The Sony Reader will be used to provide a library of e-books for Psychology and Education students.  This library will consist of e-books that have been created from existing course materials whether they are pdf, .doc or mp3 files. 

The first stage in creating these e-books is to gather the material from the relevant departments either via Blackboard or by the original files being sent through email. 

Having either downloaded or received the .docs from the departments the next step is to convert these files into clean HTML.  My preferred method is to copy the text from the .doc and then paste into Dreamweaver keeping certain structures such as tables, paragraphs and lists.

Using Dreamweaver enables me to have multiple HTML files open ready for text from Word.  I’m then able to clean the code using a find and replace through all open documents removing unwanted or empty tags e.g. <p style=”text-align: right;”></p>.

Once an initial find and replace has been completed I can then go through all the documents individually and further clean up the HTML.  To make sure these files are versatile for future use I’ll look at removing <br /> tags and making sure a paragraph structure is in place throughout the file.

As a final step I also use the validate tool within Dreamweaver, partly to check for any errors that I might have missed but more importantly to make sure that I am producing valid HTML and/or XHTML.

The final stage is to use Calibre  (an e-book library manager) to convert the HTML into an LRF format.  Presently this is the default format for Sony Readers and after initial testing seems to be the most reliable format for conversion and display on the hardware. 

There are a number of preferences that can be set to aid the conversion (such as ‘no text justification’ and ‘insert blank line’, both of which aim to make a more readable final version). However I have found that the Sony Reader seems to overwrite some of these changes and will display the text fully justified.

The justification on the text is one of the little niggles that I am hoping to be able to work out with further research and development into the conversion process in Calibre and also the impact of CSS within the body of the HTML. 

It may be a case of trial and error; because these Readers are just beginning to take off (see more about this in my Beyond Distance Research Alliance blog) there is not much information out there, e.g. through forums, help guides, tutorials, etc.

However, my initial trials though have proved successful and have improved the structure, and in turn the readability, of the end result and is something I’m hoping to continue.

Emma Davies

Learning Technologist