisdictions there are exceptions to copyright law that let you do a lot with quotes/excerpts without breaking the law  (e.g. fair use in the USA, fair dealing in the Commonwealth area, private use exception in the EU, etc.).

This means that while the contents of the clippings file does not belong to you, you can do almost anything you can imagine with it for your own personal use.  However, you do not have the right to republish your clippings (e.g.: "Clippings from XYZ selected by magicbirth") as an ebook or physical book.


I dont have the kindle device but i am using kindle app. Kindle app can not read mathematical notations.
Few months ago i bought the book Old and New Inequalitites Volume 2 by Vo Quoc Ba Can and Cosmin Pohoata. You can clearly see from the picture I understood nothing. Luckily i had an vietnamese version free so i understood it. I am also giving the pdf i converted from a kindle book to pdf. Here is the link below
Old and New Inequalitites Volume 2
you will see why i hate kindle


How do I override the power cycling when the battery gets below 5%?

Unfortunately this is not possible. The exact explanation for this actually comes from Android. Buried deep within the Android source code is this little gem:

BatteryService.java:239

private void shutdownIfNoPowerLocked() {
    if (mBatteryLevel == 0 && !isPoweredLocked(BatteryManager.BATTERY_PLUGGED_ANY)) {
        [...]

This basically forces the system to shutdown if the battery level reaches 0%. The isPoweredLocked function determines whether any of the following are true:

The battery status is unknown
The device is connected to AC
The device is connected via a USB cable
The device is within range of a wireless charger

It should also be noted (as Jason mentioned in his comment) that lithium-ion batteries typically power off when they reach a predetermined low voltage to prevent further discharge and consequent damage.


Collapse and Expand Table of Contents in Kindle PaperWhite

There is a right-facing black triangle (▶) on each menu item that can be expanded, clicking on which the menu expands and the triangle becomes downward facing (▼) which again is clickable to collapse the sub-menu.

I see how easy it is to miss given the arrows are very small in size.


Have you tried reinstalling Adobe Digital Editions?
Has the version of Adobe Air (needed by Digital Editions) changed? Try reinstalling that as well.
Have you tried transferring with another USB cable?

If none of those options seem to fix the issue, give Calibre a go to manage your ebooks. See if it works with that.


IDPF, the consortium that promotes the .epub standard, has released a tool named epubcheck.
It is available both via an online web-app here, or as a stand-alone program here.

There is also another tool called FlightCrew, available here; this is also integrated within Sigil, a full fledged epub editor (available here).

All these tools are free and cross-platform.


You are mistaken. If you upload a .doc to Amazon via Personal Documents Service, it should convert automatically -- no problem!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_pdoc_main_short_us?nodeId=200767340

Now it may not look great, but generally you are mainly interested in the text.


Convert fixed layout epub to fixed layout mobi

This is a very broad question; I'll try to give you some general guidelines, but feel free to post more specific questions if anything in particular comes up while you're doing the conversion.

If you have an epub 3.0 fixed layout file, you should be able to run it through KindleGen and get a working mobi file. The Kindle Publishing Guidelines are pretty comprehensive as well, and should give you plenty of information if there are any particular stumbling blocks. If your fixed layout is a graphic novel, you might want to use the Kindle Comic Creator instead; it offers some interesting functionality specifically for content with panels.

If your epub is one of the old iBooks pre-epub 3.0 files, your first step will be to convert that into an epub 3.0 file and then go from there.


Is there a way within the UI of the Kindle (Fire) to search only for books that can be borrowed?

Yes, there is a way. Note, of course, that this feature is only available from an actual Kindle device, not from a reading app on a computer, phone or tablet not sold by Amazon.

(Fwiw: I have a Kindle2, so your screen may differ from mine.)

Take the action to "Shop in Kindle Store" on your device. (On the K2, that is located in the menu that appears when you press the "menu" button.)

Under "Browse / Books" choose, "see all categories ..."

The last option on the list is "Kindle Owners' Lending Library"

Currently 494,389 titles are offered for lending (only one per month); a number of filters are available to reduce this deluge, which you can choose by selecting "View Subcategories within Owners' Lending Library".

If you search or otherwise leave the confines of the Lending Library listings, any book lacking a "Prime" designation in the listings shown on your Kindle is not available for lending.

Btw, once you've borrowed a book, you can read it in any Kindle reading app, not just the device you used when you borrowed it.


How easy is it to add a table of contents to an epub book?

Both Sigil and Calibre can edit or create a TOC for .epub books.

In Sigil, once you have opened your ebook, press Ctrl+T
, and you will open a window where you can generate the TOC from the various h1, h2, h3 (and so on) tags, you can manually select how deep to go in the header hierarchy.

Inside Calibre, select the ebook, press K, and you will get another window that will let you do something similar, but you have some more options if compared to Sigil, in example you can generate entries not only from html headings but also from single files inside the .epub, rearranging the list and the hierarchy, and so on. It's simplier to do it than to explain it.


I think the only option you have is to delete the dictionary completely, thus disabling it. (Search for the dictionary on your device and remove it like any other book. You can re-download it later if there is the need.)


Can Kobo's drm be removed from their ebooks?

Yes, it can be done. But it's not exactly simple.  You start by installing the Adobe Digital Editions for PC program on your computer and downloading the "Adobe DRM Epub" to your computer, which should open it in ADE for PC.  Then comes the tricky part: install the Inept Epub DeDRM plugin for Calibre.


What CSS can I use to change the background color of an epub on a Nook HD?

well this looks like a html/css question the height percentage in the css also needs that its parent has height as well

so you can try this.

html, body {
   height:100%;
}

and use your #myDiv coloring.


I researched this issue in order to answer this related question.

What I found is that there is pretty much no way to read the file short of the software supplied by the Sky Ebook Reader Company. If you have a legitimate .sbrz file and are unable to read it on your Windows machine with their software, your best bet is to seek support from that company.


Annotating/highlighting passages spanning page boundaries

My Kobo Glo, updated to the 3.12.1 firmware version, can highlight and take notes on a multiple pages basis.

Anyway, I noticed that it only does it when using Kepub files and not with standard Epub books (Kobo ereaders have two different viewing engines for standard epub and their own slightly modified kepub).

If this is acceptable to you, you can use Calibre to transfer files to the ereader, there is a plugin that can optimise them to be used with the kepub viewer.

(Also take a look at an answer that I gave to another question https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/a/4676/136 )


What are my options for reading an ebook in the bathtub?

Waterfi sells waterproofed Kindle paperwhite. It's rather expensive ( approx. $100 more than a non-waterproofed Kindle ), here you can find a video review.


If your person lives in the US, check into the NLS

  National Library Service (NLS) is a free braille and talking book library service for people with temporary or permanent low vision, blindness, or a physical disability that prevents them from reading or holding the printed page.

https://www.loc.gov/nls/

They have ereaders and booksthat specially built for both blind and most levels of disability.

The reader and the books are free and delivered by mail to the home of the individual.


Delete books from the sony erearder TRS1?

I believe you have to go to the Kobo store and move  the books from your Library to Archive (view books in the library, click on  the "..." below the book image in the cover view, or in the action column of the list view, and select "Move to Archive").


Exact readable screen size of Sony PRS-650

I don't know if this is exact enough, but based on a combination of my own manual measurements and specifications listed in the user guide (warning links to pdf directly):

Screen resolution is 600(w) x 800(h) pixels
Screen measurements (approx, done myself) are 92(w) x 122(h) mm
Using this calculator, that gives us a dpi of approx 44.
Approx measurement of status bar is 5mm (using same calculator as above we get ~33 pixels)

Conclusion:

Readable screen height is 600(w) x 767(h) pixels or 92(w) x 118(h) mm


How to mark up tales and poems using epub:type?

