# Sigil vs Calibre?



## GearPress Steve (Feb 4, 2012)

Hey guys...

I see people mentioning Sigil and so I went to check it out. Just a question: what does Sigil do that Calibre doesn't? Currently my process is to create in Scrivener, move to OOW to format for print, import the .ODT file of the printed book into Calibre to convert to EPUB, and edit the EPUB in Calibre to clean it up and tweak it to my liking. Then I upload the EPUB to Amazon.

Am I missing out on anything by not having Sigil as part of my process?


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## Guest (Feb 9, 2014)

You can format epubs and mobis in Scrivener. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

Calibre is arguable an easier tool, more visual than Sigil, and more versatile (like the ability to import Docx files).  That being said, some have posted warnings about the quality of the files produced by Calibre. At the very least they seem to point toward using it only for Epub and then using Kindlegen to convert those epubs to Mobi.  

I use both, btw,...Calibre to create Epubs and Sigil to validate them.  If there are problems with Calibre produced epubs, I haven't noticed them and I do a fairly good amount of testing on various devices before I upload.


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## Rachel Aukes (Oct 13, 2013)

Rick Gualtieri said:


> I use both, btw,...Calibre to create Epubs and Sigil to validate them.


I use both in the same way, too. With Calibre's enhancements, I might not need Sigil anymore, but until I know that for sure, I'll stick with both.

But I upload a .DOC to KDP.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Personally? Neither.

I used Calibre for a while when I first got started with formatting eBooks. Now I only use it if I need a quick-n-dirty conversion of ePub to mobi or vice-versa. I personally don't use it for anything professional and haven't for about a year and a half.

See, around then I got a copy of Adobe CS6, made the transition to InDesign, and now use that for all formatting.

So my current process is:

1) Compose in Scrivener for Windows.

2) If necessary for editorial exchanges, I port into MS Word while interacting with an editor.

2b) If Word isn't necessary, I export from Scrivener for Windows, open the RTF file in WordPad, then copy/paste into my InDesign template.

3) From InDesign, it's easy to use the same file (with minor adjustments) to .mobi, .ePub, and PDF (if I'm going to publish in print).

4) One glitch-fixer is that I use tweak_epub.exe to open the ePub and make sure the cover image is displaying correctly. I could probably eliminate this step if I took time to figure out how to alter a single default setting in how InDesign outputs .ePubs, but I continue using this tweak_epub app because it gets the job done and wherever that setting is, it's not anywhere obvious. 

So, at the minimum, I use only two apps (Scriv and ID). At most, four.

P.S., Also it strikes me as odd to upload an ePub to Amazon. The results are much cleaner when uploading a .mobi to Amazon, while using ePubs elsewhere.


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## 68564 (Mar 17, 2013)

GearPress Steve said:


> Hey guys...
> 
> I see people mentioning Sigil and so I went to check it out. Just a question: what does Sigil do that Calibre doesn't? Currently my process is to create in Scrivener, move to OOW to format for print, import the .ODT file of the printed book into Calibre to convert to EPUB, and edit the EPUB in Calibre to clean it up and tweak it to my liking. Then I upload the EPUB to Amazon.
> 
> Am I missing out on anything by not having Sigil as part of my process?


As posted by a few others - many of use both. Sigil is more like a text editor and Calibre is more like a word processor. Sigil is really aimed more at the crowd that likes to get dirty down in the source code (XHTML+CSS) of the files for total control, while Calibre is a higher level GUI interface as its focus.

What I do is....

Write the manuscript in MS Word 2011 on my Mac. Produce a DOCX and import that into Calibre. I then convert to EPUB and export it. I open it in Sigil and do my tweaking and adjustments, for example removing font sizing and justification (so that the devices can control that and not me). I then bring it back into Calibre as a fresh file and that becomes my master EPUB to base all other files off of.

As Calibre has added direct editing features in the last few builds - this may become less necessary, but for now that is what I do.

Everyone has their own system, you need to go with what works for you.


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## rosclarke (Jul 12, 2013)

Well, I am a new Sigil convert. 

I had an ePub which I'd made in Calibre that was consistently failing epubcheck and thus being rejected at Smashwords. Couldn't see what the problems were nor how to fix them with Calibre. After several very frustrating hours and days, I installed Sigil and it was like a breath of fresh air. Direct access to the code. Easy TOC creator - which was where most of my problems were because this was an anthology and Calibre wasn't coping with multiple chapter one's etc. Immediate check on validation so I could see where the issues were. Fixed everything within half an hour, uploaded and straight into Premium catalog within an hour. 

From now on, I'll go straight to Sigil for ePubs.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

To answer the original question: If you don't want complete control, and are willing to live with flaws that come from automated conversions, then I assume that Calibre alone would be fine. If you do want that control, are comfortable with "source code," and want to avoid conversion errors, I would recommend Sigil. I don't use Calibre at all for creating files that would go to anyone, especially not for publishing. It's a neat tool, but I don't trust its conversion, or almost any other conversion, process. The only one I trust is Amazon's software to convert from ePUB to MOBI, and I'm even wary of that.

Generally, people will find tools that seem to work for them and that's what they'll use, based on their anecdotal experience. This is why people will "recommend" preparing an e-book in MS Word or any other word processor. The results _seem_ fine at a first-glance level. Underneath the surface, there can be all kinds of problems that will surface, perhaps only for a few, later on. The less correctly the word processor is used, the more problems there are. One of the things I typically have to do when I'm helping a client is to undo the mess that a word processor created.

Here's an example, using forum BBCode in place of what a word processor would generate:

This sentence has one word *bold* and one word in _italics_.

The correct BBCode for that is:

```
This sentence has one word [b]bold[/b] and one word in [i]italics[/i].
```
The way a word processor -- especially an incorrectly-used word processor -- might generate that is:


```
[SIZE=13px][/SIZE]T[i][/i]his[b] [/b]sent[b][/b]ence[b][/b] has [i][/i]one[i][/i] word [b]bold[/b] and [b][/b]one[b][/b] word in [i]italics[/i].
```
The way that incorrect code is rendered is:

This sentence has one word *bold* and one word in _italics_.

On the surface it looks the same, but underneath... whew. And I'm not exaggerating, I've really seen spaces "italicized" and a lot of other redundant junk, as well as incorrect nesting that leads to display problems visible to the reader.

