Hey everyone! I've been using Scrivener trying to convert my heavily PDF-oriented apps into e-books, as suggested, firstly for the Amazon Kindle. However, I've run into a bit of a roadblock. My Scrivener file is about 60 MB. When I convert it to the .mobi format, it grows five-fold for a grand total of 300 MB - evidently way too big to even attempt to upload for the Kindle. Any thoughts on the best way to proceed in drastically reducing the size without sacrificing quality? My PDF files are roughly 150 KB each (x 200 PDFs). Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again! -Nicholas

Hmm - my guess is that your pdf conversion is completely image-based. Do you have Adobe Acrobat Pro? If so, try running OCR on the PDF first to convert all the text to, well, text. You could even convert it to a Word or HTML document from there. If, on the other hand, it's all true text to start out with and you're still ending up with a really large mobi file, my guess is it's due to the fact that you have so many files. Try combining all pdf's into a single one and see what that does. Finally, what are you using to convert the files to mobi? If you haven't tried Calibre, check it out.

Hey Chris, Thanks for the quick response. The PDF files are mixed text + image (diagram to be more specific). Also, I don't have Adobe Acrobat Pro. As for Calibre, I've read that since 2010 or 2011, Amazon has been rejecting more and more ebooks that have been tinkered with Calibre - don't know why, but that seems to be the case. And I would try to combine all PDF's into one, but that might make it difficult for making chapters or what not... not sure why a 60 MB files turns into a 300 MB after conversion.

Hmm - only reason I could see Amazon rejecting Calibre books is that Calibre has an optional (third-party developed) plugin that can remove Amazon DRM. As for why it increases in size ... whenever you convert something from one format to another, the program doing the conversion uses all sorts of logic that usually adds to the file size. Having one large file (as compared to many small ones) will usually reduce the loops the logic goes through, and thus reduce the file size. Also, generally speaking, PDF's are the worst to convert from. They maintain everything - text and images - relative to the page number. So, page 35 of a book might contain 3 paragraphs and an image. In a printed textbook, you would want that to be the case. It could be problematic to have a paragraph that says "see the image on this page" when the publisher of the book changes the page size and prints that paragraph on page 36, whereas the image is still on page 35. But, e-books tend to ignore such issues. E-book readers can change the text size and vary widely by screen size. So, if you're writing a book that you know will be displayed on an e-reader, you should avoid use of things like "see image on this page" - everything is relative. Thus, PDF's are great for printed material and terrible for electronic material. If you want to create a .mobi or .epub document, your best bet is to use content from a HTML document, a Word document, etc (where documents are primarily text-based and not dependent on page numbers).

Hey Chris, The only reason I'm not too worried about the whole PDF experience is because all my documents follow the same format, similar design, and are all basically exactly the same dimensions in terms of page. I've previewed my e-book on the Kindle Previewer and, to be quite frank, it looks great. ... minus the 300 MB size. Would you suggest that I attempt to convert my PDFs into another format? It seems when I convert it to Word that it actually gets larger. HTML, on the other hand, splits up my documents in a few documents (guessing due to part text, part design, part image?). Sorry for the bombardment! -Nicholas

No problem. It's quite possible (probable even) that your images are way too big. Do you have a photo-editing program (such as Photoshop)? If so, I would down-size the images and save them to your computer, then recompile the pages. That might be a lot of work, of course, depending on the number of pages. But, it would surely reduce the size of your book and the number of images you use. If you have Photoshop, you can load an image and save it for "web & devices". Then, of course, you have to recreate the documents, replacing the old images with the new.

Interest thing is that I just compiled my 27 MB Scrivener file into the .mobi format and it actually turned out to be a BIGGER file size at 395 MB even though there are 100 less PDFs in it! Can't seem to wrap my mind around it... & unfortunately, I can't proceed with text alone... Thanks for the help, Chris. -Nicholas

No problem. Keep playing with it. Try Calibre - you never know. May need to convert to HTML first, then inspect file sizes to see what's the issue. Calibre makes it easy to convert HTML to mobi, and HTML should make it easy to identify large image sizes (and to replace with smaller ones).

Calibre did the trick! Thanks, Chris, you were a large help in getting my first e-Book out there on the Amazon Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EH11A4I/) Thanks again!!! -Nicholas