Excellent question, and kudos for thinking about the semantics! It's depressing how few people do this.
The best resource for epub:type is the Strucutral Semantics Vocabulary from the IDPF. In the "Document Divisions" section, they detail what these divisions are used for:

volume: A component of a collection.
part: A major structural division of a piece of writing, typically
encapsulating a set of related chapters.
chapter: A major structural division of a piece of writing.
subchapter: A major sub-division of a chapter.
division: A major structural division that may also appear as a
substructure of a part (esp. in legislation).

Each of these divisions should apply to either a <section> or a <body> element.
For your case of independent tales and poems, I think we can probably rule out sub-chapter, unless some of your tales are long enough that they have sections within them that are distinct enough to warrant new levels of headers. My inclination would be to use chapter for each item, and potentially part if you have relevant content groupings, eg all the tales in one section and all the poems in another. Division seems to be a division that is larger than a chapter but smaller than a part, and volume would be a whole new book. The Lord of the Rings, for example, would be three volumes (one for each book), each comprising 2 parts themselves made up of a number of chapters.
It should be noted that at present, there are few devices that make use of epub:type tags at all, and none that I'm aware of that use the document divisions. Adding in the semantics now means that when a reading system does come out that makes use of this information, you'll already be set though, which is nice.


How to synchronize Kindle collections across all devices, including older Kindles?

I am guessing you have already found Amazon's Organizing Your Kindle Content.  If every book on your devices is from Amazon, then you can do some organizing at 'Your Account' > 'Manage Your Device' > 'Your Kindle Library' or by using the cloud.  If you have works from anyplace else, then the prospects get worse.

I personally have some OCD issues that require my books be in some kind of order that is not primary based on who I bought it from and when.  I was trying to keep track organized with an Excel book.  I searched for solutions and read many articles & blogs, I strongly desired an Amazon/Kindle solution, the majority pointed to a single solution which I eventually adopted.  Calibre is that solution.

The only disadvantage the Calibre has it is a bit more difficult to connect wirelessly to your collection. I won't go into all it's advantages but, essentially it is your own personal library, that you can organize and store you books on, regardless of where it comes from.  My 1263 (current count) works are stored on Calibre, I download from Amazon, Smashword, Baen, Project Gutenberg, etc. directly to Calibre (on my pc).  Once a week or so, I sit down at the PC, remove some books from my Kindles, mark them as read on Calibre (tag 'read'), add some new books to the appropriate kindle ('paperwhite' for reading in bed, 'keyboard' for text to speech while commuting) and tag the books I am currently reading in Calibre by the device they are on.

I believe there is at least one wireless solution for connecting your Kindle to your Calibre, but in the end I stuck with using the USB connection, as by the time I need to move some books around, I need a recharge, so i get a two for one deal (load and charge).


How can I make mathematics look good in ebooks?

For my ebook experiment, I use PNG, via Formula Sheet.


How to change the font(s) used on a pdf, or improve how they are rendered?

Based on the sample you provided, you will not be able to change the font on that particular document.  Here is why:

As one commenter already suggested, it is very clear from the sample you provided that the text you are reading is a scanned image of the page and not text being rendered in realtime from a font. I work with scanned documents and OCR tools on a daily basis, so I can say this with confidence.

Look carefully at different occurrences of each letter glyph, and you will notice that they are not identical. Computer fonts do not have inconsistencies between multiple instances of the same glyph, but printed books do.
The letters in the sample image have the appearance of ink-bleed (which indicates that they were printed on paper) and the typical washed-out look of text which has been run through an image processor to remove the paper grain (this is what causes the "thinness" which is bothering you).
Some lines of text have visual distortion from the scanning and dewarping process (look at the text "PAY_TYPE field" for a good example).

All of these things are clear visual indicators of a scanned image.

You are able to select text in the document because there is a hidden OCR text layer "behind" the image which contains the plain text of the book and a mapping file which tells your PDF viewer where each letter is located in the image. There are a few different ways this can be accomplished, but as an example here is a tutorial that shows how to OCR images with Adobe Acrobat (the full software, not Reader).


Not able to edit the html of an ebook file

If you want an easy way to do it, probably the easiest solution is to use the Calibre program. It lets you convert almost any format into an .epub file, which the (separate) Calibre editor can then edit. If desired, you can use Calibre to convert the edited .epub file back to the original format as a final step.

The .mobi format simply can't be edited in any meaningful way, so it's necessary to convert it to .epub, which seems to be the most flexible format of all.

One reason I'm particularly enthusiastic about .epub files is that the Calibre editor has so many tools to automate many functions of editing that type, making it fairly easy to make changes. And the Calibre developer guy is actively making improvements to it all the time.

The editor has a particularly nifty search-and-replace function, and even has a button for checking the .epub file for errors.

The thing to bear in mind is that Calibre is 2 programs, one is a manager program for organising your ebooks regardless of what format they are, and which can convert a book from one format to another (a huge range of different types); and then there's a second, separate program for editing .epub format files.

Calibre's philosophy is that you'll convert your ebook to .epub format, edit it in that format, then convert it back to the original format (though in fact you can choose any output format you favour, from a huge range of choices).

And Calibre's a free program!

It copes with almost any type of ebook, as long as it's not a locked (DRM) format.


Yes, a calibre plugin could do that. Does one?  Not that I know of!

You could look at the Extract ISBN plugin (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=126727) for an example of pulling data out of the ePub, and any of the metadata search plugins for how to then use the information you've found in a web search.


EPUB is an open format so you can find the standard specifications online. Wikipedia has a good article on the EPUB format.

If you want a brief description of the characteristics you just mentioned you can find in this article here.

Directory structure:

EpubFolderYouWant
   META-INF
      container.xml
   mimetype
   content.opf
   toc.ncx

Needed files:

mimetype
container.xml
content.opf
toc.ncx

And which information is contained in each file is described in the above mentioned article.


Kindle does not show epub book correctly

Unfortunately the epub conversions for scans on archive.org tend to be uniformly terrible. (Perhaps they use Abby Finereader's epub conversion tools?) The error you're pointing out is simply the result of scanned text that was never proofed.

You may already know that Project Gutenberg already has an ebook download page for Hillaire Belloc (but not for the title you mentioned).  The PG ebooks are pretty much the gold standard for epub files.  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2437

If you want a free download and have a large tablet, then I would recommend you use the PDF available from archive.org (No bigger than 6 MB).

Also, I noticed that Amazon has several proofed copies of the Servile State  (Kindle edition) for 99 cents. Judging from reader comments, there aren't complaint about typos, so someone actually proofed the text. https://www.amazon.com/Servile-State-Hilaire-Belloc-ebook/dp/B003IWZZPW/


How to convert jarirreader format to PDF/Mobi

It's most likely a custom format with DRMed and/or obfuscated files. Try opening the files in the text folder with a web browser. If you can read them in a browser you can re-assemble them to a book with an epub editor.


How can I cut down on superfluous Instapaper files on my Kindle?

While Instapaper does not have the full capabilities you desire at this point in time, there is a way to cut down on the mess to get over 1/3 of what you want, mainly by eliminating any possibility for duplicate articles on your Kindle. Here's how:

Note that regular Instapaper users always get 10 articles sent to Kindle. On Instapaper's Kindle settings page of the web site, you may select how many new articles triggers sending to Kindle. Choose 10.

