Category: Digital Publishing

Covers the emerging digital book including ebooks and epub.

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Hello World: travels in virtuality – the ebook

At the weekend I wrapped up a project turning ‘Hello World: travels in virtuality ‘ by Sue Thomas into both Kindle and epub files.

The book was originally released in dead-tree’s format back in 2004 and digital publishing has allowed us to breath a new lease of life into the book and be easily available to the world!

If you want to hear more about how I made the book let me know and i’ll write something but you can just as easily read Ahab! by Craig Mod which covers all the ground and points you to a helpful sample project.  One of the key resources in Craig’s article is to the Kindle previewer which will display the ebook file in all generations of Kindle, saving you having to purchase all of the devices. My top tip is to start with the newest versions and work back until you get bored.

The Kindle version is now available to purchase for only £2.05.

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04 Publishing jargon

On my ebook publishing journey I have begun to stumble across processes, stages and phrases that use traditional print terminology. I will note them here for my own sanity and maybe that of others as I figure where it makes sense we should use existing and established phrases.

  • Galley proof – used to describe review copies of a print book
  • Uncorrected proof – commonly used in place of ‘galley proof’ for digital books
  • Name of punctuation and general typography – a list down the right of key technical terms…. a tilde is not a squiggle!
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Force Kindle to display frontmatter first

When you first load a kindle file it may start on any number of pages as set by the book designer. I am not sure if an ebook should start on the cover as this is visible in the library.

Anyway, a problem I had today was that my book kept starting on the first chapter and bypassing the frontmatter, foreword and introduction.

After various wimperings on the #eprdctn hashtag I stumbled across the solution and am documenting it before I forget.

To control/force the kindle to start on your page of choice you need to do the following it seems:

  1. open content.opf
  2. scroll to the GUIDE section
  3. You only need three items in here – i originally had all chapters but reading around seems to say this is pointless: cover, toc, and your chosen first page as references.
  4. Change/add a reference for your chosen page to <reference type=”text” href=”frontmatter.html”/></reference>
  5. Done

Setting the reference to type fixed the problem. I had read that you need to use “start” but that seemed to be where I failed.

It is interesting to think about what page should be first, would a reader care about frontmatter or just the author and publisher?…. a post for the future me thinks.

Thanks to Tom for leading me to the correct path.

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EPUB check v3.0 now available

Whenever you make an EPUB ebook you should check that it validates (required to convert to kindle too). You can use the web upload or download epubcheck which has just hit version 3.0.

Get it now and join me in tearing your hair out at 1am when you can’t interpret the error code!

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DIY Multimedia Ebooks for Distance Students

Seeing as I constantly lose track of the comments I make on other peoples websites I think I may try and make a note here.

Read about how Phil Wood and Terese Bird from the University of Leicester are getting on with an interesting ebook student programme and then feel free to read my comments.

Read the post.

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The how and why of making ebooks out of conferences

Writing a few thousand words in the space of a couple of days is obviously a big effort, but there are a couple of reasons I don’t charge for the books. Firstly, although everything is written by me, the book exists because of the generosity of the people who have given their time to talk, and the people who took the time and risk of setting up the event. I’d hate people to think I was trying to profiteer off their efforts to make a quick buck by selling an ebook. Even if it only ever upset a couple of people, the tiny amount of money it would generate isn’t worth it.

Read the post.