An ebook is essentially a file-encapsulated, stand-alone Web site. When my main income was from professional Web development, my colleagues and I would cringe at people using word processors to author Web content. They've never been the right tool for that, and that extends to ebooks.

If you must use a word processor, learn to use it correctly. For example, never use tabs or spaces for indenting, never use the italics button (or bold button or any other button or menu option for styling). Don't set font sizes directly. Learn to use styles, learn how to structure a document (headers, etc.). If you take the time to use it properly, a word processor should be able to generate mostly-clean code. My experience, however, is that the "should" doesn't happen because users don't understand (or are too rushed, lazy, etc. to use) the more complex features that create a properly-structured document.


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## GearPress Steve (Feb 4, 2012)

rosclarke said:


> I installed Sigil and it was like a breath of fresh air. Direct access to the code. Easy TOC creator - which was where most of my problems were because this was an anthology and Calibre wasn't coping with multiple chapter one's etc. Immediate check on validation so I could see where the issues were. Fixed everything within half an hour, uploaded and straight into Premium catalog within an hour.


But Calibre also provides direct access to the code. In fact, when I went to look at Sigil's screenshots, the code editor looked almost identical to Calibre's. Since I'm a long time web coder, I know HTML well and I can tweak it myself in Calibre, which is what I did for my first e-book published on Amazon. Also, looking at the code allowed me to examine Calibre's conversion process from ODT to EPUB, which allowed me to figure out some simple fixes that will make the code smaller and cleaner next time around.

I like that Calibre gives me complete control over the code.

It sounds like Calibre may be the only EPUB tool I need. Apparently it has undergone a few enhancement cycles that make it a more complete tool now. Since I'd never used earlier versions, I guess I'm not missing the features that using Sigil would have added.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

GearPress Steve said:


> But Calibre also provides direct access to the code.


That's interesting, I don't remember seeing that in Calibre. I'll have to give it a fresh look. With that, and your coding familiarity, maybe you're really not missing anything by not using Sigil.


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## Redacted1111 (Oct 26, 2013)

I've used Calibre, but I don't like the results. The converted file always seems to have errors. I have the Adobe suite so I should probably make myself learn InDesign. I could make nicer looking books if I did.


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## rosclarke (Jul 12, 2013)

GearPress Steve said:


> But Calibre also provides direct access to the code.


It does in the most recent updates, yes. I still didn't find it helped me to locate and identify the coding errors that were causing my files not to pass epubcheck. And although I could build the TOC I wanted in it, that TOC did not function correctly in some of the ePub readers I tried. I got much better results with much less hair-tearing in Sigil.

So, I guess if Calibre is working for you, that's great. Stick with it. If at some point you find it isn't, I would recommend trying Sigil.


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## 68564 (Mar 17, 2013)

Crenel said:


> That's interesting, I don't remember seeing that in Calibre. I'll have to give it a fresh look. With that, and your coding familiarity, maybe you're really not missing anything by not using Sigil.


Its a new feature, and still a bit immature. I think its only a couple months old. I have yet to get a chance to dive in to it.


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## scottmarlowe (Apr 22, 2010)

I use Sigil to create my epubs and Calibre to convert them to mobi format.


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

I keep hearing about mobi for KDP.  Did not prc files replace mobi as preferable?


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> I keep hearing about mobi for KDP. Did not prc files replace mobi as preferable?


Both are acceptable. There's even a third format, technically, but Amazon's own InDesign plug-in for outputting Kindle files outputs to .mobi, not .prc.


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## Andrew Ashling (Nov 15, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> I keep hearing about mobi for KDP. Did not prc files replace mobi as preferable?


Not necessary. You can upload epubs and KDP turns them into azw3 (proprietary epub) for the newer kindles and azw (mobi) for the older ones.


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

CraigInTwinCities said:


> Both are acceptable. There's even a third format, technically, but Amazon's own InDesign plug-in for outputting Kindle files outputs to .mobi, not .prc.


Is mobi the better choice, than?


Andrew Ashling said:


> Not necessary. You can upload epubs and KDP turns them into azw3 (proprietary epub) for the newer kindles and azw (mobi) for the older ones.


Is epub a better choice since it works on older Kindles?


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## Andrew Ashling (Nov 15, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> Is mobi the better choice, than?
> Is epub a better choice since it works on older Kindles?


Epub doesn't work _as such_ on older kindles. It contains more information than they can handle. Amazon strips that out and makes it into their own azw format, akin to mobi, for them.
For the newer kindles the information is (mostly) retained. For them the epub gets converted into azw3 (which is epub-_like_).

The advantage is you only have to upload one file for both older and newer kindles.

ETA:

If you use the older mobi-format, the newer kindles will reproduce that correctly, but you won't take advantage of e.g. special formatting or embedded fonts. So, actually you're playing a black and white movie on a color TV.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> Is mobi the better choice, than?
> Is epub a better choice since it works on older Kindles?


.mobi is what I've always uploaded to KDP. There are formatting differences (minor ones) between .ePub and .mobi (and other Amazon-native formats). Uploading an .ePub means some of those minor differences result in anamolies between what you upload and what ends up in your end-result Kindle book.

While it IS minor stuff, it's the sort of thing that can throw off the formatting just enough that it doesn't look right unless you format your books in ultra-vanilla fashion... as in, nothing more complex than italics and bold, etc. (No drop caps, no small caps, etc.)

So, yeah, you can upload epubs, and if your books are very simple, it'll work okay. But .mobi is better for Amazon... I mean, that's the format Amazon turns 'em all into, anyway. When I plug my Kindle into my PC and look at the files, that's what's there.

So why not upload the native format to begin with? Seems like a no-brainer to me, but that's me and my mileage. Yours may vary...


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## Andrew Ashling (Nov 15, 2010)

CraigInTwinCities said:


> .mobi is what I've always uploaded to KDP. There are formatting differences (minor ones) between .ePub and .mobi (and other Amazon-native formats). Uploading an .ePub means some of those minor differences result in anamolies between what you upload and what ends up in your end-result Kindle book.
> 
> While it IS minor stuff, it's the sort of thing that can throw off the formatting just enough that it doesn't look right unless you format your books in ultra-vanilla fashion... as in, nothing more complex than italics and bold, etc. (No drop caps, no small caps, etc.)
> 
> ...