If you do all your reading on your Kindle and nowhere else (and you never archive any of the most recent 10 articles), then each Kindle digest will have exactly 10 new articles you've never seen before.

I personally do 5 because I only clip to Instapaper once every few days and I'd rather get a digest twice per month rather than once per month. So in my case, I know that I can read the 10 most recent articles, and if I want to go back further I'll have to skip the previous Kindle digest which will have 5 duplicate articles. By skipping one digest, I get to a digest which has no repeats.


Looking for recommendation on eBook reader for university textbooks

Kindle is not the only ereader to have an eink screen, in fact every device that is marketed as ereader (and not i.e. a more generic tablet) uses this technology.

Said that, basically every ereader available today can do the things that you need; I think that the real choice when speaking about scientific books that contain math and formulas is about the ebook format, not about the ereader: reflowable text formats like Amazon's .azw and everyone else's .epub can get the job done, but maybe for some more complex layouts, a fixed page format like .pdf could be a better choice. It really depends on the specific book and how well is formatted.

Choosing an ereader and a brand is more a choice of an ecosystem rather than about differences in the hardware (all of them, more or less, are equivalent and have the same features); Amazon Kindle is maybe the more closed platform, meaning that it uses its own file formats, while the rest of the world uses the de facto standard .epub.

You can also try to have a look at these questions:

Dedicated ebook reader?
Reader for scientific papers - what should I look for?
What 's the best way to read a scientific PDF?


It depends on the format of the ebook that you are currently reading (Kobo readers have different reading engines for different file formats).

When you are reading standard epub books, PDF's or comic book formats (i.e. CBZ), the number shown represent the total progress of the book.

When you are reading kepub files (it is basically a standard epub with a different extension and some optimizations made by Kobo), the default behaviour is to show the progress of the current chapter, not of the total book.
However, this can be changed in the settings of the ereader, so in the end you can make it behave like you want.


Automatic creation of bookmarks from Table Of Content

Try using pyPdf library.

And use the parser above the ToC extracted area (your non-clickable index with chapters). If it's text.

If it's vector shapes that look like letters but do not have the information that they are letters. Then you must still use OCR to convert it to editable text.


Short answer, you can't see them in the reader pane.
You'll find the annotations at:
Edit Metadata > Custom medata tab > Annotations

(Presuming you created a custom column called 'Annotations', which is the default name suggested by the plugin.)


Converting EPub consisting of images to proper text

What you need to do is run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the images of the book.

If you cannot find a program that does the OCR directly on the ePub file, you can try to convert it to PDF first, or extract the images. Make sure that if you do a conversion, that the images do not loose quality, as that would negatively influence the results of the conversion. Programs like Calibre allow you to do such conversions.

There are some online OCR services, mainly for conversion of PDF, make sure that you understand the implications of using such a service, as there is no guarantee that your book information is removed after conversion (and if you images are watermarked, or contain metadata pointing to you, that could get you in trouble).


Which is the best way to use ancient Greek fonts in an epub?

I think that embedding the font you want to use is your best option.

Many fonts have a set of greek (and/or non latin) letters, so you should be safe by just typing the letters, and they should be correctly displayed regardless of the chosen font.
But if, like you said, you want to include other special characters, embedding the full font could be the best solution (just be sure that the license of that font allows you to do it); the only drawback that I can think about is a slightly larger final file-size, but realistically speaking, a handful of kilobytes more should not be a problem for anyone.

Another thing that you should consider is that many ereaders have some degree of font customization settings; i.e. with my Kobo Glo, I can select from a list of installed fonts and this setting will override what you would have specified inside your ebook; then I could have some problems to visualize correctly your text, if the font I select doesn't support the characters you have used.
For this reason, whenever you are including a font that is required to correctly display some characters (and not just for aesthetic reasons, maybe to render a fancy title), you could add to your ebook something like a disclaimer page where you inform your readers that if they want to be sure to correctly visualize it, they should not use font customization with it.


Is there a standardized or recommended image format, size, and resolution when embedding images?

The short answer is no, and I don't expect there to be anything like that with a single recommendation.

The reason is that different input material is better rendered in different image file formats. All material handles well in non-lossy formats (among others most of the TIFF formats, PNG), however such format produce large files. When you look at space saving compressed formats, photos handle well in JPEG, and images of scanned text are best represented in DjVu.

My own experience from scanning mangas drawn on paper (so my daughter can take them on her ebook) are that for that, JPEG is a good format and that I best convert the scan to the physical dimensions of her reader. This gives optimal size of the files. And because of the interpolation that is done on the computer vs the one on the device is of better quality, it looks better and is faster in displaying.
I noticed this when I had generated her drawings in EPUB form for my reader (with a higher resolution) and then read the same EPUB on hers. The images are combined in a simple EPUB file with the stylesheets setting borders to 0. (I do all calculations for that in pixels, not bothering with physical sizes and resolution, which in the end resolves to the same).


Should every paragraph tag have a CSS style (InDesign)?

There is no need to give every paragraph a class, the definition at 1.  will apply to every paragraph, with or without a tag, and only on paragraphs that are directly below a footnote the settings will be overruled by those of the CSS of 2.

You might not even need to have the CSS at 1., but for the defaults of the ePub reader.


How to adapt annotations from an old edition book to a new edition book?

This is a very interesting question, and I did some preliminary research on it.

The basic problem here is that PDFs are generally  not considered to be an editable document and that most annotation solutions are specific to one software platform.

Because PDFs are considered to be more as output than an editable document, versioning hasn't really been implemented for the annotations.

I am not particularly well-versed in the Adobe platform, but I know that some mobile PDFs readers let you export annotations to a text file. (Several can do this).

Some other options are to do the annotations and versioning in MS Word and/or Google Docs instead of PDF. Those are both good for storing annotations and keeping track of versions. Also, both software have all sorts of mobile apps and syncing solutions.

Here's an interesting thing. If your file is an epub and if you have uploaded it to Google Play Books (GPB), then when you annotate the epub file, the annotations will be stored in a (versioned) Google Docs file for your account.  (Here's what one of my files looks like: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FvqqixSaZoY04Ua2L6wTK1mHmU5UptYISZ4z4oFSd1I/edit?usp=sharing )

Another possibility is to search through the available plugins for Google Docs or MS Word to see if there are plugins (free or commercial) which let you version comments better.

I realize that this is not the solution you want, but those are the solutions I am aware of.


Which is the quickest way to change apostrophes to quotation marks?

You could use the PunctuationSmarten Sigil plugin.


What software is used by the publishing companies to create diagrams in the introductory physics textbooks?

They are almost certainly done in TeX/LaTeX. TeX/LaTeX is not about "less effort", but exactness. It is a programming language for typesetting with a special emphasis on math and equations. TeX has a long history with the academic community in publishing. Explaining TeX and LaTeX is outside the scope of this forum (There is a TeX.stackexchange.com site). You can find some examples of how those types of diagrams are done here:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/diagrams/


I am not sure why my solution fixed the error message but I simply removed id attribute from idx:entry tag, but I left the id attribute alone in a under idx:entry.


Does Kindle (classic) support all embedded fonts in PDFs?

Every font contains the instructions to render all glyphs contained in them, so as long the software/device can use embedded fonts, you should expect every of them to work.

I've checked it on my Kindle Classic. I've used the test I've made long time ago and described on my blog: Using dynamic fonts for international texts in iText. Both of the test PDF's available for download have been displayed completely and correctly. They contain Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Hangul as well as more 'exotic' fonts such as symbols, Glagolic, hieroglyphs and mahjong. The tiny problems with Armenian fonts come from some error in generating the document - they are exactly the same as on my computer in Acrobat Reader.


how to create hypertext local to an EPUB document?

