First Experience with Printing and eBook Publishing, part 2

Continuing from part 1, part 2 is about preparing file for the Barnes & Noble Nook store.

Using Sigil and Calibre To Prepare ePub file for Barnes and Noble PubIt!

Relevant Links:
Michael Jasper's guide on preparing comics for ePub-friendly eReader
Sigil
Calibre
Nook reading App
Creating NCX File

Premise: Barnes & Noble PubIt wants an ePub format file under 20Mb size. Frustrated? Tough!

Start from a template
Again, Michael Jasper's guide was a good starting point. And again, I wrote a PHP script to do mindless labor, such as generating 172 xhtml files (he had 22 in the example).

Download software
I used Sigil to start the ePub building process. Later on I found out Calibre can convert between different ebook format, so I downloaded it again (it feels bloated so I didn't like it in the past). Lastly get Nook reading App for testing purposes.

Import necessary files
With Sigil I quickly looked over the example ePub template, deleted their content xhtml files and images, then included my 172 xhtml files and 172 image files. The user interface does not allow multiple-select-delete (so you have to delete one file at a time; make a backup copy!), which is annoying.

Important Edits
Edit the toc.ncx file based on suggestions from this article. Sigil is more tolerant about customized data. Make sure to edit the meta data (you can use the Meta Data editor through the software, instead of editing the xhtml file directly). Another important edit is the image size of all comic pages. At dimension 684x1026, 172 grayscale images caused the ePub file to be over 20 MB. So I had no choice but to shrink the JPGs. Be aware how that could affect your dialog's display size.

Double-Check
Use Calibre to double check your ePub file. I converted it to Calibre's ePub format just to be sure. Most of the settings I left as is, except for the Table of Contents section. This time I tried to tackle this puzzle that drove me nuts while using Mobipocket Creator:

Suffice to say this version worked for me.


Side-note:

Convert ePub to MOBI
MOBI is another ebook format the Kindle can read, so I tried to convert the ePub format to MOBI, then test on the Kindle Previewer. This time accessing NCX file worked!

...But I liked the PRC version of presentation for the Kindle, so I didn't re-uploaded a converted MOBI file to Kindle Direct Publishing. I also didn't like the converted ePub file from the PRC format (every image on the same page doesn't work well using the Nook reading device - better to have one image per page). So I used this independently generated ePub file for online stores.


If you need clarification on anything mentioned above, feel free to leave a comment.