Being able to embed fonts, having control over dropcaps, etc. is NOT minor stuff.

Amazon NEVER borks an epub into mobi conversion, unless&#8230;. your epub is not very well formatted to begin with.

And no, mobi, or rather *azw*, is not (any longer) the native format. The newer paperwhites and the tablets all use the new standard which is *azw3*.

So yeah, if your books are very simple, you can upload a mobi.


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

Thank you Andrew and Craig.

Since my ebook is plain vanilla, by your definition, mobi sounds adequate for my needs.  Apparently, the choice is between mobi and epub, not mobi and prc.

I have Kindle for PC.  Can I import the formatted mobi to that program and check it before I upload to KDP?


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## Andrew Ashling (Nov 15, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> Thank you Andrew and Craig.
> 
> Since my ebook is plain vanilla, by your definition, mobi sounds adequate for my needs. Apparently, the choice is between mobi and epub, not mobi and prc.
> 
> I have Kindle for PC. Can I import the formatted mobi to that program and check it before I upload to KDP?


1. You're probably right. Though it wouldn't hurt to get aquainted with epub/azw3. The older format, mobi/azw is on the way out.

2. Yes you can. But so-called emulators are never 100% what readers will see on their device. But you will catch glaring mistakes.

Just to show the difference:

This is what a page looks like in azw (mobi-like) - screenshot taken on an older kindle 2.










This is the same page in azw3 (epub-like) - screenshot taken on a new papaerwhite.










On a Kindle Fire the chapter title would be colored, as would be the dropcap. Like on my Android-reader:


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

Andrew Ashling said:


> 1. You're probably right. Though it wouldn't hurt to get aquainted with epub/azw3. The older format, mobi/azw is on the way out.
> 
> 2. Yes you can. But so-called emulators are never 100% what readers will see on their device. But you will catch glaring mistakes.
> 
> ...


Thank you for these examples. To be honest, I prefer one, the mobi. It's easiest to read, with the greatest contrast. I use ALL-CAPS to start my Chapter I. I'm not convinced that color belongs in the text unless you're doing an illustrated novel or something like that. Sometimes, technology overshoots the mark.


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## Rachel Macwhirter (May 29, 2013)

Sigil all the way. I write the whole thing in that and Q10. Never had any issues with it that I didn't cause myself.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> Thank you for these examples. To be honest, I prefer one, the mobi. It's easiest to read, with the greatest contrast. I use ALL-CAPS to start my Chapter I. I'm not convinced that color belongs in the text unless you're doing an illustrated novel or something like that. Sometimes, technology overshoots the mark.


Despite his snarkiness in terms of trying to always be right, Hudson, Andrew overlooks another difference between his examples.

Namely, that older Kindles (like the one he identified as a .mobi) have lower resolution. That's part of why it looks bigger and "easier to read." But that's not something to judge any of the Kindle-native formats by, because as the user/reader, you can set your Kindle to a bigger or smaller font size until you find the size that's best for you.

So, don't confuse file-types with screen resolutions. That's sort of a shell game.

A couple truths out of this are:

1) Amazon's own Kindle Plug-In for InDesign outputs files with a .mobi extension.

2) One can play shell games with various Kindle-native formats, from .mobi to .prc to .azw to .azw3, but the way Amazon processes KDP uploads, there are not vast differences between them, and in fact KDP processes them in such a way so that whichever format your particular Kindle is most-uniquely-built-for, it will display in that format. But none of those "native" formats include .ePub. .ePub is accepted for upload, but KDP changes it to their native format, which, yes, is technically .azw3, but .azw3 works in part to make sure that all generations of Kindles can read the file.

3) Finally, don't confuse file-format with the Kindle rendering engine. Each generation of Kindle tends to render books a little bit differently, and it's not because of the file-format so much as it is the Kindle's rendering engine. Heck, even concurrent generations of Kindles render books differently. The latest Kindle (the cheap, $69 one), Kindle Paperwhite, and Kindle Fire are ALL current, but the same book will render differently on each device. That's not due to file-format. That's due to the fact that each of those devices have different screen resolutions, with some being eInk screens and the Fires being color tablet screens. So each device renders in its own way to take fullest advantage of the specifics of that particular Kindle or Fire. (Not to mention the Kindle apps for different formats...)

All this to say, whether it's .mobi, .prc, .azw, or azw3, all of those are file-formats that are, or once were, Kindle-native formats.

That's different from .ePub, which KDP can convert, but is NOT a Kindle-native format.

Here's one technical reason why it's not best to upload an ePub:

Almost every single ePub-based eReader retailer and device currently expects authors/publishers to keep their ePubs compliant with the ePub 2.0.1 formatting standard.

The trouble is, that standard is way out of date. A newer standard, .ePub 3.0, was designed and approved by the committee that does such standard-setting, and I believe it was released around 2012-2013 sometime.

However, thus far, every site that sells .ePub books as their native format (Apple, Google, Kobo, B&N, and... reluctantly because they still want Word files, technically... Smashwords) wants books submitted by authors and publishers to conform to the old 2.0.1 standard. When someone like Apple or Smashwords screeches because your files "didn't pass ePubCheck," this is often why. Because something in your book violated ePub 2.0.1, not the more advanced standard of ePub 3.0.

No one's embraced it.

What's the difference, you ask?

Well, one handy example is Small Caps.

Amazon has supported small caps as a text effect on all their native formats.

ePub 3.0 allows for the use of the Small Caps effect. But the older 2.0.1 standard? Does not. If you have a book that you've formatted for Kindle that uses the small caps effect, when you output the file to .ePub, it'll show up as normal text in all .ePub outputs.

Why? Because almost every device and retailer out there embracing ePub still embraces the 2.0.1 standard. (Somehow, 2.0.1 was forward-looking enough to include support for Drop Caps... but not Small Caps.)

I'm starting to wonder when the ePub 3.0 standard will ever be embraced. It'd make sense, because a lot of cool stuff is in ePub 3.0 that'd bring it up-to-date with features present in the latest version of Amazon's standard, .azw3. Which would be good for .ePub users and authors and publishers all the way around. But making ePub 3.0 compliant ebooks work on older ePub-reading devices is the trick, so that's been the hold-up... No one who sells, say, Nook devices wants those readers who own a year-old Nook to buy a book and suddenly have problems because their device is only cool with ePub 2.0.1 and not ePub 3. I imagine there are protections built into the ePub 3.0 standard to guard against that, but so far no one's welcoming ePub 3.0-compliant uploads.

