Are these sections useful?

[foosion]

In the context of editing commercial books for personal use, there are some sections in epubs (especially in the front before the actual text) that don't seem very useful and often seem more a legacy of paper books.

Why not just delete (or move to the end), so you can get to the actual book faster? Am I missing something?

Title, half title: These typically duplicate information from the cover, which has title and author. Sometimes they include publisher, but you can find that elsewhere.

Inline TOC: The epub TOC seems more useful.

Index: Often lists print page numbers and suggests using search. In any event, search seems better.

Index of maps, illustrations, etc. Perhaps useful, but search could work. If useful I'd move to the end so you can get to useful text faster,

Copyright page: Important, but fine at the end.

Praise: Why bother - I've already decided to get the book.

Other books by author: Move to end or nuke. Can be out of date and if I want more from the author I can search the web.

Next reads and other publisher ads: Nuke.

Introduction: Often useful in non-fiction. In fiction it's seldom useful and can contain spoilers - moving to the end seems best.

Dedication: Almost always more for the author than for me.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by foosion

In the context of editing commercial books for personal use, there are some sections in epubs (especially in the front before the actual text) that don't seem very useful and often seem more a legacy of paper books.

Why not just delete (or move to the end), so you can get to the actual book faster? Am I missing something?

Title, half title: These typically duplicate information from the cover, which has title and author. Sometimes they include publisher, but you can find that elsewhere.

Inline TOC: The epub TOC seems more useful.

Index: Often lists print page numbers and suggests using search. In any event, search seems better.

Index of maps, illustrations, etc. Perhaps useful, but search could work. If useful I'd move to the end so you can get to useful text faster,

Copyright page: Important, but fine at the end.

Praise: Why bother - I've already decided to get the book.

Other books by author: Move to end or nuke. Can be out of date and if I want more from the author I can search the web.

Next reads and other publisher ads: Nuke.

Introduction: Often useful in non-fiction. In fiction it's seldom useful and can contain spoilers - moving to the end seems best.

Dedication: Almost always more for the author than for me.

For your own use, you can do whatever you want... although there may be some specific country laws that prevent changing a product, YMMV.

Some like to emulate the print version as closely as possible and tapping a couple extra times to skip those pages isn't a big deal. Obviously, the rules change if you are trying to publish as you need to make all those people/agencies happy.

Personally I nuke most of the extra stuff, but keep things like title page, appendix/index, copyright, about the author, also by, and move them to the back as much as makes sense.

Cover
-Dedication (out of respect to the author)
-Title
--Intro/epigraph/maps
--Chapters
--epilogue
-appendix/glossary
-index (maybe keep if it provides value added...)
-acknowledgements
-about the author
-also by the author (I like to see next books in the series and click the links)
-copyright
back cover (if it adds anything special)

[RbnJrg]

You should use "semantics". Some devices start opening the ebook where you set the semantic "text" (normally, Introduction or Chapter I). Of that way, no matter how much text there is before the place where you set the semantic, the ebook will be open where you want.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

For your own use, you can do whatever you want... although there may be some specific country laws that prevent changing a product, YMMV.

Some like to emulate the print version as closely as possible and tapping a couple extra times to skip those pages isn't a big deal. Obviously, the rules change if you are trying to publish as you need to make all those people/agencies happy.

Personally I nuke most of the extra stuff, but keep things like title page, appendix/index, copyright, about the author, also by, and move them to the back as much as makes sense.

Cover
-Dedication (out of respect to the author)
-Title
--Intro/epigraph/maps
--Chapters
--epilogue
-appendix/glossary
-index (maybe keep if it provides value added...)
-acknowledgements
-about the author
-also by the author (I like to see next books in the series and click the links)
-copyright
back cover (if it adds anything special)

Part of the reason for asking is to avoid deleting something that my future self might want and part is just to see what others do.

An alternative to deleting/moving could be to add "Start the book" to the top of the TOC and leave things in place.

Also by the author only shows the next books in the series if the epub was published or updated after the next books.

Epigraph and maps are useful, although sometimes maps can be hard to view on an ereader, especially a smaller one. Worth keeping.

I keep acknowledgements and about the author.

I rarely see back covers and can't recall any that weren't ads or praise for the author/book.

[DiapDealer]

Moving past frontmatter is a one-time deal for me when reading. Taking it out is more work for me than leaving it in (on the rare occasion that I edit commercial purchases at all these days).

