Category: 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!

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.

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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Continue reading “The making of ebooks is a difficult matter!”

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.

Continue reading “Advance apology to Nook users”