free Dhamma book makers, please make EPUB versions: PDF's are a horrendous nuisance to read

 The only legitimate reason to use PDF, is for security reasons in legal documents to prevent tampering with the source text. 

But in practice, people use it because it's a universal format that works on any device, and preserves text and picture viewing proportions properly. But for media that is primarily consumed as text, such as free Dharma books, PDF is horrendously difficult to browse, especially on book reading devices like e-ink (electronic ink) versions of kindle. 

Why should I create EPUB files?

I won't go into all the reasons, but here's the big one. Like html files that you browse all the time on the internet, the text is reflowable. Meaning you can easily make the text bigger, smaller, resize the browser window. When you get older and your eyes get worse, you'll really appreciate being able to make fonts bigger. You can't do that with PDF files. 

I know how to fix this problem easily, with free off the shelf tools

Most of you probably write your book with Microsoft word producing a '.doc' output file, or a free shareware version of Microsoft word such as libreoffice. 

Here's how you can quickly, easily, produce for free,  epub, azw3 (amazon), mobi, pdf.

Download Calibre, a free shareware ebook management tool.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Calibre is intuitive and easy to use. 

Here are the instructions. With the sample book source microsoft word file I show below, it took me about 2 minutes to create all the derivative versions (epub, pdf, azw3) using calibre.

This is all you have to do to make epub easily

 

1. Use H1 (heading 1), H2 (heading 2), or H3 for all your chapter title headings in your book source file (mybook.doc file). Depending on the epub reading software, a good one will build a tree table of contents up to 3 levels deep. For example:

● DN 2 -  Sāmañña-phala: recluseship-fruits

Note that not all epub reader software is created equal. If you use a good one, like calibre's ebook reader (separate program from calibre management tool), it will show table of contents with tree structures up to 3 levels deep.

2. Instead of saving your microsoft word file as a '.doc', use the function 'save as', and instead save it as a file of '.html' format.

3. Now run calibre, and from the toolbar "add book", and select your '.html' file from step #2.

4. With book added, now select from the toolbar "convert book", and it will give you options from epub, to azw3, to pdf, etc. Click the button to convert, and it will produce the output file. Calibre automatically builds a table of contents depending on what combination of heading sizes you used, H1, H2, H3. 

That's all! 4 simple steps.

Here is a sample book for microsoft word, and all the output formats for epub, azw3, pdf, all 3 with an automatically generated table of contents.

https://archive.org/details/epub-book-test-unknown

(Now in my example, the table of contents got flattened and lost the tree shape, but I include in the archive directory above, an epub from my DN 2 sutta with the tree structure table of contents intact)

The sample book file "epub-book-test.html"  is just this:

big section 1 title use: H1 heading

contents in normal text mode.

Subsection 1.1 title use: H2 heading

contents in normal text mode.

Subsection 1.2 title use: H2 heading

contents in normal text mode.

Sub-sub-section 1.2.1 title use: h3 heading

contents in normal text mode. Epub and calibre will add ‘h3’ sections into table of contents, but AZW3 will not last I checked.

Big section 2, make title, use: H1 heading

contents in normal text mode.

Subsection 2.1 title use: H2 heading

contents in normal text mode.

Sub-sub-section 2.1.1 title use: h3 heading

contents in normal text mode. Epub and calibre will add ‘h3’ sections into table of contents, but AZW3 will not last I checked.

Subsection 2.2 title use: H2 heading

contents in normal text mode.