But a lot of this is technical jargon, and a bit dizzying.

The bottom line is, .ePub comply to a much older standard, so you can't do some of the neater tricks in them... which means if you wanted to use something like Small Caps in your formatting, you wouldn't have that effect present in an .epub upload, which means it won't be there in your Kindle book, either.

However, use a Kindle-native format like .mobi, and you'll get to use all those tricks, if you need them, and they'll appear on your Kindle.

Finally, there's this: whenever I upload a book somewhere, if I use the native format, my book file uploads a lot quicker, because the file doesn't have to be converted.

For example, if I upload a Word .doc or .ePub or PDF to KDP, I have to wait through an extra dialogue for KDP to "convert" my file to a native format. Not so when I upload .mobi files.

Same goes for .ePub sites. When I upload to Kobo Writing Life, it all goes ultra quick if I upload a native .ePub that's passed ePub validation for the 2.0.1 standard. If I try uploading anything else, I have to wait for KWL to "convert" it to an ePub anyway, even though they accept many formats of manuscript. (And getting a good-looking ePub isn't easy if you're uploading a PDF...).

So, ePub to ePub sites and Kindle-formats (.mobi) to Amazon, for the least hassle and smoothest, fastest, best-looking results.

(Oh, and one can use text-colors on ANY generation of Kindles, but on eInk devices the text will just be grayed to the closest shade of gray in the Kindle's 16-level palette, and render as color on color Kindle devices... so don't be mislead there, that's actually a rendering engine issue, not a file-format difference.)

But I generally agree with you, Hudson; for most uses, especially fiction, adding color to, say, your chapter headers, is more distracting than it is beneficial.

P.S. Yes, I can be a bit snarky, too, at times. Guilty. People who are passionate about their craft, like Andrew and I, do slip into that from time-to-time. We're not bad people... just passionate about our craft and what we know.


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## Andrew Ashling (Nov 15, 2010)

CraigInTwinCities said:


> Despite his snarkiness in terms of trying to always be right, Hudson, Andrew overlooks another difference between his examples.


Could you please tone down the ad hominem attacks, Craig? (Oh well, I'll admit to a certain degree of snarkiness.)
I think that I, more than most, have repeatedly and publicly admitted it when I was wrong.

That said, you're partly right. You also overlook a few things. This is a new industry and it evolves quickly. Your long and interesting exposition is a snapshot how things are now. It will be different next year. Smart money is on epub. Mobi is a dying format and Amazon only will support it for as long as there are still kindles around that use it. It won't produce new kindles that use it though. (The story is kind of like Microsoft and Windows XP.)

You also overlook that Amazon is not the only kid on the block. Most other readers use epub. If you want to sell with other vendors, you _need_ epubs. Kobo, Barnes&Noble, and most European vendors use it, to mention just a few. Epub is the **** Sapiens of formats, mobi the Cro Magnon.
Of course, you could easily make your epubs by letting Calibre convert your mobis into crude (but, admittedly, perfectly functional) epubs. D2D as well seems to do a good job.

You are right in one aspect. Epub, much like modern man, is still evolving. Not only that, not all readers are created equal. Kobo will keep more faithfully to the css in epubs than most other readers (well, the Kobo Glo does, in my personal experience).

I'll also admit, like I did in a previous post - see, Craig? - that for vanilla publications mobi does a good job. However, in a few years mobi ebooks will have the approximate value of a mass paperback and well-crafted epubs that of a hardcover. Approximately. I think in a few years readers will expect a certain quality from their ebooks. Some won't care. Some will still prefer the mass paperback with it's cheap paper and no frills. Some, on the other hand, will value typography and the whistles and bells that epub/azw3 makes possible, just like some value a beautifully produced hard cover. It goes without saying that the latter will be not only more satisfying as a reading experience, but also will command higher prices.

Summarizing, I would plead for everyone to get at least acqainted with the format of the future. If you have a deadline and a working procedure to make mobis, by all means, you should go for it.



CraigInTwinCities said:


> P.S. Yes, I can be a bit snarky, too, at times. Guilty. People who are passionate about their craft, like Andrew and I, do slip into that from time-to-time. We're not bad people... just passionate about our craft and what we know.


And again, I find myself agreeing with you. There's a serious imbalance in the universe.


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## rjspears (Sep 25, 2011)

I used Calibre combined with a CSS stylesheet and Notepad++ for over a year, but had some issues that caused me to look to Sigil. The two biggest issues were that I couldn't get a decent TOC out of Calibre and I had a left margin error I couldn't fix. The other thing with my past method was that it was very time consuming, spending hours fiddling with arcane coding. Ugh.

My steps are:
1) cut and past my Word doc (shorter pieces in total or longer pieces chapter-by-chapter) into Notepad ++. This strips out all that nasty coding that Word puts in. In Notepad ++ I put paragraph tags in
2) I cut and paste in my CSS style sheet into Sigil, then cut and paste the story into the of my Sigil file
3) I do my formatting with headings and italics and the such, then save it as an epub.
4) I use EPUB to MOBI to change it to mobi and I'm done.

Now, all that being said, I haven't used the latest upgrade on Calibre which I've heard is pretty nice.


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## 75150 (Feb 7, 2014)

rjspears: Any reason you don't just save your files in Notepad++ and import them into Sigil? Having the clean text files would be good backup.

Not telling you what to do, just curious about your process.


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## GearPress Steve (Feb 4, 2012)

Well, thanks for all the more advanced information, guys. I'm happy with how KDP converted my EPUB file to the Kindle format. It looked good on all of the platforms I tested it on (Kindle 2, cloud reader, my Android phone, my Kindle simulator, inside of Calibre, etc). I will also say that when reading a book on a reader, as opposed to reading a hardcopy, I prefer the format to be simple. That's a personal preference. Some authors, I'm sure, prefer to have more bells and whistles. I like pure, clear text and one consistent font when reading on-screen. So since that it my preference, at least for now, it appears that Calibre does exactly what I need: it converts my ODT files to EPUB, and within Calibre I can go in and manually edit to clean up any conversion issues.

