Any Plugin or Tool to Convert Word to Kindle?
Hi All,
A slightly techie question but is anybody aware of a tool or plugin that converts word documents to Kindle formats? Even clean HTML would do. From the endless web sites and blogs, converting from word to kindle is a big pain, especially when the book is not just plain text. Would love to know of any tools out there to make the job easier.
Thanks,
John
A slightly techie question but is anybody aware of a tool or plugin that converts word documents to Kindle formats? Even clean HTML would do. From the endless web sites and blogs, converting from word to kindle is a big pain, especially when the book is not just plain text. Would love to know of any tools out there to make the job easier.
Thanks,
John
1 - 20 of 26 Posts
It would be helpful to understand what the end goal is- if it's to publish through KDP, you don't need to convert your Word file before uploading. If it's to have a .mobi file that you could then distribute outside of KDP, then a program like Calibre would help do the trick.
Thanks for the replies. When I published my books to Kindle, I first converted them to HTML and spent a lot of time cleaning up the code. It was time-consuming and pen to errors. I then wanted to distribute to SmashWords and make it available as an ePub file and that entailed more conversion steps. At this stage in the ebook revolution, I kinda imagined someone would have produced a tool that took my word document and converted it into all the formats I needed.
I tried Calibre before but found it overly complicated, I'll give it another go.
Thanks for the tips.
John
I tried Calibre before but found it overly complicated, I'll give it another go.
Thanks for the tips.
John
I have a more or less complete guide on converting Word to Mobi and Epub using Calibre, including autogeneration of a proper HTML and NCX table of contents.
Katie,
That guide you wrote looks fantastic! I'll try it out and come back to you with my results. Your link should be a sticky!
John
That guide you wrote looks fantastic! I'll try it out and come back to you with my results. Your link should be a sticky!
John
I use Calibre as well and have had nothing but awesome times with it. I convert my word document into a filtered html document (from Word's SAVE menu), feet that into Calibre to generate .MOBI and .EPUB files. I've never had any problems or complaints from readers...Jonathan C. Gillespie said:
Maybe give the free trial version of Scrivener a go, as well. It'll compile to Word, Mobi, Epub, PDF and a bunch of other formats in just a few clicks.
Calibre is one that a lot of folks use. Scrivener is another.John Dwyer said:Hi All,
A slightly techie question but is anybody aware of a tool or plugin that converts word documents to Kindle formats? Even clean HTML would do. From the endless web sites and blogs, converting from word to kindle is a big pain, especially when the book is not just plain text. Would love to know of any tools out there to make the job easier.
Thanks,
John
I develop wordpress plugins. If I knew there was more interest in one that did it, I would create one for the community.
Hi 
This is what I use
http://www.kindlewriter.co.uk/
If you have a problem with it Fred does all he can to help but it's all pretty straightforward.
All the best,
Dave.
This is what I use
http://www.kindlewriter.co.uk/
If you have a problem with it Fred does all he can to help but it's all pretty straightforward.
All the best,
Dave.
G
I'm fond of writer2epub, but that's a plugin for Open Office / Libre Office, not Word.
While I wrote the guide for Word, I actually use Scrivener. However, it really isn't a conversion tool, it's a writing tool and unless you want to commit to use it, if you're sticking with Word, it's far easier to use Calibre than it is to get Scrivener to do things, particularly on the Windows side.
I don't use a plugin. I just go through the steps.
1) Save your document as filtered HTML. This is important because it removes a lot of Word-specific cruft that saving as regular HTML leaves in.
2) Open up the HTML document in a good text editor.
3) Remove the @font-face styles and any page styles. You will not need them.
4) In your styles that are left, change your fonts to just "sans-serif" and "serif". Change all font sizes to percentages; the default should be 100%, so everything is relative to that.
5) Search for tags that Word put in with inline styles. There may well be some. Word has an unfortunate tendency to break tags across line breaks, so watch out for that. Just fix up any stray spans that don't belong there.
