Trey Smith
When you don't have a job, it's important to have projects! Without projects, each day merely melts into the next and it's often difficult for me sometimes to remember what day of the week or month it is.
Of course, this blog itself is a project of mine. Interspersed with the writing and maintaining of the blog, I have reading, gardening and assorted other projects to occupy my time.
This week I decided to try to tackle a project that's been on my mind for some time: I will attempt to take the Line by Line series and turn it into an e-book. Since you can read this series for free on this blog, the e-book will be free as well.
I don't know if anyone would be interested in reading the Line by Line series as an e-book; I simply thought I would make it available in that format in case someone does. If nothing else, it will be good practice. If Scott is interested and willing, we could turn several of his series into e-books as well.
My e-book project will be a time-consuming task spanning several weeks or months. Unlike a lot of blog writers, I don't write my posts in a word processing program and then transfer them here. I write the vast majority of them directly in blogger's post editor. In other words, I don't have saved copies of my writings. So, just like readers, I will have to copy the text directly from the blog!
Due to my technical non-expertise, I am using a two-step process. I am copying the posts and pasting them into a WYSIWYG html editor (I am able to tweak the html, at times) and, once this part of the project is complete, I will paste the entire html code into my open source e-book creation program. Once this is done, I can then spend my time trying to get the damn thing formatted the way I want it.
One decision I have yet to make is whether the Line by Line e-book will be a) one very long volume or b) broken down into three volumes, Verses 1-27, Verse 28-54, and Verses 55-81.
Any suggestions?
I can't see why you'd need and intermediate HTML step. just copy straight from the blog to a text editor.
ReplyDeleteI'd aim for one book and then as a simple next move you could cut out thirds or quarters to make volumes. release both the large one and the volumes as it has been shown the more versions yoke's offer the more you sell (or give).
if you are aiming to use lulu.com as an outlet its worth checking their spec requirements early on so that your format will go as widely as possible, that is, computer, android, iPad (the trickiest).
I tried a sample straight from a text editor and I found it too problematic. It worked much better coming from the html editor.
DeleteI'm not planning on using any distribution system other than emailing the book or books at readers' request.
Someone somewhere will be sitting on a train, beach, hospital bed, sofa... and type 'tao...' into the market search of their iPad or similar device. If they then see your book, downloadable for free, then you've served a much wider audience.
Delete(a typo of "you" came out as yoke's)
ReplyDeleteePub format is the industry standard for e-books, including the iPad. Amazon Kindle is the one exception. The Kindle does not support ePub, only Amazon's proprietary azw format as well as mobi and PDF.
ReplyDeletePDF works with all ebook readers, but it isn't designed for ebooks so the format may get screwed up when viewed on ebook readers.
Calibre is an excellent (free) program for managing ebooks (and it's Linux friendly)
btw, I have a good amount of free time, I can help you out if you want.
I tried Calibre, but I had trouble figuring it out. I next tried Sigil (linux-friendly) and that's the one I decided to go with. It saves work in the ePub format.
DeleteThat's a very kind offer, KaiWen. I might just take you up on it once I get the code transferred over to Sigil, though this might prove problematic if you use Calibre. Why don't you drop me an email and we can talk about it offline.