How do I create my own ebooks?

Update: Oh frabjous day! Turns out there is shareware that will do precisely what I want! After playing with these various epub guides (and crashing upon the shores of “The metafile needs to be added first and not compressed in the zip file…”), I discovered Sigil, a bare bones (not to be confused with Bare Bones) project with a simple text editor that helps you put together an ebook really, really simply.

Yay, Sigil!

Re: the ongoing e-book format wars: damn, is there nothing more annoying that downloading an e-book…and then discovering you can’t upload it to the e-book reader of your choice (in my case, an iPhone) because you picked the wrong damn format? Yes, yes, I know: “Diane, you’re a dumbass.”

But still: trying to pick the right format out of the many competing ones…is there any wonder I just buy from Amazon and eliminate the middleman?

I have some .pdf files of old books I would like to read, but they’re not formatted correctly for my iPhone ebook reader (whether Kindle…or eReader…or Stanza…or B&N eReader (which doesn’t read the same books as my eReader/Fictionwise app, dammit)).

What I’ve done so far is open the .pdf file in Lexcycle Stanza and save it as an .epub file, which is the same thing as a .zip file, only with a different extension. Everything I know about the .epub format I learned during this tutorial, in case anyone wants to double-check my knowledge.

So I change the extension on the .epub file and unpack the zip, which gives me

• mimetype
• META-INF folder
• OEBPS folder

Great. I edit the HTML info in the content.obf and toc.ncx files (and maybe that’s a problem, because those are UNIX executables when I open them, but when I save them, they become text files), and I edit the various header information in the separate chapter files.

I save the .zip file, change the extension back to .epub, and upload to my iPhone…whereupon I get the error “Failed to download and import…” because the information in the container.xml file is wrong.

Well, I didn’t touch the damn container.xml file. I could understand if one of the other files were causing the problem, but they’re not.

My friend Rob recommends I just use DropBook, which I have now given a shot (but where is it putting the completed book file? I can’t find it anywhere).

This process is very frustrating. And I know that right now the ebook market is the Wild, Wild West, but in case book publishers would like to know why ebooks haven’t taken over the world, this is why: it’s too confusing, there are too many variables, and there are too many damn formats.