I have an ePub containing 380MB of pure text. It's 58 million words, no graphics, in 1806 chapter files. It's a computer-generated ePub; most of the pages are duplicates. (I'll explain in a postscript why I'm doing this ridiculous thing.)
Anyway, when I try to convert it to Mobi with Amazon kindlegen, it crashes with a Segmentation Fault, so I thought I'd try Calibre. I'm using the command-line tool, ebook-convert, and it seems to be going so well, until eventually it crashes, too, with this error:
I get it, I get it, it's too big. But what is too big, exactly? Is it the number of words? Number of chapter files? Is there a way I could predict when a book will be "too big" for Mobi and avoid those limitations?
P.S. OK, I promised I'd explain what I'm doing. What I'm doing is building a "choose-a-path" gamebook. In traditional "choose-a-path" books, like "Choose Your Own Adventure," every page is unique, and the experience of reading the book once is quite short. In other gamebooks, like the "Fighting Fantasy" gamebooks, choices you make early on in the story can affect what happens later in the story; they ask you to take notes with pencil and paper. After exploring the book, you might find a door, and the text would say, "If you've found the key, you can unlock the door and turn to page 127."
In the interactive-fiction community we call these two types of gamebooks "stateless" or "stateful," where the idea is that what you write on the paper is the "mutable state" of the game world.
It turns out that if you don't have very much mutable state, you can generate an enormous stateless gamebook from a stateful gamebook. The input source for this ePub is only 30,000 words, 208KB of text, but from that we generate an ePub that tracks your choices as you play, so you don't have to use pencil and paper. The result is 58 million words, but it also compresses surprisingly well, 19MB.
Anyway! I'd like to take this monster and convert it into a Mobi file; if that's not possible, I'll have to reduce the amount of tracked state to make it fit the constraints of the platform.
But to do that, I'd need to know what my constraints are! How big can I go, in which dimensions?
Anyway, when I try to convert it to Mobi with Amazon kindlegen, it crashes with a Segmentation Fault, so I thought I'd try Calibre. I'm using the command-line tool, ebook-convert, and it seems to be going so well, until eventually it crashes, too, with this error:
Code:
Generating MOBI index for a book
Python function terminated unexpectedly: 'H' format requires 0 <= number <= 65535
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Resources/Python/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 154, in main
return run_entry_point()
File "/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Resources/Python/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 114, in run_entry_point
return getattr(pmod, func)()
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/cli.py", line 393, in main
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plumber.py", line 1238, in run
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/mobi_output.py", line 212, in convert
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/mobi_output.py", line 249, in write_mobi
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/mobi/writer2/main.py", line 63, in __call__
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/mobi/writer2/main.py", line 77, in dump_stream
File "site-packages/calibre/ebooks/mobi/writer2/main.py", line 239, in generate_record0
error: 'H' format requires 0 <= number <= 65535P.S. OK, I promised I'd explain what I'm doing. What I'm doing is building a "choose-a-path" gamebook. In traditional "choose-a-path" books, like "Choose Your Own Adventure," every page is unique, and the experience of reading the book once is quite short. In other gamebooks, like the "Fighting Fantasy" gamebooks, choices you make early on in the story can affect what happens later in the story; they ask you to take notes with pencil and paper. After exploring the book, you might find a door, and the text would say, "If you've found the key, you can unlock the door and turn to page 127."
In the interactive-fiction community we call these two types of gamebooks "stateless" or "stateful," where the idea is that what you write on the paper is the "mutable state" of the game world.
It turns out that if you don't have very much mutable state, you can generate an enormous stateless gamebook from a stateful gamebook. The input source for this ePub is only 30,000 words, 208KB of text, but from that we generate an ePub that tracks your choices as you play, so you don't have to use pencil and paper. The result is 58 million words, but it also compresses surprisingly well, 19MB.
Anyway! I'd like to take this monster and convert it into a Mobi file; if that's not possible, I'll have to reduce the amount of tracked state to make it fit the constraints of the platform.
But to do that, I'd need to know what my constraints are! How big can I go, in which dimensions?