2021-12-27

Book Day

The free ebooks I've found since getting my kobo ebook reader have been of somewhat varying quality. I loaded them onto my kobo only to discover that the ordering of them was a mess. Some had the author's name spelled wrong, none of them was listed as belonging to a series, the titles were differently formatted and more.

Some time ago I installed Calibre to learn more about ebook formats, but I didn't really get around to using it. Now it was a tremendously powerful tool. Editing the metadata to consistent spelling and formatting, and adding things like the series and which part of it the book in question was; all of that was a breeze. As soon as I connected the reader to the computer with a USB cable Calibre found it and made it dead simple to move the books over to it.

Then I discovered that a few of the ebooks had been generated with some god-awful software. I can tell you that if you want to show people how good your ebook generation program is, here's some tips:

Don't attempt to insert page breaks within a re-flowing format.
Don't mark those "page breaks" with a big bold text block showing the supposed page number and a long text telling the reader that your program was used to generate this book, complete with a URL (with a line break cutting it in the middle).
Include all chapters in the table of contents.
Try to keep chapters in order. You don't start with half of chapter 16 (which you didn't even list in the table of contents) before promptly shifting to chapter 1.
Actually, do please split the book into chapters rather than putting the chapter numbers in ordinary paragraphs and then adding just the one entry (that neither exists nor has a name written in unicode characters) in the table of contents.

Calibre to the rescue yet again!

I didn't bother to manually add chapters to that book that didn't have it, but all the other problems could be swiftly fixed with some regex search and replace and a couple of clicks telling Calibre to "attempt to solve fixable problems".

All in all I've spent something like seven or eight hours reading today, and less time fixing up the books than I normally spend scrolling Netflix and Disney+. Bonus: I feel like I'm carefully curating and personalizing my library. Go me!

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal