I intend to publish Just Keep Knitting as an electronic book at the same time it comes out in print, so I’ve been doing some research into the best way to convert a text document intended for paper into pixels that will work on a variety of reading devices.
I have found a workable solution in Smashwords: this allows me to upload the book once and have it available pretty much everywhere (the Amazon store is bringing Smashwords content online this month, and they already distribute to Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and the Apple store).
However, the book’s not ready for the big time yet, and I needed to do a test run, so I took the blog postings from the first year or so of our adventures at Apple Jack Creek and consolidated them into an eBook. An evening’s work doing copy and paste and cleanup, and voila, there’s a book!
If you have an eReader of some kind and would like to indulge in some nostalgia looking back on the crazy early days of our life out here, you can download a copy of the book here … and it’s free!
If you run into any technical issues, please let me know: this is a test run to see if I’ve figured out the necessary rules for formatting and so on. I did have to do several uploads before I was satisfied with the basic look of things, but as I do not have an eReader of my own (well, besides the iPod touch which I do use on occasion) I must content myself with testing in simulated environments. There are a lot of pictures, so it’s not ideal for a small screen, but I’m curious to know what you think, if you do have a look.
And if you stumbled across the book on Smashwords and have subsequently found your way here to the blog … well then, welcome! Do say hello, I’d love to meet you.
No reader device for me either but it sounds like a good idea for another medium for your book.
ReplyDeletePulled it up[ on PDF in Word...good read. I remembered a lot of it but it was great to see it all pulled together. The page numbers don't appear so it is difficult to go back and reread individual portions or to find where I left off.
ReplyDeleteIt did make me tired to read about all that work though!
Sharon
Ah yes, Aunt Sharon - eBooks on 'readers' don't use page numbers, so it's usually recommended that you leave them out of the raw material ... but I can see how that'd be irritating in a PDF. I will experiment with putting them in, and see if the eReader formats will ignore them properly. Thanks for the info!
ReplyDelete(And yah, I got tired all over again reading about all of what we did. Man, we were nuts!)
New version uploaded: this one has a navigable table of contents that will jump you to the first entry in a given month, and it has footers with page numbers which show in the PDF version but don't seem to be causing any trouble in the other e-versions. Thanks for the feedback - let me know if anything else shows up!
ReplyDeleteNo ereader here either. I should add that to my Christmas list.
ReplyDeleteHello
ReplyDeleteMy family gave me an Kobo ereader for my birthday this weekend and I downloaded your book - so I had to come over to the blog to see what you were up to now!
I('m still getting used to reading in this format - and yeah, it is a small format for photos.)