Clearly if Calibre didn't give me the ability to have complete control over my code, I would need something like Sigil. Apparently I started using Calibre AFTER their code editing enhancement so that's why I didn't understand why some folks were using both, but now that's clear to me.

I know when you discuss writing tools things get a little personal. I've seen that in my own thread praising Scrivener. But I appreciate the responses and even the slightly heated debate about formats. It helps me to better understand an area that is new to me, despite having been a web coder since the days of Mosaic.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

I have great luck with Calibre. If you put your chapter headings into a header style, it will export to H1 in HTML and you can set up Calibre to pick that up and construct HTML and NCX TOCs. You can even use a Heading 2 and have it do a multilayer one for compilations. I would say that 90% of the issues people have with Calibre come from dirty word processor files. Garbage in/garbage out. If you have a solid file with everything formatted using styles and no tabs or double returns you should get a great epub or mobi out of calibre.

People run down the code generated by Calibre and yes, you probably can go in and remove one or two styles in the CSS and consolidate them, but it's really not that bad at all. When I've gone in, I may have to look once or twice to figure out what style is what, but it's really just not that bad. I have run into a few issues with post 3.x epub validation. Sometimes that can be fixed by just ping ponging the files between mobi and epub. Sometimes I need to go in with Sigil and hand fix something and there's the strength--both of these should be part of your toolbox. It's not an either/or question.

To me, mobi or epub is irrelevant. They're both wrappers with html files of the text, css of the styling, and some control files for the TOC and metadata. They're very very similar. Mobi doesn't support as full a subset of css tags as epub or azw3, but for the most part those are features that in my opinion are overly fiddly for a narrative fiction book. YMMV and I pity anyone who tries to lay out graphic intensive non-fiction for ebooks.


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

Again, thank you Craig and Andrew.  What I don't understand, especially with so much financial incentive to do so, why isn't there a one click solution to e-book formatting?  I can get a Word to pdf conversion with one click, and a scanned doc to editable Word file with one click.  Why not for Kindle or any other reading device?  Or is this option available on Scrivener or one of those programs?


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## 68564 (Mar 17, 2013)

Hudson Owen said:


> Again, thank you Craig and Andrew. What I don't understand, especially with so much financial incentive to do so, why isn't there a one click solution to e-book formatting? I can get a Word to pdf conversion with one click, and a scanned doc to editable Word file with one click. Why not for Kindle or any other reading device? Or is this option available on Scrivener or one of those programs?


Calibre is fast becoming that. It takes a native a Word DOCX in and makes EPUB, MOBI, PDF, etc out. It is rapidly getting better and better. Infact you can get away in many cases just using its output with no touching.

Scrivner can also do this, assuming you start your process in Scrivner and take the time to build the compile scripts.

I am told there is a plugin for open office that lets you save right to EPUB.

So those options exist - but many people on this forum are perfectionists and tinkerers and love to twiddle with the output.


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## rjspears (Sep 25, 2011)

> rjspears: Any reason you don't just save your files in Notepad++ and import them into Sigil? Having the clean text files would be good backup.
> 
> Not telling you what to do, just curious about your process.


AMB -I did consider that at one point, but then I would have lots of little chapter files hanging out and I don't see myself and doing any changes that I couldn't do in Sigil. Yes, having those clean text files could be a back-up, but I'm not sure I'd ever do anything with them. Then again, I'm prone to laziness, too.


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## Andrew Ashling (Nov 15, 2010)

VydorScope said:


> Calibre is fast becoming that. It takes a native a Word DOCX in and makes EPUB, MOBI, PDF, etc out. It is rapidly getting better and better. Infact you can get away in many cases just using its output with no touching.
> 
> Scrivner can also do this, assuming you start your process in Scrivner and take the time to build the compile scripts.
> 
> ...


Yep, some of us are. 

Let's also not forget that more and more readers are using their tablets (both Android and iPads) to read a bit during lunch hour, while waiting for the bus, on the train and so on. Most vendors have their own apps and there are also apps that basically transform your tablet into an ereader. For Android I can recommend Aldiko - burrow deep into the menus and there's a setting to keep the formatting of the publisher. Aldiko will render an epub perfectly. They're perfect for those of us who read a few paragraphs at a time. For prolonged reading they're tiring on the eyes.

But, as I said, and as you implied as well, things are changing rapidly.


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## Hudson Owen (May 18, 2012)

VydorScope said:


> Calibre is fast becoming that. It takes a native a Word DOCX in and makes EPUB, MOBI, PDF, etc out. It is rapidly getting better and better. Infact you can get away in many cases just using its output with no touching.
> 
> Scrivner can also do this, assuming you start your process in Scrivner and take the time to build the compile scripts.
> 
> ...


I've used the older Calibre to format an essay, and that uploaded ok. For anything more complicated, I'm using outside help.


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## 68564 (Mar 17, 2013)

Hudson Owen said:


> I've used the older Calibre to format an essay, and that uploaded ok. For anything more complicated, I'm using outside help.


To be clear the "older Calibre" was not very good at it. It has really grown up over the last say 6 months. You might revisit it and see what you think.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Andrew Ashling said:


> Smart money is on epub. Mobi is a dying format and Amazon only will support it for as long as there are still kindles around that use it. It won't produce new kindles that use it though. (The story is kind of like Microsoft and Windows XP.)


This point, Andrew, is where you and I are essentially betting on different horses and therefore our passions are differently directed.

You see, both .mobi and .epub are old formats.

.mobi was established in 2000 under the ownership of MobiPocket. It's a company Amazon bought up when it entered the eReader market. They bought it for the format, so they'd have exclusive control over it.

All revisions to the .mobi format (and even changes in the filename extension) have been built off that original .mobi design.

And actually, we're both a bit off on our understanding of Kindle-native formats. The most recent isn't .azw3, but .kf8 (which included extensions for Kindle Fire optimization). But it's still all built off the .mobi container.

And again, the rendering engine is often more important than the file format.

.ePub would seem to be, on the surface, newer. It was established in 2007. But those seven years don't matter a while lot, because things moved a lot more slowly back then. eReaders didn't skyrocket in popularity until they started becoming a bit more affordable in 2010/2011.

