Month: January 2026

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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 the wonky, auto-derived Internet Archive 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 EPUB 3.0. 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.