You Say Documents, I Say Source Files. From Jaye Manus - I’ve been creating manuscripts for well over twenty years. I can rattle off the formatting in my sleep. Double-spaced, one inch margins, header with page number top left corner, drop to middle of page to start a new chapter, blah blah blah. It’s a manuscript. A document to be printed and stacked and tucked in a box or an envelope and put in the mail. Please go read the whole thing on Jaye’s blog: You Say Documents, I Say Source Files. Although this is an excellent set of tips for the current state of the art in preparing source files for ebook formatting, reading this made me sad.
When I look at the typical novel, I see something very simple. Source Files Update. So last week I talked about the importance of writers shifting their mindset from thinking “Print Documents” to thinking “Electronic Files.” Judging by the responses I got, I’d say I’m not the only one concerned with this subject. One of the problems is that the tools we use–namely word processors–are superb for producing printed documents, but frustrating, maddening and over-powered when creating electronic files. Are We Stripping Modern Books Bare? Reader Drew Turney wrote to me recently with an interesting question.
There's so much advice, commentary, and opinion about stripping away anything unessential to a book's plot. Writing in the modern era emphasizes moving the plot forward at all costs, and everything else is "ruthlessly killed off no matter how darling. " Digressions and detritus that might otherwise be compelling on their own are eliminated. Is this a purely modern phenomenon? And is it for the best? My opinion: Yes to both. Yes, I do think it's a modern phenomenon. But it's complicated. We're living in a golden era We tend to view the present in a negative light, especially when it comes to books and literature.
Overheard in Austin: Apps, Tools, Sites. Publishing: The Revolutionary Future by Jason Epstein. The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible.
This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good.
Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? I received a Kindle for my birthday, and enjoying “light reading,” in addition to the dense science I read for work, I immediately loaded it with mysteries by my favorite authors.
Ebook Friendly - simple, distraction-free way to discover and buy ebooks. What makes a good-looking eBook: Tips on eBook design for standard titles. While I was pleased to read about FutureBook’s first Digital Innovation Awards last year, I was disappointed not to see a category for ‘Best eBook’ alongside 'Best app/enhanced eBook/interactive book'.
It would have been nice to have had a shout-out for perfectly normal ebooks, with no bells and whistles but intelligently produced and sensitively designed, in recognition of the difficulties of achieving the latter in the standard reflowable EPUB format. Of course, if FutureBook did create this category, it would probably have to take it down even by the next round of awards, as technology and standards are constantly improving and hopefully we will soon reach the point where there is no need to celebrate ebooks that have the functionality and design that we would expect from an HTML-based medium. So, what are the challenges of standard reflowable ebook design? Given the number of limitations, the concept of the ‘good-looking ebook’ might seem oxymoronic. Paragraph indentation. Oh, what a tangled web. How much should an ebook cost? Subscribe to our free email newsletter.
We'll update you once or twice a week, and we'll never rent or sell your email address to anyone. Thanks. This is the wrong question. The right question is: How much will an ebook cost? Because the answer isn’t up to one author or one publisher or even a price-fixing cartel. On one hand, the marginal cost of delivering a single ebook is close to zero. (People who disagree with that statement don’t understand the concept of marginal cost and should look it up before participating in this discussion. In a market where the marginal cost is close to zero, prices tend to race to zero as well. Except when there are no substitutes. So our analysis begins with the notion that there will be at least two price points for ebooks. Disruptive Innovation Described. Wired.com. A Kindle World blog.