But here's where I have a problem with your central thesis that "the future is ePub," Andrew:

You claim it's newer and the wave of the future. But their current embraced standard of ePub deployment is the 2.0.1 revision, introduced in 2007 and received a maintenance update in 2010. The actual most recent release is the 3.0 standard, which no one accepts currently for upload, was created in 2011 and is superior in a lot of ways to 2.0.1, though there are issues.

Meanwhile, on the Amazon side of things, .kf8, Amazon's most recent expansion of the .mobi code core, was introduced in 2011 and was deployed from the release of the first Kindle Fire, and has been around for two generations of hardware. It's even used on newer eInk Kindles.

Amazon can do this because they bought the .mobi code base by buying out MobiPocket, specifically so they'd have an exclusive file-format for their books.

ePub is an "open standard," which is why so many people use it. But that's also why deploying ePub 3.0 has been so troublesome... everyone wants to stay with the 2.0.1 standard rather than struggle with the cross-compatibility issues between 2.0.1 and 3.0.

Frankly, I don't see it as a Microsoft/Windows XP parallel.

It's closer to the parallel between Apple iOS and Android.

Amazon has chosen the Apple iOS model. They have an exclusive format and want to keep it exclusive.

ePub is closer to the Google Android model. They have an open standard and want massive adoption to drown out "company loyalty."

Now, I'll agree that Google's model is ultimately working better in smartphones. But it's working not because you have 40 companies using Android versus 1 company (Apple) using iOS.

It's working because 2-3 top companies are succeeding massively with Android, with Samsung currently outselling Apple single-handedly, and other Android companies like Google itself, nipping at their heels.

However, I don't think the same mathematics apply to ePub vs. Amazon.

For one thing sure, there's a lot of companies supporting ePub... but none of them have come close to matching Amazon Kindle on marketshare. There is no "Samsung of the eBook world" that's completely spanking Amazon on eReader sales.

And even the most effective sellers of non-eInk color tablets... be they Apple or Samsung or whoever... while they may officially back ePub, most book readers simply download (or side-load in some cases) the Amazon Kindle app and end up using that, rather than one of the ePub alternatives built into their devices.

ePub 3.0 did a good job of updating the .epub code base in 2011, but no one's adopted its use en masse.

Meanwhile, Amazon updated .mobi with .kf8 in the same year, and has had two generations of hardware out that are completely compliant (all 2012 and 2013 Kindle products are .kf8-savvy), while issuing slight updates to older Kindles to read the latest formats (even though the rendering engines don't really make the new files display any differently).

So, I'd argue that due to its installed base, continued market dominance, and quickness-to-market with format updates places Amazon in the driver's seat on eReader technology.

I don't think the Apple iOS/Google Android dynamic will apply to the results of Amazon .mobi/everyone else ePub battle.

After all, it's ultimately Samsung stepping up as a direct competitor to Apple in a blow-for-blow matchup, not the 20+ companies vs. 1 company dynamic, that helped Android overcome Apple iOS.

For a long time, it seemed like Barnes & Noble's nook would fulfill that blow-for-blow role, but terrible management and backwards thinking really messed up nook's momentum.

Now, the closest competitor is Kobo, in terms of eInk devices, and I think the Aura HD is gorgeous hardware and better in nearly every respect to a Kindle Paperwhite... expect all my books are on Kindle PW and as lovely as the Aura HD is, it's not enough to make me want to move.

And while Kobo is gaining ground overseas, it's still barely a blip on the radar in North America.



Andrew Ashling said:


> Of course, you could easily make your epubs by letting Calibre convert your mobis into crude (but, admittedly, perfectly functional) epubs. D2D as well seems to do a good job.


I don't even bother with crude tools like Caliber or Sigel, Andrew. As a formatting professional, I use InDesign; I format books to be as pleasing to the eye as they can be (given that there are limits on font control and size control, which are in the end-user's hands), and then I export-as to Kindle using Amazon's own ID Plug-In... then make the 2-3 necessary formatting adjustments and export natively within ID to ePub... and then add in the extra work (like choosing specific fonts and balancing pages, etc.) that are necessary for print optimization, and export to PDF. All from InDesign. Then all I need to do is use tweak_epub to change a single setting on the ePubs, and run the ePubs through the validator, and off one InDesign file, I've created all the outputs I need, to all three major formats.

But I think you go a bit far to compare the two formats as you do. To say ePub is "well-crafted and **** sapien" compared to Amazon's "crude, Cro-Magnon" format is simply silly. The dated 2.0.1 standard is a product primarily of 2007, compared to Amazon/Mobi's 2011 .kf8 standard.

Now, if anyone would actually EMBRACE ePub 3.0, they'd both be on a level playing field technologically, but frankly I just don't see any possibility for .ePubs to become "hardcovers in value" compared to Amazon .mobi (.kf being a mass-market paperback. I think that's getting too caught up in the weeds of file format stuff.

If it were a .kf8-to-ePub 3.0 world, all it would mean is the two formats are roughly equal. But because no one is implementing ePub 3.0, Amazon has a clear edge in formatting.

Can it change? We both know it can, but Amazon seems rather capable of responding more quickly than the ePub Alliance. Because Amazon is probably already at work on .kf9 or whatever comes next, and as soon as they finish it, it'll show up in the very next round of hardware, while ePub supporters will still be holding back on embracing the newest revisions, like they are now.

And that said, let's balance this all out with a realistic perspective: people just want their books, and for those books to look good on their devices and work on them. So we can argue these specialist issues till we're blue in the face, and all we'll both get is blue in the face, my friend.



Andrew Ashling said:


> And again, I find myself agreeing with you. There's a serious imbalance in the universe.


Ahh, we're both passionate about stuff, but I don't think we're too bad, overall. I think we both try to remain respectful, even in disagreement.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Hudson Owen said:


> Again, thank you Craig and Andrew. What I don't understand, especially with so much financial incentive to do so, why isn't there a one click solution to e-book formatting? I can get a Word to pdf conversion with one click, and a scanned doc to editable Word file with one click. Why not for Kindle or any other reading device? Or is this option available on Scrivener or one of those programs?


Hudson,

Let's not confuse terms.

There's "formatting," which is the art of designing text layout in a book in an eye-pleasing and reader-friendly way.

Then there's "file conversion," which is capturing the formatted book as closely as possible into a content-delivery-format.

Formatting itself will never be one-click. There's a lot of craftsmanship involved.

