Lauren's been checking over what we're up to, and had us put together a list of the steps we follow (involving Sigil), so anyone else who wants to can convert their stories to as high-quality epubs. She'll be posting that sometime soon so any author can convert their own if they like and have them look really good. So don't worry, I gather that pretty soon it will be thrown open to everyone. She just wanted to make sure they could turn out really nice and the system works fine first.
I don't want to jump the gun on her, so I won't post any links, but she's got a separate system set up where Bob and I have been uploading the finished epubs and putting together a wiki of the ones we've done so anyone could get them. I'm gathering she'll have that released within the next day, so all you FoLCs can go grab epubs to read. Ultimately she'll merge it with the Archive, I think, like the Filename Z page is.
As for the TOC, Bob, I don't think it's that hard to do a quick search. I have two links open--one for the mbs, and one for the old boards. If I hit any trouble finding it there, I just split myself. But I actually find it easier not having to think about where to split. The author DID, in some ways, tell where things should split when they broke it up in sections to post. The ones who never posted to the mbs at all, that's pretty clear they didn't care about splitting, so we can do it where we think best. That said, it's probably not too much of a big deal to split it where you want if you find checking the mbs is too time-consuming (so don't let that keep you from converting some)--but I wouldn't do that with authors who are very much active and might convert their stories themselves anyway.
The big reasons for splitting are twofold, actually. One, on an e-book reader, you can't just drag the scroll bar halfway down the screen to read the last half. Dozens of page turns are time- and battery-consuming (if my experience with my e-book reader is anything like the norm), and anything beyond a few page turns is a pain to get to. Epubs have a built-in TOC system designed to make jumping around more convenient, but you have to mark something with a heading system to get it to work (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. like in Word). (Unless you're a guru at the xhtml editing, which I am not--it's a lot of coding to do it without the heading stuff.) The obvious thing to mark are chapters or sections, whereupon people can then go to the TOC and pick Chapter 4, or Part Six, as they like.
The other reason for splitting is the physical splitting of xhtml files. It's not a good idea with an epub of any larger than about 200-some to leave as one big xhtml file. You can mark chapter headings within that, though--you can mark chapter headings without splitting physically, but you wouldn't want to split physically without marking chapter headings because physical splitting means it starts on a new page and random jumps to a new page look tacky. The splitting prevents the file from loading sluggishly, or worse, freezing the reader. I have no doubt that an un-split Masques, for instance (or On the Other Hand, which as an epub came out to 948 kb, I found!), would freeze a good number of e-book readers. It's simply a size beyond what they're designed to load into memory, and that's what the e-book reader has to do with each physical xhtml file. Splitting it means it only loads the one xhtml file the reader's on, then when they hop to the next file, it loads that one instead. It'll look like one big file to the reader, just with page jumps, but the difference in responsiveness is huge.
