Well, I've already started converting the stories I do have saved offline into epub (though going back to the Archive to pull a fresh copy to work from). Sigil is not removing the hard returns so I'm dumping them into Word and doing a series of Replace Alls. Works pretty well, actually.
The one part I'm trying to figure out is just where to draw the chapter line for stories which are not on the MBs (where the Fanfic TOCs are great for seeing the section divisions the author wanted--I've got a tab here in Firefox open right now for doing those searches). I'm tackling Anybody's Baby by Annie M right now, for instance, and finding it a challenge to pick a scene to split at. She's got frequent scene breaks, so any one of them could work, but about how long should a chapter be? (Keeping in mind I'm now looking at a full-screen fic with no premature line breaks, approximately how many pages would you say?) Try to end it on a cliffhanger or suspenseful moment when possible? Might be good to get some guidelines discussed so we have an idea of how to go about it.
As for permissions, considering they've already given permission for it to go on the Archive, I can't see that a different file format would be any issue. We're not adding anything (except for "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2" as necessary) and simply re-formatting. Sounds like we're probably good to go there. So as soon as you've got things set up to do uploading of files, I'm ready to share some. A wiki sounds like a good idea, as long as it's tied to being registered here and not just public, of course. *g*
Are you considering expanding to all four formats at one time? Would you need people to do the converting manually or is there an easy way on your end to batch process the whole lot? (Or perhaps, once there's an epub, it's easier to go from that to another? I don't know of any simpler way to get rid of the hard returns than all the Replace Alls, and I have to think about what I'm doing. For instance, some fics have a space at the end of each line, some don't, and some have sections with three returns where I only want two, in addition to two returns where I only want one--epub spaces out paragraphs naturally--so I have to do at least five conversions to get everything to come out right and be mentally processing how to do them. I'm not sure there's any way to automate that!) Though it looks like the hard returns aren't really a problem with html--they do look a little odd for pdfs, though.