File-conversion is largely a one-click process in many modern programs. But because eBooks come in Amazon and ePub flavors, rather than one flavor, it's more like a two-click process... 

For insights on how formatting is different from file conversion, you might want to read the following, which I wrote:

http://bluevalleyauthorservices.com/content/formatting-blue-valley

http://bluevalleyauthorservices.com/content/formatting-faq


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## Lucy B. (Jan 8, 2014)

I've recently become a big Sigil convert.  Mostly because I can just open the file, make a change (be it on content or underlying HTML), hit save, and I'm done.  To convert to mobi I use Kindlegen (on a Mac) which involves opening my terminal command, dragging the kindlegen icon into it, dragging the book file icon into it, and pressing return.  So tweaking the file takes a minimum amount of time.

When I started out doing my own conversions I used Calibre and it was before you could get access to the HTML code or ebook content itself (or if you could get access to it, I didn't know how).  So if I wanted to make any changes I had to do so in another program, import it to Calibre, convert it (making sure to check all the conversion boxes and tell it how to find my chapters, etc etc), and then save it.  And then I had to do it all over again for whichever other format I wanted to turn it into (so to get both an epub and mobi, I had to run through all of those steps twice).

Granted, I'm entirely self taught on this stuff and I was likely not using the most efficient process -- I didn't take the time to learn Calibre the way I probably should have.  But the ease of updating a file in Sigil is what sold me on it -- it's surprising how much time those extra conversion steps in Calibre were causing me!


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

rjspears said:


> My steps are:
> 1) cut and past my Word doc (shorter pieces in total or longer pieces chapter-by-chapter) into Notepad ++. This strips out all that nasty coding that Word puts in. In Notepad ++ I put paragraph tags in
> ...


I love Notepad++ but what does using Word give you if you're just copying and pasting text? Why not author in Notepad++ to begin with? If you want more control over the styling, Markdown is really quick and easy to learn and it would let you author in Notepad++ with support for most basic styling (italics, bold, indents, quotes, etc.). Add a bit of HTML where Markdown doesn't suffice, and you'll have a very clean source file.



Katie Elle said:


> I would say that 90% of the issues people have with Calibre come from dirty word processor files. Garbage in/garbage out.


Can we get an "Amen!" 



Hudson Owen said:


> What I don't understand, especially with so much financial incentive to do so, why isn't there a one click solution to e-book formatting? I can get a Word to pdf conversion with one click, and a scanned doc to editable Word file with one click.


Whether you're going from Word to PDF or from scanned document to Word, you're talking about going from one page-oriented format to another. A Kindle book (or ePUB) is not page-oriented, unless you're doing fixed layout children's books, comics, or something else along those lines. Instead, an ebook is reflowable content that is adapted at view time to a specific display. It is, as I mentioned earlier, a stand-alone, file-encapsulated Web site. So, who cares? Well, if people author their work in a huge variety of tools that often include page-oriented tools (e.g., Word), getting a one-click solution to move the content from those diverse tools into a non-page-oriented structure (ebook) is "challenging." And by that I mean that someone could claim they have a one-click solution but I wouldn't pay for it because it would almost certainly have gaps in its ability.


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## Sarah Wynde (Apr 7, 2013)

A plug for Sigil: it has really clear, straightforward, accessible instructional and help files. 

I started with Calibre, and spent tons of time struggling with stupid stuff--yes, left-over from using Word, but I'm not giving up Word's editing tools anytime soon. And I don't have to create ebooks often--I'm on the one or two book a year track, not the file every other month, so I kept having to re-learn what I'd solved once before. Making TOCs. Ugh. I seriously considered paying someone to do the formatting for me. Then I tried Sigil and the instructions are so clear and well-written that it's really easy to simply go step-by-step to get a quality, *simple*, book. I'm not using it for anything fancy, but I don't really feel like my fiction needs anything fancy.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

No One Stars Please.


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## leep (Aug 25, 2011)

I use Sigil, probably because I didn't see a way to tweak my Epubs as much in Calibre (that could be a lack of knowledge on my part).


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## rjspears (Sep 25, 2011)

Crenel said:


> I love Notepad++ but what does using Word give you if you're just copying and pasting text? Why not author in Notepad++ to begin with? If you want more control over the styling, Markdown is really quick and easy to learn and it would let you author in Notepad++ with support for most basic styling (italics, bold, indents, quotes, etc.). Add a bit of HTML where Markdown doesn't suffice, and you'll have a very clean source file.


Crenel: There's a part of me that would love to create my work in something like Notepad++. That would remove a lot of the hassle, but my editor insists on Word, as does my publisher.

What I don't like about Word or any program is that I have to worry about file storage and file access. That's why I use Google Docs for all my writing. It ports out a Word file easily and I can access it from anywhere. Since I have a Chromebook, I can access my files offline if I don't have net access.


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

rjspears said:


> Crenel: There's a part of me that would love to create my work in something like Notepad++. That would remove a lot of the hassle, but my editor insists on Word, as does my publisher.
> 
> What I don't like about Word or any program is that I have to worry about file storage and file access. That's why I use Google Docs for all my writing. It ports out a Word file easily and I can access it from anywhere. Since I have a Chromebook, I can access my files offline if I don't have net access.


Ah, I see. Well, one way to approach this would be to author in Notepad++ using Markdown with the files saved in a Dropbox folder (or SpiderOak Hive, etc.), and then use pandoc or an online convertor to generate .docx files from the Markdown source. Of course it may just be simpler to not try to "fix" something that's not broken, but I think you could save a good amount of time and effort by automating things, and the Markdown/Dropbox/pandoc combination makes automation easier. I haven't done it myself but I'd bet that you could fire off something right from Notepad++ that would do the conversion and then send the generated files, all with just a click or two.

For reference, this is the pandoc user guide: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html

Here is a trivial Markdown example:

```
My Short Story
==============
Once upon a time I had a short story. It was *really* short. Short, and kinda ~~bad~~**rotten**.

About the Author
----------------
The author of this short, rotten story wishes to remain a naughty moose.
```
Once converted, and making some style assumptions, that would render something like:



> *My Short Story*
> Once upon a time I had a short story. It was _really_ short. Short, and kinda bad*rotten*.
> 
> _*About the Author*_
> The author of this short, rotten story wishes to remain a naughty moose.


