Do you edit your eBooks?

[mikeayers]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What eBooks don't have chapters starting on a new page/screen? I've not seen this.

a fair number I have downloaded from mobileread and gutenburg.
A lot of the shortstories books are like this.
It does seem to be getting better lately...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mikeayers

a fair number I have downloaded from mobileread and gutenburg.
A lot of the shortstories books are like this.
It does seem to be getting better lately...

Can you list some of the ones from here that do not start the chapters on a separate screen/page? Thanks.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What eBooks don't have chapters starting on a new page/screen? I've not seen this.

I've seen that occasionally from Gutenberg, as well as once every paragraph on a new page.
This one https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43069 produced a page break per paragraph.

They update without revision history so a title linked today may be fine. It tends to be some of the shorter books with no page break. They might be copying the original as I have paper books with inline chapter breaks. Maybe to save paper during wartime?

Also the bad formatting might be only one version of format.

I convert ALL Gutenberg to remove line-height, change spaced to indented paragraphs and "smarten punctuation", but that's not manual editing.
Sometimes they use nested blockquotes instead of a single larger margin and that can break rendering.

[Comfy.n]

One frequent use case is that I often prefer editing some textbooks' CSS in order to make the editorial notes within a <li> class smaller, and the main text larger:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s

• see item 5, for more information, bla bla bla
  
• check here for more bla bla bla
  
• check here for more bla bla bla

after editing:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s

• see item 5, for more information, bla bla bla
  
• check here for more bla bla bla
  
• check here for more bla bla bla

[DiapDealer]

I can't remember the last book I bought that wasn't already split into individual chapter files.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Can you list some of the ones from here that do not start the chapters on a separate screen/page? Thanks.

There have been quite a lot of self-pubs over the years. Not so often recently anymore, but years ago it wasn't unusual.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What eBooks don't have chapters starting on a new page/screen? I've not seen this.

Quite a few from Gutenberg where you find multiple chapters and pieces of chapters in a single file. I've seen all too many ebooks where the entire ebook is in a single file and there is no page break forced though, if you are lucky, there are multiple blank lines between the end of one chapter and the start of another which does make it easy to automate the splitting.

One recent book used a 4 files for the entirety of the text and didn't even bother to split the files at chapter boundaries so chapter 10 was partly in one file and partly in another leading to a mostly blank page with two lines in the middle of the chapter. As near as I could tell, the original was a single file which was split into 103KB chunks.

Overall, ebook formatting has gotten better and there are fewer abominations but you can still find them.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have a complaint. Other should not be there. It's of no use. You either do or you don't modify eBooks. There is no other.

Ok then.

[Cactus Chef]

For people who selected "Yes," how many of you edit the actual book itself vs just editing the metadata/cover photo? I consider there to be a distinction between the two, and I suspect more people are doing just the latter than the former.

I've only edited the underlying ebook a handful of times, once when I ripped a Kindle book into a very old MOBI format and it didn't have a working ToC. I generated one by hand, just so I'd have useful navigation when I read the book on my Kobo.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

For people who selected "Yes," how many of you edit the actual book itself vs just editing the metadata/cover photo? I consider there to be a distinction between the two, and I suspect more people are doing just the latter than the former.

I edit tables of contents frequently, and fix badly-formatted where the chapters aren't split into separate files.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have a complaint. Other should not be there. It's of no use. You either do or you don't modify eBooks. There is no other.

Perhaps you did not read the original question? The title of the thread is "Do you edit your eBooks?" and the poll question was "Do you edit eBooks?". No mention of 'modify' was to be seen though edit could be construed as a subset of modify.

Which of the following activities would you consider as editing an eBook?

• Download metadata and covers and then embeds them in an eBook?
• Delete the stylesheets?
• Changes series information (say from Family Spies #1 to Valdemar:Family Spies #1?
• Takes a text file and converts it to a ePub file?
• Strips embedded fonts?
• Converts eBook format (azw3 to ePub, Mobi to ePub, ePub to fb2, etc.)?

All of which can be done without using a editor.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

For people who selected "Yes," how many of you edit the actual book itself vs just editing the metadata/cover photo? I consider there to be a distinction between the two, and I suspect more people are doing just the latter than the former.

I don't regard "editing" the metadata as editing the book at all. See library management for a physical book library, or media rental library, or a document management system for archived documents (which can be mix of scanned paper and files). You edit the metadata so you can find stuff. With those it's actually forbidden to edit the content.

I check the metadata, and edit if needed, on
every ebook added. Sometimes it's just making title case or having Author consistent. Also I have to always set if PD or purchased or copyright but free or our own under "Owner" and set the "Collection". I don't use the imported tags directly. Also many ebooks have the ebook release date (Gutenberg or bought) and I set original publication date.

Editing a ebook is to me editing the HTML and CSS. At most changing punctuation on imported ebooks. Any editing of actual visitble content is only done on our own content, or reformatting web content in the wordprocessor, or rewriting old translations of myth & legend well into PD (usually just grammar and archaic usage). I'd not edit the content of an ebook as an ebook, but only in a Wordprocessor.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

For people who selected "Yes," how many of you edit the actual book itself vs just editing the metadata/cover photo?

Me.
The book gets a new hi-res cover, css is replaced with my own, which means updating all the tags throughout the book.
New TOC and title page.
Rename all the files, esp if they are using the isbn in the filename
Probably a character summary at the end if it is a complex book.
Essentially the book is completely overhauled.

One of the more satisfying changes is removing all the excess code - p tags nested in naked divs nested in naked section and the div and sections have no css entry.
I also make all the coding uniform. I am sure a lot of editors have seen the sloppy coding where, for example, the heading tags have such variety, some using h tags, others using p tags with classes, then the combination of some having bold or italic tags and others don't. I never understand that absolute sloppiness.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I don't regard "editing" the metadata as editing the book at all.

I also don't consider polishing in better covers or metadata as 'editing' either. Just actual edits to the code or structure of the ePub — I don't edit other formats, instead convert to ePub and edit those.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

For people who selected "Yes," how many of you edit the actual book itself vs just editing the metadata/cover photo? I consider there to be a distinction between the two, and I suspect more people are doing just the latter than the former.

Always both the metadata and the coding of the file itself. I want my formatting to be uniform across my entire library (same font size, margins, line-height, paragraph indents, and no spacing between ordinary paragraphs. Also all ads and excerpts from other books get deleted as useless bloat).