I see it’s been about a week since I last posted. I was trying to be more faithful than that with posts, but apparently I still need to work on that some. (Nothing new, I have been known to be a GREAT procrastinator.)
I haven’t completely ignored the blog, and we have been doing our classes which is good. In the non-class time, I’ve working on reformatting public domain books to make them more usable for us. I have a specific format I like my ebooks in, and I have the tools (and ability) to change ebooks to my preferred format. For some of the books I’ve found it takes a bit more work to find the free illustrated versions and some of the time, I have to add the public domain illustrations back into the book so that I can have an illustrated ebook. But before I create the ebook I like to clean up the aging that will often happen to the illustrations and try to return them to what I believe the original illustration was more like. Basically most older illustrations are either grayed or yellowed and slightly faded so I try to white balance and slightly enhance the saturation of the images.
There are two free tools I use to do these things. One is calibre which is a ebook management system with the ability to create ebooks in various formats. Typically I create a html version of the ebook which has the formatting the way I like. I save the html in .rar to store it in the smallest file size. From there I can create epub or mobi and a few other formats without a problem. As for the images, I use GIMP which is at least as powerful as Photo Shop (if not more) and free. It’s main down side is that it has a pretty steep learning curve to learn how to do everything but there are some great sites that can help. It also works great for digital scrapbooking!
When I have a few more of the public domain books cleaned up, etc I’ll share them in another post.