Quote:
Originally Posted by st_albert
Actually, I'm sorry to admit, our house is almost at that point already. Fortunately, at least 90% of our books are fiction novels, so there's minimal tricky formatting required. We try to avoid embedded fonts, and stick with fairly simple text formatting that at least offers a tip-of-the-hat to the print book design, and we pretty much target the Kindle devices (albeit in a sort of least-common-denominator sense). That's where most of our market is, by far.
BTW, Back when iPads first came out, many of our authors really wanted to be in the iBookstore. Now, most of them realize where the big money is.
I've come to the conclusion that if I produce a valid epub that conforms to specs, and somebody sells an ereader that claims to display said epub, but doesn't do so properly, that MIGHT be their problem, not mine. 
In fact, I'm even beginning to lose sympathy for legacy Kindle devices, now that even the K3 (keyboard) can handle kf8.
Albert |
Albert:
From a business and a "don't yank your hair out of your head" standpoint, that would make sense. But...I just can't bring myself to do it. I can't. I wish I could. I don't claim (mostly) to make books that are haute couture, but we at least try to make them Barney's or Lord & Taylor, not Walmart.
But the damned retailers are practically sticking a knife in our hearts with this s**t. I could not believe this nonsense yesterday. Overriding the stylesheet, somehow? What the frack is up with that?
On a side-loaded book? No wonder this poor guy was yanking his damn hair out. Add that crap to the new crap at NookPress--we've had at least 5 clients that ended up with "remade" ePUBs that NookPress kindly "fixed" for them with a completely new stylesheet--and B&N wonders why they can't make up ground?
Yes, our clientele, even the biggest Jobblesheads, have all come to realize that they are wasting their time in the iBookstore. One of our bigger names, who loves her some Mac, and all the i-Things, and had us embed video in every single fiction title early on, so it could be flash at the iBookstore, has now stopped even uploading her books there--and this is a NYTimes Bestselling author/Edgar winner, etc. Man, if she can't sell there....I don't know what can, unless what's selling is the vamp-romance tween stuff that is so popular at Wattpad. {shrug}.
I am really, really frustrated. I don't want to do vanilla, I don't. My bookmakers don't. They're not drones, they're craftswo/men. We really labor over our books. To go in that direction--vanilla--would seriously be a sea-change for us. And, yes, our primary market is fiction, although we also get a fair number of kids' books for fixed-format, and naturally, the non-fiction/complex formatting category; how-to, syllabi, that lot.
Crap.
Hitch