I don't really understand the question, but it is possible for an epub file to contain html files which do not appear in the main navigation document. They can be accessed indirectly through hyperlinks within the HTML document.

See the answer I gave for a different but related question here: https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/a/7211/417

By the way, if that is your question,  I recommend ignoring the epub2 way to do it and just do it the epub3 way. A lot of reading systems (including the Kindle ones) are ignoring the toc.ncx document if you have a <nav epub:type="toc"> element.


Epub -> Mobi/Azw3 conversion (calibre) , Kindle App doesn't show cover no matter what

Everything works fine except the book covers don't show up in kindle app.

Unfortunately, that's the default behavior, because the Kindle for PC/OSX app will only display covers for "personal documents," i.e. ePubs converted with Kindle Previewer/KindleGen, or books bought from Amazon.

AFAIK, Calibre adds a fake ASIN and changes other metadata items so that books no longer appear in the Personal Documents folder. However, this change also causes the book to be displayed without a cover in the Kindle for PC/OSX apps.

  Everything works fine except the book covers don't show up in kindle app. There's no description also, so it's impossible to recognise which book I'm opening.

To display the book titles, click the hamburger icon (≡) in the Kindle app toolbar.


Can I use Google Docs to write an ebook for Kindle?

Yes. You can write. Here are my experiences.

MS Word approach

I exported the manuscript as .DOCX. This format worked best for me. I faced serious problems with .epub and .pdf formats.
Caveat - If you have used Google doc specific embedded drawings then they are likely to get clipped. I had to convert them to pictures using Windows sniping tool and embed them  back as an image
Caveat - I had lots of problems with equations. They would not align well with oridinary text or with bullets. Some of the Equation toolbar symbols like the summation did not show up at all. I had to use the "insert symbol" approach
Caveat - Table column widths appeared different on Kindle

Overall suggestion using MS Word - write a couple of pages on GD which captures some of your complex formatting scenarios, export to DOCX and preview the file on Kindle previewer (online) . I would recommend doing this upfront so that you can learn lessons

HTML approach

You can also save your Google Doc content as a HTML file. This will come down as a ZIP with 1 HTML and a subfolder with all the images. But there were serious challenges.

HTML errors - Kindle Previewer 3 would frequently complain that there were errors in the HTML. I had to un-minify the HTML and then run Kindle Previewer again. Go back to the offending line number. There were many empty IMG tags and I had to remove all of them
Font units - The font sizes were too large when viewed on Kindle. I had to change the font units from pt to em for much improved rendition on Kindle
Equations -  If your manuscript has mathematical equations then these will be converted to static pictures.
Table of contents -  The table of contents that was generated inside Google Docs would not work nicely on Kindle. Clicking on the ToC would take me to unpredictable locations in the book. I have no explanation for this.
Further reference -

https://medium.com/@perrygarvin/how-to-make-an-amazon-kindle-book-using-html-and-css-146070ba0d7e

https://daveparsonsnz.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/converting-a-google-doc-to-a-kindle-format-mobi-file/

Summary
Yes you can definitely use Google Docs for authoring Kindle content. You can use MS Word or HTML. You should try out a short sample before progressing too far down the road. However, in my case, I am almost on the verge of abandoning GD in favour of a tool like Scrivener, which I believe is more suited for such an endeavour.

Hope this helps.


Is it possible to send a book purchased from Amazon to all of my devices at once?

According to the Kindle support forums, after purchasing a book, you will be presented with an option to send the book to additional Kindle devices. You will need to do this for each of the devices you would like to send the book to - there is no option to send it to all of them.

Also, keep in mind that most books limit the number of devices that they may be downloaded to - therefore sending a book to more Kindles than the book allows would be impossible anyway.


How can I manually enter number of "Hours Read" in Kobo Aura HD?

The simplest way (still not simple one) is to connect your reader into linux machine and manually edit KoboReader.sqlite file via sqlite3. Now you need to know the structure of this database and try to find place where total hours read are stored. I don't have any Kobo reader so can't help you more.


How to manage translations when self-publishing (in-house translation)?

I recommend you consider to move to an explicit mark-up system (LaTeX, reST/Sphinx) that allow you to:

split the work in smaller files that are automatically combined
use revision control (Mercurial) on the files so you can see what changed between versions (roll-back of changes, easy differencing, have multiple people work on the same file with conflict resolution support)
have the possibility to include more extensive comments (that will never show up in a printed version).

You can continue to edit the files in word, you should just not use its What-You-See-Is-All-You've-Got features for layout and styling.

This might seem overhead if you never used tools like LaTeX/Sphinx. Having persistent predictable output is something that will be invaluable for anything serious (more than 10 pages I would say). I have seen academics trying to do their thesis in Word (and more recently LibreOffice) and be driven up-the-wall by documents breaking after a section or picture was moved around or missing hyphens while exporting to PDF.

Revision control systems like Mercurial allow you to save often, mark specific revision and compare those against the latest (or each other) and push your whole writing effort to a (private) remote copy of the full repository (with all the revisions) in an efficient way. This is much quicker than keeping track of revisions by hand ( e.g. saving as book_20131225.docx) or making off-site backups in any other way.

The people at TeX-LaTeX StackExchange are very helpful and for revision control you can ask on StackOverflow.


What prospect is there for foreign language look-up in Kindle for PC?

Is this situation likely to change soon? Or is there some deep reason for it, which is likely to make it last a long time?

IMHO, Amazon most likely hasn't updated the Kindle for Windows and OSX apps, because not enough readers demanded custom dictionary support. (BTW, Amazon-bought dictionaries can be sent to the Kindle for Android app.)
Until Amazon fixes this, you can outsmart the Kindle for PC/OSX/iOS apps by changing the ASIN number of your custom dictionary to the ASIN number of one of the default dictionaries and overwriting the default dictionary with your custom dictionary. This involves the following steps:

Remove the DRM from the custom dictionary that you want to use.

Download a dictionary that you won't use, e.g. the American English dictionary (B003ODIZL6_EBOK.azw).

Open your dictionary with Java Mobi Metadata
Editor, change the existing ASIN entries to B003ODIZL6, save
the file, rename it to B003ODIZL6_EBOK.azw and copy it to the My
Kindle Content folder. (If your dictionary doesn't have ASIN entries, click the (+) button and select 113 ASIN and 504 ASIN.)

Obviously, you'd use the ASIN number of the French monolingual dictionary, if you wanted to replace the default monolingual French dictionary with a bilingual dictionary etc.


concatenate several files generated by send to kindle amazon plugin to consolidate multiple page documents

You can try GrabMyBooks.
It can be used to grab webpages and create an ebook from them; I don't own a Kindle and I don't recall if it saves in formats other than ePub, but you can easily use Calibre to convert it if needed. You can send the ebook to your device then and read it like any other ebook.

Another possible solution, if it integrates also with Kindle (it does with my Kobo), is to use Pocket.


Desktop publishing programs that are capable of including videos in an ebook

Anthon is correct but he doesn't really explain why he is correct which is what the real question is about:

EPUB 3 supports video in ebooks.  Quark and InDesign are two commercial top notch desktop publishing software that have both (finally) integrated EPUB exporting into their software because of the rise of popularity in ebooks.  However, this is an extension of their original application which is simply meant for static layouts.  A good way of thinking about an ebook is to think of it as a simple locally stored website.  It can do most of the things that a website can do, just like you see websites with videos in them, so can an ebook have them.  And like a website, ebooks are written in HTML (XHTML if you want to be specific) CSS, Java, with support for images, videos, etc.  All HTML CSS and JS are at the end of the day is plain text with tags.  You can learn more about these languages at places like codeacademy.  Thus, all Indesign and Quark do is automate the writing of this code by trying to assume what you meant from the static layout of your earlier design before export.

