I have just spent the past couple of weeks making 45 eBooks for the Texts and Translations section of the Ancient Buddhist Texts website.
I was encouraged to do this by the American monk Ven. Khemaratana, who indeed first asked me to convert the English Only section last year.
As I don’t have an eReader he very kindly helped by checking through most of the works, and giving some very valuable feedback, which has really helped improve their presentation.
The workflow was quite complicated: The first thing needed was to convert all the documents to Unicode, and remake the pdfs (the online htmls have been in Unicode for a long time, but the pdfs were still in a non-standard font).
After that I also had to make front page covers for them all. For some which exist in English Only versions I simply remade the cover to apply to the Texts and Translations version.
But as there are many more books in the latter section, others had to be made from the beginning. Thankfully I have a large store of photographs that can be adapted for covers on my Photo Dharma website.
The source documents for pdf and eBooks have to be quite different so it was necessary to reformat the whole series in a second set of documents, which could then be exported to .epub format, which is the standard format for all eReaders except Amazon’s Kindle.
But from there it is fairly easy to send them to the command line and export to .mobi format for the Kindle using the Calibre eBook software.
The documents are available in a zip file from the Downloads page on the website, or can be accessed indiviually from each page in the Texts and Translations section, where they are available as pdf epub and mobi, besides the online html.
When I had just finished the work an American yogi came to stay at Vivekavana and as he had a Kindle, so we loaded the files, and this was the first time I have been able to see what they look like in a eReader. Not bad. Here is a screenshot provided by Ven Khemaratana (with an encouraging comment):