Anyway, seeing cut-and-paste as a regular routine tweaks my business process analysis nerves.


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## TheSFReader (Jan 20, 2011)

I don't see it mentionned here (but may have overlooked it), but Kovig Goyal (Calibre's main developper) recently added into it a new fully fledged editing feature, with direct work on the content.

So the Calibre way to create an epub is not limited to conversion anymore...

While development has been maintenance at best on Sigil, Calibre's new feature seems to get the blessing of Sigil's team which has officially abdicated in favor of Calibre http://sigildev.blogspot.de/2014/02/sigils-spiritual-successor.html


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## 68564 (Mar 17, 2013)

TheSFReader said:


> While development has been maintenance at best on Sigil, Calibre's new feature seems to get the blessing of Sigil's team which has officially abdicated in favor of Calibre http://sigildev.blogspot.de/2014/02/sigils-spiritual-successor.html


Oh, that makes me sad


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## TheGapBetweenMerlons (Jun 2, 2011)

VydorScope said:


> Oh, that makes me sad


Wow, me too. I was not aware of this.  Now I'm really going to have to take a fresh look at calibre, although I expect I will continue using Sigil for as long as it makes sense (i.e., no major problems and nothing offered by calibre that would tempt me away).


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## xbhughes (Sep 12, 2016)

Being able to embed fonts, having control over dropcaps, etc. is NOT minor stuff.

Amazon NEVER borks an epub into mobi conversion, unless&#8230;. your epub is not very well formatted to begin with.

And no, mobi, or rather *azw*, is not (any longer) the native format. The newer paperwhites and the tablets all use the new standard which is *azw3*.

So yeah, if your books are very simple, you can upload a mobi.
[/quote]

Hi, Andrew, I saw you have a great knowledge of formatting. thanks for the contribution.
i wonder if you can tell me your steps of creating kindle books? or briefly, do you use InDesign to make your kindle book have drop caps or do you use calibre to make drop caps?

thanks!


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## Loosecannon (May 9, 2013)

Wow...lots of great info here (with some post's not-so-much). I have been using Sigil as a key part of my ebook production tool chain since 2015 and never looked back. My development path is LibreOffice (which also plays nice with any flavor of Word .doc) ->use OPENOffice extension "Writer2xhtml" to export to EPUB -> Open epub in Sigil for final clean-up (i.e. 1 click to add metadata, add Kindle start reading location, add cover file, add drop caps and or any special fonts via CSS, easily add metadata) ->use Sigil's Flightcrew plugin to validate EPUB2.0 compliance - >Publish.

The comments above about Sigil not being maintained anymore were accurate, back in 2014! But the project now has a few new coders that have taken up the helm and move Sigil forward towards full EPUB 3.0 capabilities (which is a nasty can of worms anyways, and may never become a commercial thing anyways.) The latest versions are available at their project home along with numerous newer plugins that may be helpful for various specialized tasks: https://sigil-ebook.com/about/

If you are just doing genre fiction and uber-simple formatting it may be overkill, but if you want a solid tool for tweaking and adjusting EPUBs and making them 'just right' at a commerical/professional level it is the go-to tool.


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## Nils Morten (May 3, 2018)

For those trying to upload to IngramSpark you will easily notice that Calibre will malfunction for various reasons. Calibre, although being a wonderful program, is simple not calibrated for IngramSpark. Sigil on the other hand will work fluently with IngramSpark.


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## C. Gockel (Jan 28, 2014)

*coughs*

Vellum


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## Cactus Lady (Jun 4, 2014)

Nils Morten said:


> For those trying to upload to IngramSpark you will easily notice that Calibre will malfunction for various reasons. Calibre, although being a wonderful program, is simple not calibrated for IngramSpark. Sigil on the other hand will work fluently with IngramSpark.


Don't distribute ebooks through IngramSpark. I've never heard of anyone having a good experience doing that. Use Draft2Digital, Smashwords, PublishDrive (those are the big 3) or go direct wherever you can. But not IngramSpark. That's for print, not ebooks.


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## Secret Pen Pal (Dec 27, 2013)

I still use Calibre. It catches weird typos that Scrivener, Libre, and proofreaders miss, and takes care of any missing curly quotes with one click. But it sometimes leaves bookmarks and other weirdness that give Smashwords indigestion.

I had problems with Sigil removing some formatting a few years ago. It remains my bug-squisher. Best thing for fixing anything that fails epub check. I might give it another try.

Someday, Vellum.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

Nils Morten said:


> For those trying to upload to IngramSpark you will easily notice that Calibre will malfunction for various reasons. Calibre, although being a wonderful program, is simple not calibrated for IngramSpark. Sigil on the other hand will work fluently with IngramSpark.


What in Calibre will malfunction? Hand crafting a book using its editor? Converting from exported HTML to epub? Converting docx to epub? Calibre is a lot of stuff.


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## Nev (Nov 9, 2017)

I've only used Calibre, so I can't offer comparisons to other conversion software packages, but I've had zero problems with Calibre and like the fact that I can edit directly to EPUB or AZW3 files for small updates (correcting typos, modifying backmatter links) instead of reloading full files.


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## Nils Morten (May 3, 2018)

I can't exactly pinpoint what the problem is but Calibre puts in a lot of lines with the brand name in it, something Ingram isn't very fond of. So although ePub validation works through http://validator.idpf.org/ Ingram still doesn't accept the files. I'm certainly not saying Calibre is a bad program, the problem is probably more with Ingram's extremely non-user friendly environment. Just wanted to note it though.

As for not using IngramSpark, yes it's definitely correct that it's a pain to use it. What can be done in KDP in a matter of minutes might take more than an hour to just figure out in their interface. But on the other hand their distribution channels are quite large from what I understand. So I know a lot of authors who opt for them, because of this.

Anyway the best way to go forward is probably to have both of them installed as one certainly does something better than the other. Personally I'm a great fan of both.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

Calibre doesn't do conversions, it just manages your files. Calibre's plug-ins do conversions and they are generally sourced from public domain code. So in order to make a statement about what Calibre does or doesn't do with a conversion, you need to look at what you're doing with Calibre. When you use it to convert, there's a plug-in based on the initial filetype and then there's a second plugin based on the output file type. So filtered html to mobi has effectively zero in common with docx to epub.


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