*waves hi and grins sheepishly* I'm actually poking my head in here, after I don't know how many months. I had a question I wanted to pose.
See, I got an e-book reader recently (Astak EZ Reader Pocket Pro, if anyone's curious which), and its best format for reading is epub. Although it can read txt files just fine, testing the Archive's files brought me to a screeching halt.
A small minority of fanfics on the Archive, when saved, have so many words and then a forced line break. This is easy to read on a computer screen, since my computer screen is far wider than the line is. On my e-book reader, on the other hand, the screen there is smaller than the line, forcing some text to drop below. This requires more page turns (due to the inefficiency at displaying text) and is more challenging to read.
The vast majority of fanfics there are completely unreadable when saved, even on the computer, as the line breaks are replaced with "undisplayable" characters (i.e. those little boxes like when you have Chinese characters and don't have the font sets installed). Text wraps continously with no line breaks whatsoever, and every paragraph is only separated by two boxes, with more boxes in the middle of sentences where the original forced line breaks were.
Now, I understand why this is the way it is; when read online at the Archive, the fics are very readable and exactly as designed. However, since I'd like to read some fics offline, I'm going to have to go through them and edit all those line breaks out so there are just paragraph separations. While I'm at it, I might as well make them epub format, which is basically xhtml in a zip container; it's very small file size. I took a children's book and converted it just the other day, and the epub size was less than half of the txt size (122 kb to the original 267 kb). Epub has another benefit in that it lets you create a TOC and jump to individual chapters.
Since I'm going to do this for various fanfics, is there any way the Archive would want to host epub versions of fanfics as well? Should I post them somewhere online? Since this is simply re-formatting (with some chapter breaks--which I can use as they were posted on the mbs or just find scene breaks every so many pages, roughly), I don't see as big an issue with it as with audio fanfics, or translations, but would there be permission issues? Do I need to just keep it to myself, or is it something I could share with other FoLCs who also have e-book readers and would like nicely formatted epubs they can read offline?
I would welcome any thoughts/comments any of you have on this, particularly staff input as much of this is a question only they can truly answer. (I'm also curious how many of you read fanfics on an e-book reader and would find this sort of thing useful. Anyone else already doing this type of thing?)
