Day: December 28, 2004

MobiPocket Creator 4.0 Home Edition

Although it is far from perfect, Mobipocket remains my preferred ebook reader for the PocketPC. After playing around with it for most of the day, I am also impressed with the Mobipocket Creator 4.0 Home Edition.

It has a nice drag and drop function that lets you take HTML files, drop them into the software and very quickly convert to the Mobipocket format. Once it’s converted, the software lets you immediately preview the file in an emulated PocketPC so the user can doublecheck to make sure there aren’t any problems.

I do a lot of editing of HTML documents. Usually I put them on a disk and edit them at my desktop or laptop. From now on I think I’ll be converting them to Mobipocket format and throwing them on my PDA.

MobiPocket Version of Star Dragon

Boing! Boing! points to Mike Brotherton releasing his scifi novel Star Dragon under a Creative Commons license. Brotherton has text, RTF and HTML versions of the novel on his web site.

For those, like me, using MobiPocket Reader on a PDA, I’ve created a MobiPocket version of Star Dragon. Update: This can now be downloaded from Mike Brotherton’s site. The PRC file is located here.

Note: I’ll soon be removing the MobiPocket version of the novel, as the webmaster for Mike Brotherton’s site is going to add it there.

I have added, however, the cleaned-up HTML version of the noel that I used to create the MobiPocket version, which should help others wanting to convert the novel to other formats.

This differs from the HTML version currently on Brotherton’s site in that,

  • All of the non-breaking spaces have been removed
  • All open paragraph tags now have accompanying closed paragraph tags at the end of each paragraph
  • All of the HTML-encoded characters have been replaced with straight ASCII versions — i.e., I replaced all the HTML encoded single quotes with actual single quotes
  • Chapter and other headings are now center-aligned paragraphs and with opening and closing bold tags

You can download the cleaned-up version here.