With my new ePub edition of Broken Mirror in hand, I logged back in to my LuLu account, and within a couple minutes I had it uploaded, and got an ISBN assigned!
Here it is: 978-0-557-65774-2
So I guess it wasn’t all that hard after all.
You can buy the ePub version at LuLu, and I think it’s on its way onto the iBookshelf!
Now all I need to do is get back to writing more books.
I finally hacked through the weeds and got my perl programs to build a proper ebook. My sample document is the first two stories from my collection of short stories, Broken Mirror.
If you want, you can download the sample eBook. Save it to disk and open it with your zip program. It may help to replace the .epub extension with .zip. Then you can see all the files under the covers. (And if you like the stories, you can buy the Kindle edition and read it on your free Kindle reader program!)
If you don’t have an ebook reader, you can get an easy plug-in for the Firefox browser. (Choose Tools/Add-Ons. Click the Get Add-ons tab and enter “epub reader” in the search box – It should find this).
The following sites were very helpful:
Of course, if I want to sell this on iBookshelf I still need to buy an ISBN and publish it through one of the regular partners. That can be for another day.
As much fun as it was playing with ePub, I really need to get back to my submission package and agent search. I know I’ve been letting that slip.
If anyone would like help formatting an ebook, let me know. If it’s mostly text, I should be able to run it through my little tool. If you’re serious, you can find ePub formatter programs on the web.
After all that, I’ll still probably stick with Kindle for the other projects I have rolling around in my head. The ability to get in without an ISBN or having to go thorough another company is still the quickest point between author and reader. There are some hacks for running ePub files on the Kindle, so it’s possible that it may someday emerge as a supported standard. I don’t really care what the format is. VHS, BETA, Blue-Ray, but it would be nice if we could just pick one!
The air in Merebor was chilled by a heavy, tireless wind that blew from the north and churned the lazy fog that clogged the senses with thick smells of fish, sea salt, and fresh sawdust from the mill. She buttoned her jacket as she hurried down the rickety stair that was covered in scab-like patches of last year’s peeling paint. The door banged behind her when she stepped into the store that was always too dry and too warm from the large wood-burning stove. She leaned across the counter and kissed her father’s gray whiskers.
This weekend I decided to finally dig into the ePub standard for ebook publishing. This is the standard that is used for the Nook and iPad. Don’t worry, I’m still planning on getting Carpenter’s Mark published on DTBs (a.k.a Dead Tree Books), but I do have a Kindle book, and if I ever want to publish that or other content on the iPad I need to tackle this.
I’m not going to get too technical. If you want technical start here, then go here, then email me if you want help with anything.
One of the things the ePub standard does is support online-catalogs, by allowing you to add a lot of information about the book beyond just the title and author. It also has support for systems that will read the book to you.
You have to supply a manifest, which lists each file that is part of the book. Usually you have one — the book — but if you have images, you have to list the images. If you want to have a separate file for each chapter, you have to list each chapter.
It also gives you pretty good formatting options with its cascading style sheet command subset, which also extends css to support headers and footers.
As a programmer, I think I prefer it slightly over the Kindle format. Kindle is simpler, but ePub is solid, formal, flexible, and extensible. Programmers love this sort of thing. Programmers spend their day thinking things like, “What if someone comes up with a fancy Something viewer, and they want to make a book that shows it and embed fancy Somethings in their ebook. Ah ha! They can write a non-standard “xml island” extension, which most ebook devices can gracefully ignore, but still allows innovation and special features.”
It’s a difficult call. We do want a system that is both well defined and open to extension, and for this point in computing history it’s not a bad compromise. However, I can’t help but notice that ePub, and Kindle, are reflections of the web, and not reflections of books. More to the point, they’re more like crippled web pages than they are super books.
It’s going to be a very long time (probably never) before ePub will support the sort of rich graphical display that you see in magazines, comic books, or children’s books today.
As with web pages, the creative tug-of-war is between graphic design of a page as a singular unit and the flow of resizable text. Html and ebooks let you change font size, and for that simple feature we have changed everything. In my opinion, are not only missing a great opportunity, but we are locking ourselves into a limited model that will plague us for years to come.
Here’s where I think we should be heading…
You open an eBook and you see the cover. With the flick of a finger that all shrinks back into a grid of page icons. Tap a little page icon and it grows to fill the screen. Flip forward and back through the pages. Any page itself can have smaller, nested page icons for sidebars or ads. Tap them and they grow to fill the page. The ad can have a contact information page icon in the corner. Tap it and zoom in to that page.
Pages don’t have to be sequential either. As in a magazine, there might be a new article every three pages, but instead of the annoying continued on page 86 the article page sequence can be different than the overall book sequence. If you’re reading the article, you just jump to the right place.
Want just the text? Now go into text-flow mode where you have only the text extracted and readable on your mobile device. Tap back to see the whole page again on your little screen.
In other words, start with the page, just like in a magazine or book. Add flowable text or image zoom as overlays, as options, but don’t throw the whole page layout concept out the window at the starting line!
We don’t need html. We need PDF. We need to embrace graphic design, not work around it. Books are not just text. They are pictures. They are layout. They are design. They are beautiful.
ePub, for all it’s complexity, is a really a step backward. I’d like to go forward.
But I don’t get to design the world quite yet, so I need to get back to the ePub standards.
