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Originally Posted by Psymon
From the sounds of it, "Smashwords" sounds like a rather apt name for them -- I suppose "smashbooks" was probably already taken.  |
I might have to
copy/emulate/"steal" that word.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
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.
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Well there is your problem! You should expand throw off the chains of that locked down Apple ecosystem, and migrate to the good stuff! haha.
Hmmmmm... have you tested your ebook in Marvin yet?
It is an alternative to iBooks which seems to be quite popular with the people here on MobileRead (even has its own section now):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=260
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
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.
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Yeah, in the overall market... it is small. Perhaps in the tablet market their share is larger (I don't remember any stats off the top of my head), but we are talking about the much larger ebook market (and the ebook market is just a small subset of the overall BOOK market).
Also, it depends on where you are planning on selling this in the world. In the US, Amazon dominates the sales in the ebook market, but in other countries, the situation is different. Which is why you typically want your book in EPUB and MOBI (KF8/KF7)... so you can be read on nearly all devices in nearly all countries.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
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. |
Well, a lot of these specs were designed for extremely low powered devices. This allows you to create them much more cheaply. Having to accommodate such complex CSS and typography would mean the device would need a faster CPU, more RAM, more space, etc. etc. (This would raise the production costs dramatically).
Of course, the prices of technology is dropping every day thanks to the market and good ol' competition.
This is also the reason why you want to make clean/maintainable code though, because when the devices DO get better (they will), you can easily edit/fix your book to take advantage of newer methods/CSS/Fonts/Readers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
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.
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Yes, it would be nice if you could just cut off and forget about a lot of these crappy (compared to the bleeding edge devices of today... and those devices will be crappy compared to the bleeding edge six years from now), but they are still a HUGE share of the market. iPads are just a drop in the water compared to all the old Kindles out there.... not to mention that Kindles are a drop in the water compared to all the other older ereading devices that are still chugging along.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
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.
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KindleGen = the commandline tool to generate MOBI/KF8 for sale on Amazon.
Kindle Previewer = a GUI drag/drop for feeding books into KindleGen, and it allows you to "see how it would look on the different Kindles" (cannot be trusted in a lot of cases... ALWAYS try to test on the physical device itself.. ESPECIALLY in your case, as you are doing very complex things with CSS/fonts).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000765261