[foosion]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

You should use "semantics". Some devices start opening the ebook where you set the semantic "text" (normally, Introduction or Chapter I). Of that way, no matter how much text there is before the place where you set the semantic, the ebook will be open where you want.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Do you mean setting the first entry in the epub TOC to the start (intro or chapter 1) or moving all the front matter to the end or something else?

[foosion]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Moving past frontmatter is a one-time deal for me when reading. Taking it out is more work for me than leaving it in (on the rare occasion that I edit commercial purchases at all these days).

I usually have to do at least a bit of editing to fix margins, font-size and the like, so the marginal effort to delete sections or rearrange the TOC is small. YMMV.

[Turtle91]

In Sigil (similar for Calibre Editor), right click on the file you want to start reading, select semantics, then select “text” or start. If the device/app honors that setting it will open to that page. That’s only good for the first time opening (usually) as the device would normally open to the last point read after that.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by foosion

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Do you mean setting the first entry in the epub TOC to the start (intro or chapter 1) or moving all the front matter to the end or something else?

I want to mean what Turtle91 answered to you in the above post

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by foosion

In the context of editing commercial books for personal use, there are some sections in epubs (especially in the front before the actual text) that don't seem very useful and often seem more a legacy of paper books.

Why not just delete (or move to the end), so you can get to the actual book faster? Am I missing something?

Title, half title: These typically duplicate information from the cover, which has title and author. Sometimes they include publisher, but you can find that elsewhere.

Inline TOC: The epub TOC seems more useful.

Index: Often lists print page numbers and suggests using search. In any event, search seems better.

Index of maps, illustrations, etc. Perhaps useful, but search could work. If useful I'd move to the end so you can get to useful text faster,

Copyright page: Important, but fine at the end.

Praise: Why bother - I've already decided to get the book.

Other books by author: Move to end or nuke. Can be out of date and if I want more from the author I can search the web.

Next reads and other publisher ads: Nuke.

Introduction: Often useful in non-fiction. In fiction it's seldom useful and can contain spoilers - moving to the end seems best.

Dedication: Almost always more for the author than for me.

I delete the 1/2 title, HTML ToC, Index of images and other stuff in the front of the book, praise, list of other books, previews, and adverts. There could be other stuff, but I cannot say off-hand. I do move the Copyright after the title page if need be. Then after all that rubbish is gone, I'll remove all unused CSS. Then I'll add in my CSS. And when I am done editing, I'll remove any unused CSS.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I delete the 1/2 title, HTML ToC, Index of images and other stuff in the front of the book, praise, list of other books, previews, and adverts. There could be other stuff, but I cannot say off-hand. I do move the Copyright after the title page if need be. Then after all that rubbish is gone, I'll remove all unused CSS. Then I'll add in my CSS. And when I am done editing, I'll remove any unused CSS.

I'll have had the book finished (and started the next one) by the time you get all that done.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'll have had the book finished (and started the next one) by the time you get all that done.

That kind of basic structural cleanup of an EPUB takes less than 5 minutes. I can do wholesale CSS cleanup in about 10 minutes.

The only thing that takes any real time is semantic cleanup, so that em and strong are only used for emphasized matter and not all italics and bolding, etc.

[Karellen]

This is what I keep and what I remove...

Title - Keep
Copyright page - Keep
Introduction - Keep
Dedication - Keep
Acknowledgements - Keep
About the Author - Keep

Index of maps, illustrations, etc. - Decide case-by-case

half title - Remove
Inline TOC - Remove
Index - Remove
Praise - Remove
Other books by author - Remove
Next reads and other publisher ads - Remove
And any other publisher added advertising and filler pages.

And for more complex novels with lots of characters, I normally insert a character summary at the end.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

That kind of basic structural cleanup of an EPUB takes less than 5 minutes. I can do wholesale CSS cleanup in about 10 minutes.

The only thing that takes any real time is semantic cleanup, so that em and strong are only used for emphasized matter and not all italics and bolding, etc.

It was a joke. I'm very familiar with editing epubs (as well as being fairly adept at it). I just ran out of all desire to do so (with commercial epubs) any more. I very rarely run into anything distracting enough to force me to pop the hood on my purchases these days. I'll usually return a terribly formatted ebook instead of fixing it myself. Plus, I've no interest in homogenizing my reading experience. I enjoy a little formatting variety.

[DNSB]

My concentration is cleaning up the text of the ePub (removing extraneous embedded fonts, drop caps, etc.). The cover, titlepage, dedication, etc. I skip over. Most of this is done by my collection of saved searches so less than 5 minutes for most books.