Amen to that, Joel.
Going back to Margaret's formatting difficulties, which sound
horrendous, I haven't tried the Amazon route, but I've worked through
Smashwords, which is a good tool if you want to produce an ebook which
is basically just text. I like the Smashwords site: it's run by a man
called Mark Coker, and it's got a very personal feel to it. You can send
him an e-mail and he'll send you a personal reply. Most of the "Help" on
the site was obviously written by him, and gives you a strong sense of
his individuality. It's also quite funny in places. His advice about how
to format your book is, in a nutshell, to reduce formatting to an
absolute minimum; once you've done this he's got software which will
produce versions of the book in .epub, .mobi (for the Kindle), LRF (for
the Sony ereader), PDB (for PalmDoc), PDF, .rtf and plain text. He can
also get it into Apple's bookstore for you (where it will languish
unseen and unbought amongst thousands of others...).
If you fancy working in just the .epub format, which means you can make
more use of things like colour and .jpg illustrations, then there's an
excellent piece of open-source software called Sigil. It's a good idea
to undestand about the HTML and CSS source-code, but Sigil takes care of
all the dirty work, like preparing a contents page, and lets you see
what the finished product will look like in a typical ereader (if there
is such a thing).
I was toying with the idea of setting myself up as an e-publisher
earlier this year, and I still think it would be a really interesting
thing to do. Maybe some time.
- Edward
On 09/04/2011 15:28, Joel Weishaus wrote:
> And you work without a spectrum of possible incomes.
>
> -Joel
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Simon Biggs" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2011 12:37 AM
> Subject: Re: [WDL] Fwd: The Unbound Book
>
>
>> Variable media is variable. Artworks made with it are variable.
>> Trying to
>> control those variables is rather pointless. You work within a
>> spectrum of
>> possible outcomes.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> Simon
>>
>>
>> On 08/04/2011 19:38, "Joel Weishaus" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> Computer monitors still register colors differently. And screen
>>> resolution
>>> makes a big difference in how a work is seen.
>>> Because of this, I began framing my work into a specific amount of
>>> pixels,
>>> at least horizontally. While I check colors on at least two
>>> monitors, and
>>> try to get something reasonable.
>>> Of course artists have always had similar problems over control of
>>> their
>>> work. Oil paint fades and darkens; marble weathers and chips;
>>> Taliban-minded
>>> people are lurking everywhere, ready to blow up what offends their
>>> reality.
>>> Even with books, as George Butterick has brilliantly shown,
>>> publishers set
>>> typos that are perpetuated in later editions; thus texts may change
>>> from the
>>> writer's original words.
>>> The world is in flux, and so are works of art.
>>>
>>> -Joel
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Edward Picot" <[log in to unmask]>
>>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 10:01 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [WDL] Fwd: The Unbound Book
>>>
>>>
>>> Margaret -
>>>
>>> Has your venture into e-book self-publishing been via Smashwords, by
>>> any
>>> chance? The stuff about hyperlinked index and formatting sounds
>>> familiar.
>>>
>>> I like your positive attitude towards e-books, and I agree with you:
>>> I think
>>> they probably are the future. On the other hand, of course, there
>>> are all
>>> these stupid compatibility issues. Epub is the best format, but Kindle
>>> doesn't like it. Colour is one of the big advantages of
>>> e-publishing, but
>>> Kindle doesn't do colour. Page layout is really tricky because there
>>> are so
>>> many different-sized readers. Even things like hyperlinks and
>>> rollovers... a
>>> lot of e-readers (like the crappy one I got from Waterstones, purely
>>> because
>>> someone gave me a load of Waterstones tokens) don't have
>>> touch-screen, which
>>> means you can't click a link or activate a rollover.
>>>
>>> I think a lot of these compatibility issues will probably disappear
>>> within
>>> the next couple of years: I don't think non-touch-screen e-readers
>>> are going
>>> to be around much longer, for example; and I'm sure Kindle will want
>>> to add
>>> colour as soon as they can do it at a reasonable price and without
>>> compromising their much-vaunted text quality. We may then find
>>> ourselves in
>>> a very interesting place, because with zero storage and distribution
>>> costs
>>> minority-interest publishing will be a really good opportunity for
>>> anybody
>>> who fancies giving it a go.
>>>
>>> - Edward
>>>
>>> **********
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>>
>>
>> Simon Biggs
>> [log in to unmask]
>> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>> http://www.elmcip.net/
>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
>>
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>
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