Thursday, July 14, 2011

Strangely, there is no Kindle Store on Amazon.ca. So if you want to buy The Circle Cast on Kindle from Canada, you have to go to Amazon.com. (See link at right.)

Labels: technology

12:09 PM

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Monday, March 7, 2011

Okay, I have made an Epub version of THE CIRCLE CAST, suitable for iPads. And a MOBI version, suitable for Kindles.

That took some doing. Calibre, the very fine free software that converts your document into an Epub, translates your input into XHTML. So the easiest way to control the formatting of your ebook is to turn your document into HTML, fuss with the HTML, and then convert from HTML into the ebook of your choice.

So I recoded the RTF document I got from the graphic designer into HTML using Word, cleaned up Word's horribly messy HTML, and then massage the HTML using TextWrangler.

I'd really like to figure out how to get the original fonts to appear. The book's beautiful title treatment is CCNearMythFables font, not a font most people will have on their computer. (I had to pay $50 for it.) Can Epub embed a font? Some say yes, Virginia, there is a way that you can embed a font into something called an LRF file, using the CSS @font-face element. But I don't know how to do that.

I also don't know how to center something vertically on a page, e.g. the dedication? And it may not actually be possible. The MOBI and EPUB formats don't include everything you can do in Word or PDF. Word and PDF are meant to format for a specific size document. EPUB and MOBI are meant to be "reflowable" for different sized tablets and readers.

But I've got an Epub. It is professional-looking and readable on my iPhone. And I've got a MOBI, that looks nice on my antique Kindle.

Is this is the wave of the future? We'll see. There were a couple of reviewers who wanted a digital review copy. It would be great if you could get your ARCs out digitally -- hella cheaper and faster. More often I see reviewers specifically saying, No, please, no digital review copies. So into the mail it goes.

I suspect the formats will get more robust and the software will get cleverer. For now, it's a cranky bit of work.

Theoretically I ought to be able to sell the Kindle edition, or actually my publisher ought to be able, if he sets up an Amazon Kindle publisher account. (That, at least, is trivial to do.) I think the MOBI I made looks legitimate, but I'm not 100% sure I've done all the formatting I'm capable of. So I'm holding back. Darn fonts.

Labels: technology

10:58 AM

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Thursday, March 3, 2011

I was looking around Amazon for free content for my Kindle, and ran across an e-Book that neatly answered a nagging question I had: how do you turn a book into a Kindle eBook?

Conveniently, Amazon will send you a free copy of their book Publish on Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing, provided of course that you have a Kindle to send it to.

It turns out pretty much all you need is an HTML file of your book, and about fifteen minute. The KDP software turns an HTML file into a Kindle book for you. (If you have a Microsoft Word doc, then you can have MS Word turn it into HTML.)

Interestingly, both the iPad and Kindle conversion software dislike PDFs. I tried to turn a PDF of The Circle Cast into an iBook using a powerful free program called Calibre. Calibre messed up my table of contents and chapter headings pretty badly. Now I'm trying to get a Word doc to work from. PDF is a format made to specify exactly how the book will appear on your chosen size of page. iBooks and eBooks are meant to appear readably on a variety of different sized screens. Hence Amazon's decision to base KDP on HTML, which is also meant to scale well on different screens.

Ironically, it will be a bit harder for me to get a Kindle edition out because I have to coordinate with my publisher. The downside of having conventional publishers is that they are, well, conventional. Henry Holt is still promising to Kindle-fy my two screenwriting books, Crafty Screenwriting and Crafty TV Writing. Tradewind hopes to bring someone in to Kindle-fy The Circle Cast. But I can't just, y'know, go and do it.

Once you have a properly formatted eBook for Kindle, as far as I can tell from the book, it is ridiculously easy to set up an account to sell it.

Of course you'll still have trouble marketing it. Most of the book review blogs and, I imagine, almost all traditional reviewers, refuse to look at self-published or Print on Demand books. There is a strong presumption of suckitude if you haven't been able to find a legit publisher.

But if you have a document that a limited number of people will desperately want to read, Kindle (or iBooks) is a great, practically free way to get the information out there.

Now where's my iPad 2?

Labels: technology

2:47 PM

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Thursday, January 27, 2011

I have wound up with a Kindle. Hunter got one for Christmas from his grandparents, I guess on the theory that maybe he would read books if they were on a screen. But he isn't really a book person. So now I have a Kindle.

As a guy whose family of four has five laptops (one for everybody, and a Macbook Air for travel), the Kindle already seems backwards as a device. No color? Tiny screen? It's easier to read a book on than my iPhone; but my heart yearns for an iPad. On an iPad, I could see two pages at once.

But it is a handy little fellow. I like that I can get something on it immediately. I will likely take it on trips.

What bugs me most is the pricing. Most of the time i buy used books, I get them for seven or eight bucks after shipping. A Kindle book costs ten bucks or more. And there's no real reason for that. Most of the cost of a book is making the book and then distributing the book. A Kindle costs essentially nothing to make and distribute. Amazon is making tons of profit on Kindle books.

It's been the same as the pricing on music. Why does an album cost almost as much on iTunes as on CD?

I guess I feel about the Kindle that this is the 1.0 of something whose 5.0 will be pretty good.

What I'd really love is to figure out how to distribute my review copies by Kindle, to reviewers who have one. Anyone know how I can do that?

Labels: technology

10:01 AM

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