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By Chris Meadows

HenryAtPub Henry Melton, whose book Emperor Dad I have recently reviewed here, writes in his blog about one of the difficulties of converting his own books into e-book formats.

In this particular entry, he focuses on the problems presented by scene breaks. For print books, there are stylistic methods of conveying a scene break without interrupting the reader, such as the dropped capital—enlarging and shifting down the first letter of the first sentence. But e-books by and large do not yet offer that sort of finesse of control over the reading experience—and to make matters worse, different e-book formats or converters often have quite different requirements or capabilities.

So back to the scene break. How to give that subtle cue to the reader? Most of the automatic book converter tools I’ve tried end up stripping scene breaks. Unless you care about confusing the reader, you’ll have to wade through the converted text and page by page, fix up the scene break; possibly by putting back a variation of that ‘###’ that the manuscript had in the beginning  and hope the reader doesn’t stumble over it.

This is the sort of thing that people who make their own e-books often have to think about. Perhaps those who make e-book converting applications should keep it in mind.

 
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