Do you edit your eBooks?

[haertig]

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 always update the metadata. What info comes with the book is often times junk. Missing descriptions or crappy descriptions that are more praise for the author than synopsis of plot. Author names inconsistent with what I have for other books by the same author. Horrible tags, or 25 million tags. Publisher names, ISBN numbers, language - I delete all those fields.

I don't consider this "editing the book". Creating good metadata is just one step in adding a book to Calibre IMHO.

[maddz]

Like others, I don't consider editing metadata to be editing a book (that's just library management), although I suppose format shifting is a bit of a grey area. To me, editing means actually editing the content rather than the container or display instructions.

[Aleron Ives]

I think in this context, "edit" means "modify the EPUB file in some way" and not "copy edit the text", so changing the metadata does constitute editing your e-books. The purpose of the poll is to see how many people accept their e-books "as is".

[JBaby]

I edit copies and not the originals. That’s because I don’t care about acknowledgements or dedications. I hate previews of future books. I don’t care about the thanks to the important people either. I edit out everything that’s not the story. I only do this for books I buy outside of Amazon.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

I think in this context, "edit" means "modify the EPUB file in some way" and not "copy edit the text", so changing the metadata does constitute editing your e-books. The purpose of the poll is to see how many people accept their e-books "as is".

You can edit library metadata without changing the ebook.

Even an "edit" of metadata that changes the metadata (only) in the ebook isn't really editing the book. The two are completely different and shouldn't be conflated.

Some apps and ereaders only use filenames and ignore the metadata, yet disply the content correctly. Metadata is not used when reading an ebook, it's really only used for a library interface to browse/search ebooks rather than browsing file names and directories.

Re-read what I wrote about physical libraries and rental libraries.

[JSWolf]

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'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.

I edit the cover (change the size if large enough and losslessly recompress) , I edit the CSS, I edit the HTML, I edit the ToC (if needed). I edit the metadata by hand (if needed). I edit the OPF (if needed).

As for Mobi, you'd be better off converting to ePub. Kobo does a rather poor job with Mobi.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

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.

To edit the eBook, it has to be done with the editor or Sigil. Yes, modify was a poor choice of words.

[John F]

Originally Posted by John F

Normally I would say "no", but I guess I do. I use calibre's editor to remove fonts, compress images, and delete non used stuff. I'll use calibre to make sure I like the metadata. I'll do an conversion (usually epub to epub) to get the look I like.

Not sure why I don't consider the above editing.

And thinking about this some more, I do edit/modify.

Bottom line, .epub, .mobi, .kfx, ... are all ebooks. If I change anything in the ebook file, I have edited/modified it. Even going so far as just changing the compression of an epub, would be editing/modifying it.

Whether it is done with an editor, calibre, command line tools, ... anything that changes the content of the file is editing.

IMO.

[ekbell]

Aside from the normal metadata cleanup and adding a cover if needed, I have also added a table of contents to some books and corrected some particularly annoying OCR errors.

I normally deal with minor formatting issues (annoying font choice or size, etc) through my reader app's override options, if it has major display issues I'm more likely to abandon the book then to fix it.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Even an "edit" of metadata that changes the metadata (only) in the ebook isn't really editing the book.

If you edit the title, author, series, genre, publisher, publication date, ISBN, etc. in the OPF file, that sounds like editing the EPUB file to me.

[Karellen]

I guess we are trying to make a distinction between...

Incidental Changes - changes that happen automatically because you have tidied up some metadata which Calibre and Sigil then automatically flow into the ebook
and
Comprehensive editing - pre-planned changes that affect the structure, layout, look and feel of the book by adjusting css, xml tags, tables, lists etc etc

And I am assuming that editing the ebook, does not mean editing the story text. For me that is a no-no, except to fix typ-o's.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Karellen

I guess we are trying to make a distinction between...

Incidental Changes - changes that happen automatically because you have tidied up some metadata which Calibre and Sigil then automatically flow into the ebook
and
Comprehensive editing - pre-planned changes that affect the structure, layout, look and feel of the book by adjusting css, xml tags, tables, lists etc etc

And I am assuming that editing the ebook, does not mean editing the story text. For me that is a no-no, except to fix typ-o's.

Yes, to all that.
And if it's your own book, you'd edit in a word processor as source for content.

[ps67]

I have my own idea of how an ebook should be formatted and I apply it to all the books I buy. I remove the line height and the embedded fonts (unless there is a precise reason to keep them, which is almost never). I remove also @page and body margins. And my normal paragraphs have no margins, no font-size and text-indent is 1.5em.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better if I could just read the books and enjoy the reading, but I can't.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

If you edit the title, author, series, genre, publisher, publication date, ISBN, etc. in the OPF file, that sounds like editing the EPUB file to me.

I don't think so. Anything calibre can update with 'edit metadata' doesn't count as editing the ebook. There's a reason there is a second button called 'edit book'

That's how I see it anyway.

[ownedbycats]

I feel like I should have named the thread and poll "do you edit your eBook files."