If you get notepad+ (free) and have the ability to unzip and zip an epub into its constituent  parts then you can literally write all the code out by following the EPUB 3 specifications.  Your best bet however, is probably something like pressbooks http://pressbooks.com/, which allow you to lay out the design of your ebook much like you would in Indesign and Quark and which you can export into an epub for very little money - esp. when compared with Adobe products.

Hope this makes sense, I tried to unpack a bunch in a little bit of space based on what I assumed was your knowledge level.


Can I float an image to the top or the bottom of the screen?

You can't float to top or bottom. But you can use the CSS break-before property to ensure a page-break before your pictures. Obviously, this will put pictures at the top of the page.


How can I verify that the statistics provided by an DIY publisher are accurate?

As with so many things in life you cannot be 100% sure. That is somewhat more true for digital distribution, as there is no way to check e.g. that a company bought paper for 1000 books and said it only printed and sold half of that.

Unless the DIY publishing company is really small, there will be multiple people involved in faking such sales (the person doing the website, the accountant, the manager), all of them have to play along. And if one of them gets a better job the chances would be, that a an ex-employee discloses fraudulent practises. If that kind of thing comes out you can normally close your shop, and I would not want that to happen if it was mine. Building a business is much more difficult than selling 10% more, so that cheating and losing all of it doesn't make sense.

That doesn't mean that small companies are more susceptible to fraudulent activities. If you work on your own you are much more likely to lose your personal credibility.

It is in my experience with companies, much more likely that payment will be late than that they try to cheat on you.


Why is Hard copy book black and white, but Ebook is color?

Obviously cost is the major concern, but often the importance of having color graphics in a printed book is overrated. For example, I have published a few print technical books with lots of screenshots, none of which would be better if the graphics were in color.

For example, a book specifically about css or layout or typography might not need color at all.

Yes, you're right that Packt and Oreilly typically use BW/grayscale graphics in their printed books, but I've also seen print examples from both publishers that are colorful. (Indeed, a lot of printed books about design are pretty awesome to look at).

When you're printing, you're trying to maximize royalties while keeping retail price low. When plugging in numbers via an online calculator for b/w and color versions of the same book, the cost differences can be substantial. One calculator shows it as costing 2x as much.

By the way, you have just described an easily overlooked advantage of ebooks -- the ability to include color graphics at no extra charge. I recently published a literary graphics with multiple interior graphics. I'm selling it at the minimum price (2.99) but if I sold it as print book, I'd have to increase the price so much that it wouldn't sell well.

(If you're buying a large number of print copies and  selling it  at workshops and conferences, the numbers  improve somewhat though).


No they don't. Otherwise Kindle screen pictures/ and similar picture on other e-ink devices would have been discouraged and the screen would had been blank on shutdown.


How to create DjVu format with selectable text?

DjVu files are normally image only. From these file sections can be selected as images but not as text¹.

If OCR was applied during, or after, the conversion to DjVu. Extra information is stored in the files that associate image areas with text. Only if that was done you can select text from such a file².

Applying OCR to a DjVu file can be done online. If you don't like that you could try this script, that uses Tesseract. Or you can go for commercial software such as Document Express.

¹  e.g. using  the djview program.
² In theory one could do OCR on the fly in the DjVu viewer, but I don't think any of the currently available viewers can do that.


There's a plugin called Modify ePub which could remove Calibre bookmarks. But I haven't tried it myself.


How can I extract some chapters or sections from an ebook into a new one?

Besides using a real ebook editor like Sigil, there is an easier way to do it.

Calibre has a very useful additional plugin called EpubSplit, that with a simple interface let's you select the single .html files inside the .epub and create a new ebook just from them; after the process is also possible to edit the metadata of the newly created ebook.

These tools only work with .epub files, to perform this kind of editing on other formats a conversion with Calibre should be made.


What is a good ebook for learning the English language?

I think this is question that a simple search with Google can solve, as I did very easy: https://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/best-e-books-to-learn-english/

I suppose there are plenty of applications an Android store, sort of speaking.


Before bending, warm the "clam" with an electric paint stripper (maybe a hairdryer is enough). I used a heat focusing cone for the stripper. Apply short shots from a short distance until the plastic is warm and stays in shape when moved. Keep in place until cooled. I did this more than one year ago and it still works.

Be very careful with bending when inserting PRS-700 back in. Do not overstretch the plastic again. Also, use tools to prevent burning your fingers.

Mine was broken at top, so not much strain on the plastic while reading.


Can Nook Read Kobo Books and Vise Versa?

Both NOOK and Kobo have a variety of book formats in common, such EPUB and Adobe PDF. Kobo can use Adobe Digital Editions, but Barnes and Noble states, "NOOK Books from Barnes & Noble cannot be read on your Kobo eReader." However, B&N states the converse works, i.e., transferring ebooks from Kobo to NOOK. It is possible to read DRM NOOK books on Kobo by the legally-questionable removal of DRM.
That said, for books without DRM, such as the many public-domain offerings on Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and publishers of copyright-protected, but not DRM locked, ebooks, such as Baen Books, texts can be transferred between devices using software such as the excellent Calibre application.
Using Calibre or other tool, it's also possible to change the format of a book, such as Kindle's MOBI to NOOK and Kobo EPUB, or vice-versa. (Note that PDF is somewhat a dead-end: while it is easy to convert documents to PDF, going from PDF to another format is not always successful.)


How to make money by giving books away for free?

I suspect advertising won't get much traction -- unless it's a product related to the subject of the book (I'm assuming nonfiction here).

Probably the best payoff from a freebie is getting the email from a downloader. That way you can form a relationship with the reader/customer over time. From the book perspective, you can send book announcements and special discount coupon codes. (I'm talking about outside amazon.com here).

Also you can drive traffic to your blog, which can in turn can lead to more ad possibilities and more things to sell.

I think the hardest thing for authors is author branding. A free ebook can help alleviate that issue -- especially if you can persuade them to sign up for an occasional newsletter.


Possible to transfer Adobe Digital Edition ePUB books from my local library to my Kindle?

Your Kindle cannot handle .epub files.

You could convert .epub to .mobi e.g. using Calibre, but this is only possible without DRM. There are also plugins to remove DRM, but using them is probably not legal in most jurisdictions.


No .indd files to convert for Kindle publishing

This is going to be a challenge. There are some programs out there that do a decent job extracting text cleanly from PDF files, such as OmniPage. You might also check out pandoc, but you will have to convert the document from PDF to something else before it can help you much. You will almost certainly have to recreate a lot of the formatting, no matter what you do.

It would help us give better answers if you told us what issues you have after converting from PDF to RTF and importing the RTF into InDesign.


Fixed Layout vs Reflowable For A Puzzle e-Book

I'm not answering the main part of your question, which is what are the capabilities of fixed layout ebooks. I think someone with a moderate amount of experience on reflowables could do a reflowable version provided that readers were informed to use a minimum screen resolution (768 pixels width?) and not  use devices older than K4.

Fyi there is an issue with  Google Play Books which does not honor this bit of code:

img {
page-break-after: always !important;
}

That makes it impossible to do a page break using css alone in Google Play Books. I'm pretty sure this code works on Kindle devices and other reading systems though.

