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First two ebooks updated

This is likely the final version for each, though you won’t catch me swearing to that! Because, if anyone finds a typo, and tells me, I’d fix it.

I added to the rights page in each book, which is why both books got new versions. I am releasing my contributions via a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Find both titles on my uploads page at the Internet Archive.

Another ebook eventually arriving will be Midnight, by Rutherford Montgomery. It turns out, the copyright for this 1940 title was never renewed. Gutenberg.org has had an ebook available since 2019, digitized from the paperback version I used to own as a child! But that edition only had a single illustration, a frontispiece by Pers Crowell. I will be doing the first edition, 1940 Henry Holt and Company hardcover, fully illustrated by Jacob Bates Abbott.

A black mare and her newborn black colt walk down a rocky path with tall rock formations in the background.
Midnight by Rutherford Montgomery,
frontispiece by Jacob Bates Abbott

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Oh Happy Friday 13th!

I found the problem that was creating missing text on Nook devices and apps! The Top Horse of Crescent Ranch file is fixed! Works on Nook and in the Nook Android app as it should. This is a huge load off my mind!

I will upload the new version (1.3) to the Internet Archive over the weekend. But not today. I don’t want to push my luck! No one likes a bite on the butt!

A horse ridden by a man in full English hunting attire is about to bite another horse on the butt.
Foxhunting Formalities (1930), by J. Stanley Reeve, illustration by Paul Desmond Brown.
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An update on ebooks

I work on more than one ebook at a time, so I can’t say which will be done next. Switching around allows me to make progress while not having my mind go stale on a particular title.

The 1930 title, Red Horse Hill, by Stephen W. Meader, is a possibility, as the images have been fairly easy to process so far. The text is done, but for author and artist bio pages, and a final proofread. I’m a quarter of the way through the images. One, however, has a printing GOOBER smack in the middle of a horse’s leg! I’m going to try my hand at artistic editing. If I can’t fix it, then I need to find another cheap copy of the book, ugh!

Sadly, almost no book seller gives you photos of every image in an illustrated book. Acquiring an illustrated title to digitize is always a gamble! Print quality can be excellent in one book, and poor in another copy. Like that proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get!

Horses harnessed to a wagon, a printing goober obscures a horses leg. A red arrow points to the problem.
When your image scan reveals a big printing GOOBER!

How do I know that every copy doesn’t have this exact same printing goober on the frontispiece image? A Google search turned up a brief book review on Todd’s Blog with exactly this image shown! It gives me a hint for possible editing.

I also found a few things I wanted to improve in the first two books. The main thing I’m revamping is the form of bio attributions. The new form is clearer as to which documents were used. Game-Legs has already been updated.

I’m still scratching my head over the “NOOK quirk” in Top Horse of Crescent Ranch. I checked the template that I use for all ebooks, and it does not have a problem! This will take some serious detective work. Thankfully, Game-Legs is free of the issue, so it’s probably some tiny little thing that Nook devices don’t like.

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Game-Legs: another horse ebook!

My second public domain EPUB is available for download.

https://archive.org/details/arthur-c-bartlett-game-legs

Cover - Game-Legs by Arthur C. Bartlett

Game-Legs, first published in 1928, is a lovely and charming story by Arthur C. Bartlett, who wrote two more horse stories for children, General Jim, and 4-H Cowboy.

The main character of Game-Legs is Jimmy Burbank. Jimmy contracted polio as a young child, and needs to use walking sticks to get around. His father, a doctor, has a favorite mare he has bred, hoping for a good foal. But, when the mare gives birth, the foal can’t stand on her own. Jimmy identifies with the weak filly and becomes concerned for her. He does not realize that her weakness could result in her being put down.

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Top Horse of Crescent Ranch: an ebook!

Head to the Internet Archive book download page. Don’t judge the ebook by auto-derived preview. Download the EPUB format book!

Top Horse of Crescent Ranch is a 1942 title by Howard L. Hastings. It is not a plot-heavy book, but a pleasing read nevertheless. The first edition print publication is 248 pages. While there are many chapters, they are short. The title fell into the public domain of the United States due to non-renewal of copyright. It is also public domain in countries where the copyright period is “life plus 70” years.

It was written during the same time period as My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara (1941). Both titles are set on Wyoming ranches. The child characters in each book do some unsupervised range riding. Each author clearly loves horses and stresses good treatment of them! Otherwise, they are completely different reads.

The author is best known as an illustrator. A few titles illustrated by Mr. Hastings are public domain and available from Gutenberg.org.

The new ebook cover.
The dedication page, with left-aligned text
Landscape orientation, with a sans-serif font.
My Kindle showing the cover and two pages with “read it your way” settings.
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The making of ebooks is a difficult matter!

It isn’t just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter … —The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot

And you’d be right!

Long post, but with “under-the-hood” sneak-peek images!

Making ebooks is not for the faint of heart. It’s a brain-lethal combo of geeky nerdiness, creativity, concentration, and obsessive-compulsiveness that often makes me want to … pound things. I’ve heard it referred to by other epub-making hobbyists as a particularly frustrating game of “whack-a-mole.” When you think you’ve solved a problem, another pops up.

An EPUB is a group of XHMTL files, images, metadata, and fonts zipped up in a special archive. So anyone can make one. Making one that has accessibility baked in, that works across platforms, is trickier.