6) If you use small caps anywhere, change those to a style. Word tries to do these with inline styles. The proper font-variant style is recognized by some readers; it works fine in epubs for the iPad and mobi files for the Kindle Fire.
7) Once the HTML is ready, fire up Calibre and create a new book, adding your HTML file as one of the formats.
The conversion process in Calibre is relatively straightforward so I don't feel like adding a guide on that would be especially helpful (others have no doubt covered that in depth), but being able to prepare good HTML from your Word document is usually enough for most publishing platforms anyway.
1) Save your document as filtered HTML. This is important because it removes a lot of Word-specific cruft that saving as regular HTML leaves in.
2) Open up the HTML document in a good text editor.
3) Remove the @font-face styles and any page styles. You will not need them.
4) In your styles that are left, change your fonts to just "sans-serif" and "serif". Change all font sizes to percentages; the default should be 100%, so everything is relative to that.
5) Search for tags that Word put in with inline styles. There may well be some. Word has an unfortunate tendency to break tags across line breaks, so watch out for that. Just fix up any stray spans that don't belong there.
6) If you use small caps anywhere, change those to a style. Word tries to do these with inline styles. The proper font-variant style is recognized by some readers; it works fine in epubs for the iPad and mobi files for the Kindle Fire.
7) Once the HTML is ready, fire up Calibre and create a new book, adding your HTML file as one of the formats.
The conversion process in Calibre is relatively straightforward so I don't feel like adding a guide on that would be especially helpful (others have no doubt covered that in depth), but being able to prepare good HTML from your Word document is usually enough for most publishing platforms anyway.
Calibre will automatically remove font-face/font-family and change font-size to EMs when you convert html to mobi.3) Remove the @font-face styles and any page styles. You will not need them.
4) In your styles that are left, change your fonts to just "sans-serif" and "serif". Change all font sizes to percentages; the default should be 100%, so everything is relative to that.
I just uploaded my books in Word and Kindle did the rest
It's my understanding that at the moment, if you upload with Word, you will get irregular results on indents. They'll appear on some devices, but not on others.
Just an FYI, not all versions of Word have option to save as "filtered HTML". Another publisher has asked me for help with conversion, and I said sure, I've got a system that works pretty well for me. But their version of Word didn't have "filtered HTML" and the regular HTML option is very very awful.
Well that sucks. I wonder if it's a newer or older version. I run Word 2003. The regular HTML option is indeed terrible. It's amazing how much useless crap Word insists on throwing in there.Eltanin Publishing said:Just an FYI, not all versions of Word have option to save as "filtered HTML". Another publisher has asked me for help with conversion, and I said sure, I've got a system that works pretty well for me. But their version of Word didn't have "filtered HTML" and the regular HTML option is very very awful.
I also just upload my word doc straight to Amazon and they convert it for me.
As for indents - I actually go into Paragraph, then Line Spacing Options, and Indentation, Special, Line Spacing Options, and set it at 0.3"
That way, whenever I hit return after a paragraph it imbeds the indent for me. I have never had an issue in any of my files. I also use Page Breaks at the end of each Title Page/ Chapter/ Etc ... If you know your way around Word then nothing else is needed to upload to Kindle.
As for indents - I actually go into Paragraph, then Line Spacing Options, and Indentation, Special, Line Spacing Options, and set it at 0.3"
That way, whenever I hit return after a paragraph it imbeds the indent for me. I have never had an issue in any of my files. I also use Page Breaks at the end of each Title Page/ Chapter/ Etc ... If you know your way around Word then nothing else is needed to upload to Kindle.
You should download the mobi of one of your books and look at it in the downloadable viewer set for the PaperWhite. They don't display correctly on KF8 devices aka the PaperWhite bug. They're locked into Helvetica.S.L. Baum said:If you know your way around Word then nothing else is needed to upload to Kindle.
1 - 20 of 26 Posts
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