For a reflowable book, you probably could use css media queries to ensure that each display size works on Kindle. The css breakpoints I use are 320-767px width (both portrait and landscape), 768-1500 (landscape), 1500+ (landscape), 768-1024 (portrait) and 1025+ (portrait). You should use high resolution images and then let Kindle downsize them when needed. Each css media query should specify a different size for the div container which contains the image.

On Kindle the css max-width isn't supported, so I use the code here: https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=1005910

If you do reflowable, you could declare that ebook is only for tablets and not for phones (that's the easiest thing!). For smaller screens you could split the content into 2 screens, but it wouldn't be optimal.

A lot of testing would be involved, but it wouldn't be impossible.


How can I read an PDF purchased from Kobo on an Amazon Kindle?

EDIT:
The problem is definitely with Adobe. They have this thing called DRM (Digital Rights Management), that's essentially a layer of protection that's supposed to minimize the amount of book piracy. Essentially, when you buy a book with DRM (as opposed to DRM-free), you are not downloading a .PDF or .EPUB file, you are getting a .ACSM, which is Adobe's file format for license + book. So if you open that .ACSM file with an Adobe-supported app (such as ADE), it can figure out whether the license is valid or not - in other words whether you've purchased the book yourself or if you've just downloaded it from the Internet - and if it is, let you read it.

The downside is, obviously, a situation like yours, where you simply want to read the book on a device that doesn't know how to handle .ACSM files. Unfortunately, there is no "proper" way to do this, you need to get rid of this license Adobe attached to your book and work with an actual real DRM-free PDF. If you google something like ".acsm to pdf" or "remove DRM from .acsm file" you should be able to find plenty of tools online. I'll link to just one of them - but keep in mind, I haven't tested it myself. http://www.epubor.com/how-to-convert-acsm-to-pdf-free.html

Take a look around either My Documents or your AppData. You can find the latter by pressing {Windows Key}+R to bring up the Run window, and then typing %AppData%. This will probably send you to C:\Users{username}\AppData\Roaming, but if you can't find a folder called Kobo Desktop or something similar, you may need to step up from Roaming and take a look at Local.

This being said, from what I could gather online, it may be damn near impossible to do what you want to do without stripping the books off their DRM.


Open the top bar, as if to go back to the home page from within your book.

Tap Page Display menu, then select Font & Page Settings. You can control the progress from the reading tab of the dialog that will come up.


What is the easiest workflow to publish ePub files from highly structured database content?

I recommend you generate some mark up format supported as input for pandoc (i.e. markdown, reST, HTML) and generate the EPUB from that.

You should have no trouble scripting pandoc, but you would need some work automating the generation of the markup from your database (but not more than you would have generating XML).


How to set the font sizes of two text sections to be relative to each other?

I eventually found out that I can use

style="font-size:90%;"

which is not exactly what I wanted but is sufficients for my needs.


What is the most popular font style for ebooks?

Besides a preference on the broad family of serif fonts over sans-serif ones (see my answer to your other font related question), I don't think that there is any set preference for a particular font type.
Often books from the same publisher tend to have a set of shared fonts (once they have bought licenses for some font types, it is reasonable to broadly use them, both to maximise the investment and to create a unique look and feel for the products of the same company).
Then, one must also consider that there are also many publishers that don't include any font at all in their ebooks; in this situation every ereader uses its standard fonts, unless the users apply their own personal preferences. Even now, serif fonts seem to be the most commonly used (my Kobo defaults to Georgia, and judging from online screenshots, also Kindle and other ereaders default to some kind of serif font).


It can be accomplished with the page-break-after (link) or page-break-before (link) CSS properties. Pretty obviously, these create a page break after or before the element that they are applied on.

Here are a couple of examples of their use:

page-break-after

CSS style

.newpage {
    page-break-after:always;
}

HTML code

This text is on a page. The text will be split after this paragraph.

This text is on the following page, after the split.

page-break-before

CSS style

.newpage {
    page-break-before;
}

HTML code

This text is on a page. The text will be split after this paragraph.

This text is on the following page, after the split.

As you can see, they accomplish the same thing with a small difference (where you should put the property itself); depending on the situation, one could be more appropriate than the other.

I tested it with Calibre internal reader and on a Kobo Glo device, and it works in both of them.


Start Calibre, update feeds, transfer files and close

You can do it easily from cron (if you are on *nix) and most probably it can be done on Windows too. Calubre includes several command line tools, but for you the most important is ebook-convert(.exe).

With that you can create a mobi ebook from the RSS recipe like:

ebook-convert WHATEVER.recipe WHATEVER.mobi

Mailing can then be done like:

calibre-smtp -a WHATEVER.mobi -u SENDERNAME@PROVIDER.com -p PASSWORD -r smtp.PROVIDER.com --port 587 SENDERNAME@PROVIDER.com USERNAME@free.kindle.com ''

And set up a cron/scheduler job to automail it to you.

I'd recommend to read the fine manual.

(Note: this wont add the created mobi to your library! But you can do it with the calibredb command as documented here)


Epub3 run js function on page turn event

This is solvable thing but I wonder whether the animation and this effect are so much important for the book. The problem is these things are typical for relatively highly tuned web pages and implementing them into a book could bring more problems than it would solve.

At the moment, eBook readers are often extremely memory-limited and it is suggested one chapter should have less than 300 KB!

If you were still interested in the solution, check this post.

I have tried adding of jQuery into ebooks and it worked pretty well but it is still very experimental practice (just for fun at the moment!).


Why publish technical books only in hardback form and not in ebook form?

One reason is that formatting a technical book for printing is 10x easier than formatting it for ebook. Often, people are using Adobe Indesign to handle the difficult formatting issues and while there is an epub export function, I'm guessing that it can't handle technical issues across platforms easily. When you print, you need only to worry about how the printed book looks.

Another issue to think about is that some technical books just work better as printed books. Stuff with lots of diagrams, indices, oversized pages. Sometimes programming books are hard to view as ebooks because the lines of code are hard to look at one page at a time while in printed books there is the possibility of having them on back to back pages. I have the wonderful Docbook XSL book by Bob Staynton, and even though the full book is online http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/  I eventually bought a hard copy because I felt more comfortable putting paperclips on key pages and keeping it near my side as a reference. Some references work better in print form for that reason.

One final thought is that because Amazon decided not to sell PDFs and ibooks doesn't do so either, the publisher can't just sell PDFs except from their own stores. It involves setting up an Adobe content server which manages the DRM. That's a lot of unnecessary work. I suspect if Amazon sold PDFs directly or if a company like Scribd became more popular selling PDF, then this argument would disappear because publishers could just reuse the PDF they used for the print copy.

By the way, I used to say only a few years ago that PDF sucked because it wasn't reflowable and the tablet screens were not large enough. Now, fortunately, 10 inch screens and higher are much more common. so that is no longer a minus for using PDFs for reading it as an ebook.


If a book doesn't have DRM does that mean it is OK to give a copy to my friend to read?

NO!

Every eBook is released under a licence.  Even if there is no licence specifically identified then it is covered under the general copyright law.  If you purchased the book and it was not released under a licence that permits redistribution then you should assume that giving away copies to friends is forbidden.

Generally you can find the licence that the book was released under listed in the first few pages of the book, usually before any of the main content.  There are some licences that permit redistribution either for a fee or not.  Most licencing restricts distribution to those people who have a specific distribution licence and pay the appropriate royalties and fees to the publisher and author.

