Science Fiction Cole, Everett B.: The Players v1 4 apr 2009

[mtravellerh]

This is the first of a series of ePuB only e-books I will upload here on MR.

I have gone this way because this approach allows me to use better layout features only supported by the ePub format.

Here is "The Players", first published in Astounding Science Fiction April 1955. This is the blurb:

A Playboy is someone with power, too much
time on his hands, and too little sense of a goal
worth achieving. And if the Playboy happens
to belong to a highly advanced culture....

I like this story

[jgray]

First, I want to say I applaude your efforts in converting this to epub. I do have a few comments, however.

First, for some reason, the images don't display in Azardi, but do in FBReader (I haven't tried Digital Editions yet).

Second, I am wondering why you broke the story up into such tiny pieces. The side effect of this is that you get odd and rather large blank spaces in the middle of the story. This is due to the fact that the reader software will display a new XHTML file at the top of the screen/page (as it should).

I didn't see any chapters as I quickly paged through the story, so using those as a natural break is out. Not counting the cover page(s), the rest of the story (including images) only comes to 310KB. I understand that the Sony reader has a problem with files over 300kB (is this an exact limit?), so I understand breaking up such a short story. I just think that fewer breaks at carefully chosen points would make things display better.

Just my two cents.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by jgray

First, I want to say I applaude your efforts in converting this to epub. I do have a few comments, however.

First, for some reason, the images don't display in Azardi, but do in FBReader (I haven't tried Digital Editions yet).

Second, I am wondering why you broke the story up into such tiny pieces. The side effect of this is that you get odd and rather large blank spaces in the middle of the story. This is due to the fact that the reader software will display a new XHTML file at the top of the screen/page (as it should).

I didn't see any chapters as I quickly paged through the story, so using those as a natural break is out. Not counting the cover page(s), the rest of the story (including images) only comes to 310KB. I understand that the Sony reader has a problem with files over 300kB (is this an exact limit?), so I understand breaking up such a short story. I just think that fewer breaks at carefully chosen points would make things display better.

Just my two cents.

1: The image files are png files. Maybe Azardy does not display those?
2: That was a personnel decision, honestly. The text was originally divided up by lines, and I used pagebreaks to replace those. I think that clarifies the internal structure of the text.