Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Proofreading on a Kindle

This is topic Proofreading on a Kindle in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by GrizzlyWulff (Member # 9656) on :

I’ve searched the archive for this and haven’t found anything similar so here goes.

I’m getting ready to take a trip with my wife and she’s been pestering me to read what I have so far on a novel I’m working on. While I could print it out for her, that’s not practical as I have about 65 pages and one abrupt stop of the car could have them spread all over.

I got to wondering if there was a SIMPLE way to create an e-book and then load it on my Kindle: turns out there is. At about the same time I got my Kindle I found an open source e-book formatter and reader called Calibre that runs on my PC. I use it all the time to download e-books from sites such as Project Gutenberg and then format and transfer them to my Kindle.

Two great things about Calibre, it’s free and it’s constantly being updated. With Calibre I can easily move content to and from my Kindle, manage my growing library of e-books and other e-print media, convert between different e-book formats, and I can also convert my MS Word documents to the MOBI format used by my Kindle.

All I have to do is save a copy of my manuscript as an RTF document and then import it into Calibre. Once in Calibre I convert it to MOBI format and then load it on my Kindle. If you have drawings, pictures, etc. in your manuscript you can convert it to HTML, edit it, and then import it to Calibre and convert it to MOBI although this is a bit more complex than working with RTF. The Calibre website has step-by-step instructions on performing both operations.

Once the manuscript is on my Kindle, my wife can read it, attach comments, and highlight areas of the story. I have to assume that other e-book readers/tablets have similar capabilities.

So, if you’re looking for a convenient way to carry your manuscript around or to let others have a look at it, this might be worth a try.

Posted by EmilyS (Member # 9447) on :

I've never used Calibre, but I found the Mobipocket Creator to be easy to use (it can create the .mobi file directly from a word doc, or several other formats I believe). Ever since the new version of Scrivener, however, I just export directly from that, since I write on a mac.

I have edited on my kindle, but it's not my preferred method; I tend to have too much revision to do. But it's a good solution for critiquing other people's work. My sister has read a couple drafts of my WIP on hers and sent me back the comment files to read on my own kindle.

Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :

Can the Kindle read PDFs? Cause you could just save it as a PDF and skip the middleman.

Posted by GrizzlyWulff (Member # 9656) on :

Yes, the Kindle does handle PDF's. I haven't tried it yet, and don't know how the formatting will display.

Posted by MattLeo (Member # 9331) on :

Well, I've got a Kindle and a Nook, and I've found in both cases PDF handling to be less than stellar. That's generally the case for all mobile devices that while you *can* use PDF, it's not a great experience.

It's not that the PDF doesn't render accurately; I think it's because PDF is a page oriented technology; it exists to represent paper documents. It doesn't work that well on less than a full-sized screen. You're also at the mercy of the software which generated the PDF; that's why converting a PDF into regular text document can sometimes not work; the PDF generator figured out how to put the columns of text on the page, but broke it up in a way that doesn't *flow*.

Ebook or word processing formats are the way to go.