There is a standard for a valid epub file. There is NO set standard for the epub readers and rendering engines. A reflowable-text ebook will look different depending on what device or app is used to read it. With more robust mainstream apps and devices, the differences are fairly minor. Yet most apps and devices have individual quirks.

The ebooks I make are open format EPUB 3.0, and what you, the reader, will see, won’t be exactly what I see. We each will choose our own preferred settings, devices, or apps and that’s OK!

I learned how to make epub by reading about the process online. I started my education in 2010, shortly after getting my first e-ink reader, a Nook. My first publication was for a nephew, to whom I ended up giving the Nook.

I’ve spent time looking under-the-hood at other people’s epubs. I borrow code like crazy. I test. There’s little consensus online as to how best to go about ebook making. There’s good advice and bad. Arguments over how to handle any given element abound. Add in accessibility, and you have yet another arena of disagreement. Which means that one does one’s best and accepts that perfection is not reachable.

It’s been a rocky road!

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Advance apology to Nook users

The type of ebook I make is EPUB3. With a lot of accessibility features baked in for those who need them. I make these epubs backwardly compatible with older devices and rendering engines but I’ve hit a peculiar wall with Nook.

In the past, I’ve noticed buggy behavior with epubs when testing in the Nook Android app. Was the problem confined to the app? Or would it show up on a device? I had no way to know. So I bit the bullet and bought a 2023 Nook Glowlight 4 Plus for half price on eBay. And found out. The bug happens on the device too. Sigh.

Well, this is why testing is important. You can’t count on different devices or apps, even from the SAME company, to render ebooks identically.

Interestingly, there is NO TRACE of this bug in the Nook iOS app. None, zip, nada.

The problem, which only happens in the Nook Android app and on the Nook e-ink device is quite reader-unfriendly. TEXT GOES MISSING! Fortunately, there is a fix.

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The race to 2026 is over and who won?

The United States of America public domain, that’s who! Happy Public Domain day!

Any titles and images posted below may be under copyright in other countries. Please check the laws for your own country before making use of any of these works!

Two chestnut horses race neck and neck for the finish on grass turf, with one rider using a crop. A third horse follows several lengths behind. Behind a white fence on the right, a crowd looks on.
Wissahickon
—1930 The Derrydale Press, Gentlemen Up by William B. Street, illustrated by Paul Desmond Brown

There’s some nice horse titles entering the public domain this year, non-fiction and fiction. For art lovers, there are two non-fiction titles with Paul Brown illustrations: Gentlemen Up, and Foxhunting Formalities by J. Stanley Reeve.

From the UK, there’s Moorland Mousie by Golden Gorse and Jerry: The Story of an Exmoor Pony by Eleanor E. Helme and Nance Paul. Hildebrand by John Thorburn, features an opinionated piebald who has “ceased to be a willing co-operator.” All illustrated!

If you prefer western horse adventures, there are Tornado Boy by Thomas C. Hinkle, and The Pinto Pony by Hoffman Birney. Lone Cowboy by Will James, though not specifically a horse book, has plenty of horse action and horse illustration.

For fans of a good driving or harness horse, there’s Red Horse Hill by Stephen W. Meader.

There may be others, but those are the titles from my own collection that qualify.

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Wyoming Summer – Mary O’Hara

Dust jacket: Wyoming Summer by Mary O'Hara. A small group of horses in a dry grass field against a backdrop of cloudy sky.

If you love horses, you have probably read Mary O’Hara’s classic novel, My Friend Flicka. Or perhaps you’ve seen the movie.

Flicka is drawn from the author’s real life with her husband Helge Sture-Vasa on the Remount Ranch, Wyoming in the 1930s.

I have always loved Flicka, Thunderhead, and Green Grass of Wyoming, and have re-read the trilogy many times. As a child, I knew nothing of the author. As an adult, I was curious to read the memoir of her Wyoming experiences.

Published in 1963, Wyoming Summer details a summer Mary spent on the ranch, though she incorporated incidents from other summers. Names got changed. The Remount Ranch becomes the Goose Bar Ranch of fiction, yet I feel the name change is unnecessary. No reader would have trouble recognizing the Remount as the Goose Bar! Mary’s husband Helge is referred to as Michael. The Sture-Vasas become the Bergwins. My guess is the publisher preferred American-sounding names.

It’s a nice companion to the series, though not the same read. This book consists of vignettes and tidbits of life on the ranch, and some of Mary’s life off the ranch. There’s action and drama, and plenty of humor, life on the ranch was never boring!

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Long time no see!

And I mean that literally. I hadn’t looked at or logged into the site in an age. Naturally, I was locked out again. Fortunately, I was able to get back in. My WordPress install is up-to-date.

I am still alive and kicking, but with my spine troubles, find it hard to get things done easily. Fixing meals, getting a wee bit of exercise, taking care of the cats, and housework tends to be most of what I can manage.

Writing a blog has fallen by the wayside, no surprise there! I’m not planning to close the site down, but there may be a shift in focus.

My brain is bookish lately. Looking over my cluttered bookshelves, I realized I have a fair number of books that will enter the public domain of the United States of America tomorrow! These are books for the most part that were published in 1930 or prior years.

I plan to make some of these into ebooks. I don’t expect many folks to be interested in books that old, but I love this kind of nerdy thing, so it is what it is. Stay tuned.