[Psymon]

Thanks to Toxaris, too, for your thoughts on this! I'll respond to Tex2002ans' follow-up comments here...

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I second this... I have heard horrible things about Smashwords. And if I remember correctly from other posts on the forums, even perfectly compliant/clean EPUBs from Hitch's company had horror stories trying to go through Smashwords.

Sounds like good advice for someone like me (if not most people here) -- I don't need someone else completely ruining all my efforts, never mind rewarding them for doing so with a percentage of the nominal sales I'll probably have anyway. From the sounds of it, "Smashwords" sounds like a rather apt name for them -- I suppose "smashbooks" was probably already taken.

Best bet for your book would be to figure it out, get it working nicely in ADE, and submitting it to the stores directly.

Thanks entirely to all the discussions here, I think I've actually gotten my epub to look good in both iBooks and ADE -- indeed, pretty much exactly the same, in fact! So for that I don't even need two versions, I have just one.

The biggest difference -- from what little I know about non-iBooks readers -- would probably be what you said here...

Most devices are not as large as the iPad, and most ereaders are going to be read vertically (not landscape) as single pages.

I guess there's not much I can do about that, and there's a couple of spots in my book where there's "redundant" pages with full-page images (for example, the frontispiece), but not too many at all, and hopefully these will still provide some kind of additional, "non-literary" appeal to my book anyway. I hope.

All this discussion here really has been a huge eye-opener for me, though -- virtually everyone I know (family and friends) who have an ereader all have iPads (and iPhones), I don't know anyone at all that has a Kindle or any other reader. Obviously I shouldn't be just designing for only my family and friends, but I really had no idea just how relatively UN-popular the iPad is.

And on that note, actually, I realize that so much of this technology is still fairly new, but the inability of some of these readers to display even basic typography (let alone graphics) is so discouraging, it's like what the internet was before the World Wide Web (and graphics) were available -- if anyone else out there (besides me) is old enough to remember that -- i.e. just plain text, like it was typed on an old manual typewriter, with horridly plain headings and blue, underlined "links" and stuff. I'm seriously wondering if I should just not bother at all with trying to design for "backwards compatibility", it's so "backwards" -- and surely it's only a matter of time before all those simpler readers become passé and are able to display what the iPad (and other readers) can.

It's just a matter of time, I'm sure -- and based on how VERY quickly things went in a similar regard with web design back in the 1990s, I would suspect that that's actually right around the corner. Pretty soon, I'm sure, our landfills will be filled with millions upon millions of these older, crappier readers... but that's another thought (and a very depressing one). :/

"different versions for different places"...... that, to me, is a huge pain. Imagine you find a typo and want to make a fix. Now instead of fixing it in one spot, you must fix the same thing in three, four, five+ EPUBs. Then you have to make sure you actually did the fix in X, Y, Z versions, and you have to make sure that you update the right version to the right store, etc. etc.

That's why I'm soooooo very glad that I've gotten my design to work nicely in both iBooks and ADE -- if nothing else. I'm really just not sure what to do about/for amazon, though -- I need to explore that a little more, I guess, but I have a feeling that I'll have to totally "dumb down" my work to virtually a plain-text version in order to get it to work and be backwards compatible there. I just don't know... yet. I'll have to look into this more, but for now, first things first.

AT MOST, I would recommend keeping two different versions. One for iBooks (taking advantage of the complex CSS), and one for all the other EPUB devices + being fed through KindleGen.

See, even this is news to me, I still have so much to learn. Does KindleGen actually do conversions of books, like, I could take my EPUB file and run it through there and convert it to MOBI format? I thought it was just a "generator" for running the previewer program so you can test out your books... or something.

I don't know -- I guess all that info must be on their site (or here in these forums). I'll take a look into that... later.

MAYBE in your special case, there might be a third EPUB, made specifically for KindleGen, where you have images of your "olde" half of the book, with fallback code to display the images in the old Kindles.

I just don't know enough about Kindle yet, but from my minimal understanding I was under the impression that I might have to totally scrap the entire second half (the "olde" half) of my book -- not to mention any/all images -- in order to get it to work on Kindle and actually be backwards-compatible for earlier versions. But I just don't know yet if that's the case -- and I don't know if I'd be willing to do that, scrap what all is, to me, half of the appeal of my book (i.e. not just the "words" written in it, but the presentation of those words).

My eyes hurt from too much of the "ye olde" text.

Like I've said, the first half of my book is all in plain modern text, and the same as the second, "olde" half -- this latter is really kind-of for fun, a sort of "ode" of mine to early typography and stuff (a long-time interest and passion of mine).

As a side note... is there a forum you frequent where everyone writes in Middle English?

No, not at all, this "olde" version of my book came about after I'd rather inadvertently come across an old (1950s) scholarly book on the transition of English writing from middle English to modern English -- which essentially came about when the first English Bible was printed back in the mid-16th century. That book was full of examples of writing from that entire time, and through that is how I came up with all the spellings, etc. for the words. There's very little consistency beyond the mere basics during that period -- people kinda just made it up as they went along, since there simply wasn't any real consistent way of writing/spelling -- but at the same time there were many "patterns" that one could see, and this latter helped alot in some cases where I had words in my original, modern text that I had no 16th century equivalent of, and pretty much had to come up with how those words probably would have been spelled at the time.

It was quite a chore, believe me -- I hope I never do something like that again.