There is some question about older books that are public domain.  The content of the book(the text) is the only thing that is public domain.  The Ebook has added markup and is covered under copyright laws as a new creation.  You can still use the public domain content as permitted, but the markup and any images included that are not public domain images are covered.

Also just because you are in a country that may not enforce copyright and licencing from the country of origin, does not mean that the copyright does not exist. In real world terms, think of it as an analogy to walking down a street and seeing a house that has no door lock. Is it OK to enter the house and take anything in it, just because there's no door lock preventing you from doing so? No.  And even if the police will not arrest you that does not mean that it is acceptable to do so.


Limiting compatibility issues

Perform a validation of the file structure. See this question about this subject.

Making it faster to load

Keep the size of individual internal HTML files small. The reader usually load them individually when needed, and it is (obviously) faster to load a small file than a big one; as a rule of thumb the size limit is considered to be 250~300 KB. It is better to have many smaller files than a single heavy one, so try to have any file cover a single chapter or section rather than the whole book.
Always to keep the individual files smaller and to reduce required processing power, use a distinct stylesheet to define the CSS styles, rather than putting them inside each individual HTML text file.
Try to keep the HTML code of you files as simple and tidy as possible. I.E. use  and  tags for italic and bold text instead of their relative  and .
If you are including images, keep their size as small as possible. Consider the screen resolutions of the devices where the book will be read, whether they have color or B/W displays, and if the images are photographies or other complex illustrations, or instead simple drawings or diagrams.

Keeping it consistent

Keep the visual look as simple as possible; if you want to include some fancy layout (i.e. for chapter titles or other particular portions of text like quotes and so on) try to define it as properly and accurately as possible with CSS styles, and test the outcome with the greater number of reading devices and software that you can.
If you want to use any specific font, be sure to include it in the epub file and to define its @font-face and styles in the CSS file.


how to convert markdown with sub-markdowns to ebook

I found two things.

For me the link has to be written '( ./6.md )' with a space before and after the file specification.

Then I found the ebook-convert app wants html files for inputs.
It complains that the inputs are "binary"


How can I read Hebrew .docx files with their original fonts on a Kindle Paperwhite?

If you are comfortable making HTML from your Word documents, I was able to print Hebrew text strings to Kindle KF8/Fire (phrases, not whole documents) using HTML with CSS tags.

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Hebrew';
    src: url('.../Path/HebrewFont.ttf');
}
p.hb {
    font-family: 'Hebrew', serif;
}

In your HTML, you need to call the .hb class in your P tag:

hebrew text

non-hebrew text

If all the text is Heb, I suspect that it will work better if you wrap each paragraph in the P with hb class rather than applying it to the body.

I don't know how complex your formatting needs are, but if they are simple, you could get away with Word find/replace paragraph breaks (^p) with

^p
^&

This will wrap every paragraph in your Word doc with the needed HTML tags needed. Export (save as) the file from Word as text, not HTML/Webpage (mind your encoding). From here you need to work in a text editor, not Word You will need a HTML head and foot for the top and bottom of the file.


Service to nicely print a huge E-textbook?

This is a shopping/recommendation question, which is generally not appropriate for this site.

I have to assume that you want the printed book for personal use and not to sell to other people. I also have to assume that you don't care about how the cover looks and that you want something bound. But you didn't mention how many copies you want or how much you wish to spend. These last two points are important.

I am not really recommending this store, but this business site lists various packages for printing books. http://www.officedepot.com/a/copy-and-print/presentations/ This will give you an idea about terminology for the different types of printing.

I think it's better to talk to someone at a local print shop. Such a person might have a better idea which kind of binding is most suitable for your budget and for page length.

Another option might be to look through the various print-on-demand services. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-4-online-selfpublishers-book-write/
(contrary to what this article says, I think Createspace is a good print-on-demand service). The main problems with these POD services is that they assume that you have a PDF ready for printing according to their specs, and you are probably not in a position to modify the formatting.


How can you delete the books from 'Cloud' in Kindle PaperWhite?

Aha, I figured it out. You need to log in to your amazon account from a PC or laptop.

Go to MANAGE YOUR CONTENT AND DEVICES on amazon.com
Select MANAGE YOUR CONTENT.
For the dropdown labeled SHOW, change it from BOOKS to DOCS.

From there, you will see all your personal content and be able to delete content.


How can I add a European card to my nook?

B&N will not sell ebooks overseas (well, they did not last time I checked). I guess they may use the credit card to check that.  However, You do not have to buy from them.

What matters for you is the standard used for ebooks, not who sells them. The nook uses epub, which is the main international standard (Amazon uses its own private standard).
So you can buy epub books from some other source and then load them onto your nook ereader.

You can buy epub from Kobo, Humble Bundle, smashwords, Wildside Press, Baen, Phoenix Pick, and lots of other sources (my own sources are SciFi oriented).


Developing a new file format for E-readers that supports special languages

The epub3 standard offers a couple of new attributes specifically for RTL languages such as Persian and most free ePub3 apps, for example, ADE 4, Azardi, Gitden Reader and iBooks display epub3 RTL books fine.

(There's an Arabic test book at the official epub3 samples website that you can use for testing.)

BTW, if you happen to have a Kindle, you'll need to convert epubs to AZW3 files with Calibre, because the old MOBI format doesn't support RTL languages.


Can an ePub 2.0 contain multiple .opf files?

I am not sure what your two .opf files contain, but the EPUB 2.0.1 specs http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/epub/OCF_2.0.1_draft.doc (section 10.1) say:

  The <rootfiles> element MUST contain at least one  element
  that has a media-type of “application/oebps-package+xml”. Only one
   element with a media-type of
  “application/oebps-package+xml” SHOULD be included. The file
  referenced by the first  element that has a media-type of
  “application/oebps-package+xml” will be considered the EPUB rootfile.
  The EPUB rootfile (the OPF package file) MUST NOT be encrypted.

This means that you can have more OPF files in the container, and even reference them in the container.xml, but only the first will be considered the primary one. (And, I add, most real world reading systems will ignore the others.)

Note, however, that you can have multiple renditions inside the EPUB container:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<container version="1.0" xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:container">
<rootfiles>
<rootfile full-path="OEBPS/My Crazy Life.opf" media-type="application/oebps-package+xml" />
<rootfile full-path="PDF/My Crazy Life.pdf" media-type="application/pdf" />
</rootfiles>
</container>

So, just having another OPF file is fine, as long as you list it in the <manifest> (of the OPF actually referenced in the container.xml). For any functional purpose, it will be ignored by the reading system.

Comment 1: I still think that the EPUB you have been given is probably the result of some sort of experimentation, and having two OPF files is the result of some mistake.

Comment 2: in theory, having multiple OPF files is a way to pack multiple renditions of the same publication inside the same EPUB container. The IDPF has a working group on multiple renditions: http://www.idpf.org/epub/renditions/multiple/


When will the Sony PRS-T3 be available in the US?

According to this article, never.

  "Sony will not be offering the Reader PRS-T3 in the United States. In response to the region’s market changes, Sony will be focusing instead on mobile and tablet devices, including the Xperia Tablet Z and Xperia Z smartphone. Digital reading and eBooks remain an important priority for Sony. Reader Store will still help book lovers find and read their next story, anytime and anywhere, and customers can continue to expect new and exciting features and discovery tools. Reader Store will continue to support previous Readers as well as other compatible devices via the free Reader apps for PC, Mac, Android and iOS."


What are serif and sans serif fonts on different ebook reading systems?

