Educate the Mobile Generation: Convert WORD documents to ePub and MOBI

You’ve seen the headlines and heard the buzz as much as I have: smartphones are taking over the planet, e-books are selling like hotcakes, and, tablets like the iPad are cannibalizing laptop and desktop computer sales. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to conclude that Mobile computing in the hottest trend in technology since electricity was invented. With this fact in mind, I asked myself this question – are my course materials mobile-friendly? Can my students easily get the materials in my course onto their mobile device be it an iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android Smartphone, Sony eBook Reader, Amazon Kindle, or Barnes & Noble Nook, etc.

Well, I was a bit embarrassed by my answer. My answer was ‘sort-of’. I was providing nice printer-friendly PDF files as one format and PDF does work on most mobile devices but it’s not optimized for mobile delivery. So I decided to try something new. I am converting my WORD documents to ePub and MOBI (for Kindle) formats. So I Googled around to get some help and found this very useful posting by Jeremy Reimer dated March 24th, 2010. It really guided me in the right direction. This is what I did:

1. I took my WORD source documents (*.doc) and ‘Saved As HTML’ (or “Save as Web Page” for the Mac version of WORD) using the built in function in WORD.


2. Then I opened the HTML file up in Dreamweaver. I then used the fantastically useful feature in Dreamweaver of Commands > Clean Up WORD HTML.


3. Then I used the second most fantastical feature in Adobe Dreamweaver: Commands > Clean Up HTML.


4. Then I applied a unique class attribute to each Lesson Title in my HTML document so that I could use this unique class attribute to generate a Table of Contents for the ePub and MODI files later. I did it really simply. I found the lesson title in the HTML code and then noticed right before it was a paragraph code (<p>) so I changed that to <p class=”TableOfContents”> for every lesson title or section title of my document that I wanted to show up in the Table of Contents.


5. I then downloaded a free copy of Calibre. It’s an eBook reader software for computers. In addition, it also converts from one eBook format to another. So I loaded the HTML version of my document into Calibre.


6. Next, using Calibre I chose to convert this HTML version of my document into an ePub format. There are some settings you can play around with; however, I generally stayed to the default settings with one exception: the Table of Contents. I specified that I only wanted items in the Level 1 of table of contents that had a paragraph code with class = “TableOfContents”. Here's the exact syntax that I used in Calibre: //h:p[re:test(@class, "TableOfContents", "i")]


7. Finally, I repeated step 6 while choosing MOBI as my output file format instead of ePub.


8. Done.

I emailed myself these two files and tested them on my iPhone. They both work well. Links are active, footnotes work, Table of Contents is exactly how I wanted it, and images look fine.

Now I am going to put up the ePub and MOBI versions of the course materials on the Learning Management System for students to have access to if they want to optimize the experience for mobile devices. At the end of the semester, I’ll survey them to see which file formats they used and when, etc.

If you have developed any other useful methods for converting WORD documents to ePub and MOBI format then please leave a comment below.

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Paper still beats electronic in 2007!

Catchy title eh? A colleague and I (thanks Susan!) just wrapped up a very small study with some graduate students at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) and the results were quite interesting. First, let me briefly explain the scenario and method. We selected one graduate course in the Masters of Arts in Defence Management and Policy programme and it had 7 people enrolled for the Fall 2006 semester. This course was offered at a distance using WebCT as an LMS. Students were provided with a paper-based package of course notes free of charge. They were required to purchase 6 textbooks and 2 readers (i.e. collections of scholarly articles). One reader was paper-based while the other reader was electronic-based. Our experiment was to try to measure which type of reader students preferred. For this experiment, we offered the electronic-based reader at a 20% lower price than the paper-based reader. The electronic-based reader was a professionally done product through collaboration with Access Copyright and VitalSource. Near the end of the course, students were administered an anonymous questionnaire which gathered data on the readers and how they used them. 5 of 7 the students chose to complete the survey.

Here are some of the most interesting results.

When asked ‘which reader they preferred to use’, 100% said they preferred the paper-based.

When asked ‘If you had a choice between purchasing a reader in a paper-based format for full price (say $70) or the same reader in a discounted electronic-based format (say a 20% discount), which would you purchase’ 80% of students said they would purchase the paper-based reader.

When asked how much of the electronic-based reader they printed, three students said they printed more than 60% of the reader (Note that 60%+ represents 240+ pages of printing). One student said they printed between 40-60% and one student printed between 10-20% of the reader.

When asked what were the reasons for printing pages from the electronic reader, 100% of students stated two reasons: i) ‘I printed pages because I prefer reading on paper instead of the screen’, and ii) ‘I printed pages because it was easy to transport the printed readings between two or more physical locations (i.e. example: home, work, library, coffee shop, etc.)’ 80% of students stated this reason for printing pages: ‘I printed pages because I always print all course materials’. It is interesting to note that only 1 student stated ‘I printed pages because I had limited Internet/computer access.’

I realize that the sample size is very small here and the target market is not the typical graduate student in Canada. At RMC, most graduate students in the Masters of Arts in Defence Management and Policy are either military members or associated with the Department of National Defence in some way. However, based on these results I will default to recommending the creation of paper-based readers for the courses I design in this programme in the future.

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