Kobo ereader devices

My 1st gen Kobo Glo has the following fonts pre-installed (I suppose other Kobo devices use the same set; it is possible for the user to add more but I think this is beyond the scope of your question):

Serif: (1)

Amasis
Caecilia
Georgia (Default Serif font; also default font if nothing is specified in the ebook)
Kobo Nickel
Malabar

Sans Serif:

Avenir Next (Default Sans Serif font)
Gill Sans

Other:

KBJ-TsukuMin Pr6N RB (Serif) (2)
KBJ-UDKakugo Pr6N M (Sans Serif) (2)
OpenDyslexic

Of course, these customizations are optional, and it is possible to default fonts as defined inside the ebook.

About titles, if there are not specific settings inside the ebook stylesheets, they are treated like other text: besides having a larger size, if not explicitly set to something else, the default Georgia is used.

Kobo app for Android

Compared to the ereaders, the app is more limited in the customization options:

Default settings
Droid Serif
Droid Sans

1. Including slab serif
2. I'm not really sure but I think that these are used for Chinese/Japanese languages compatibility.


How can I get free Microsoft word templates for poetry books?

It's complicated to format poetry. I'm not sure MS word would be the best way to do it. I've formatted 2 ebooks with a good amount of poetry and I did it purely with css.

EPUBSECRETS wrote a two part article on it: http://epubsecrets.com/well-hung-poetry-ebooks-and-indents-part-one.php and http://epubsecrets.com/well-hung-poetry-ebooks-and-indents-part-two.php

Derek Murphy has two videos about formatting poetry on MS Word: http://diybookformats.com/format-publish-market-book-poetry/ Murphy always has great ideas, but I'm skeptical about using MS Word for poetry.

My code about formatting verse is somewhere, I can't find it at the moment. Two hints: 1)make sure you test on BOTH  a small device (IE width less than 767 px) and a 10 inch tablet (1025px and above). 2)Make sure the page breaks where you want. The css properties page-break-before and page break-after are supposed to work; I can't remember if they work in Kindle. CHeck Paul Salvette's article http://www.paulsalvette.com/2012/04/adding-page-breaks-for-your-kindle.html

I use something like this:

blockquote.stanza {
     margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;

 }

 /* for verse lines. */

 p.line-verse {
    text-indent: -2em; padding-left: 3em;
    padding-right: 3em;
    line-height: 80%;

 }

Looking over this code, I realize that line-height was used mainly for a quotation of a longer verse passage in a prose chapter. You wouldn't need to use that.


Is it possible to transfer my Wattpad books to my Kindle?

Some Wattpad files are epub format and other are jad format and the latter may be more of an issue though I did find a number of on-line converter claiming to be able to convert them - preferably to epub as I found that reading pdfs on the Kindle was hard work because they are not re-paginated or re-flowed to match your screen size.

Personally I would suggest using Calibre E-Book Manager for storing all & managing all of your ebooks.  If you store them in sensible formats like epub it can convert them to a number of formats including mobi for you and upload them to your Kindle and a large number of other devices via USB.


How to handle footnotes when working with epub files

Remember that you are trying to apply the expectations for a print book onto an ebook. That may be a mistake. You don't need to re-create everything; you just want something that approximates what you want.

A simple hyperlink to an End Notes section at the end of the book would satisfy the functional need even if it's not the same thing. Fast and easy to implement, and fast and easy to use.

For your specific page of text, a popup from an   might be the best solution. ibooks implements a fairly good solution here. http://sketchytech.blogspot.com/2014/03/practical-notes-on-using-pop-up-notes.html

Here's a long discussion of how to implement it in Kindle.
http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=249033
(This thread is 3 pages long, and basically offers a way to have it work in e-ink devices as well as kf8). It does look pretty messy though.

By the way, from that thread is the interesting remark that the editing part of Calibre seems to support making footnotes.

Having a list of notes at the end of the book which you can link to directly from the text which will then point back to the text itself is probably the safest method you need.

I personally would wait until the Kindle Formatting Guide provides a specific supported mechanism for footnotes before you start messing around with popups.

But if you can easily manage one epub for ibooks and another epub for the current stable of Kindle devices, that should last you a while. I guess you would also need a simple epub where all the notes go to a final end notes chapter. The semantics for all three ebooks seem to be different, so maintaining three separate ebooks seems to be a pretty amount of work. If it were merely a matter of changing CSS between versions, that would be more manageable (although I guess you could make the text for asides hidden via css for non-ibooks epubs).

I suspect that PDF's output from InDesign can be configured to show footnotes on the bottom of printed pages.  If the ebook deliverable can be a PDF, then you wouldn't even need to worry about that.


How to erase data before selling a Kindle?

Every Kindle has a menu option "Reset to Factory Defaults", which does exactly what you want: It removes all user specific data from the device.

Step by step instructions for factory resets on various Kindle devices

For the paranoid: Most devices will not actually erase your data, but just mark it as "erased". For the user both are the same thing - if you sell your device, the new owner will not see your stuff. For anybody with sufficient knowledge and interest in that piece of information - such as crime scene investigators etc. - it usually is possible to restore data. I have not checked if a Kindle will actually overwrite your data or leave traces behind.


Are there any ebook readers which are NOT backlit, but for which you can upload pdfs?

There is no need to 'hack' or 'jailbreak' a Kobo reader—they can read PDFs natively. The following comes from their site:

  You'll find some differences when you're reading PDF books compared to
  regular books, including the option to read in landscape orientation,
  and to zoom in on the page.

  Here are some things you can't do with a PDF book: Select text Add
  highlights Look up words in the dictionary Change the text size or
  style

This applies to Kobo Mini, Kobo Original / Kobo Wifi, Kobo Touch, Kobo Glo, Kobo Aura HD, Kobo Aura, and Kobo Aura H20.

Also on their site, there are instructions for how to load a PDF onto a Kobo Original:

  The Kobo Wireless and Kobo Original eReaders support documents in PDF
  format.

  You can transfer them to your eReader:

  By drag-and-drop On an SD card If your PDFs are protected by Adobe
  DRM, you must use Adobe Digital Editions to transfer them to your
  eReader.

For use with the SD card:

  If your PDFs are not protected by Adobe DRM, you can transfer them to
  your eReader using a SD card.

  Insert the SD card with the PDF files on it into your eReader's SD
  card slot. Turn on your eReader. Wait for your eReader to process the
  content. Find the documents under Documents.

while for drag and drop:

  Connect your eReader to your computer using the USB cable.

  On your eReader select Manage Library.

  Press the centre of the Navigation pad.

  Open Finder (on a Macintosh computer) or Explorer (on a Windows
  computer), and look for KOBOeReader. This may be listed as a hard
  drive or as a removable storage device.

  In another Finder or Explorer window, locate the files you want
  to transfer. Drag these files to KOBOeReader. You can now eject
  your eReader and read your documents.

Since PDF is now a standard, most e-readers support it, so Kobo is not unique in this regard—Kindle and Nook both read PDFs as well. Also, you might check out the sidelighing of the Kobo Glo—it's not at all bright or glaring, but offers comfortable reading in any light level. Looks really nice—my mom loves hers.


To read an ePub book, you need some kind of software that can open it and display it to you in the proper way, exactly like any other kind of file types.

I don't know about all phones, especially for Android ones, the set of preinstalled apps depends largely on the manufacturer choices.

Often, Google Play Books is preinstalled, but there are a lot of other ePub reader apps.

Anyway, I don't really understand what the real problem is. If you are going to send an ePub to another person that had no problem in finding and installing the Facebook Messenger app, you should not be concerned that he would not be equally able to find and install an app used for another purpose.