Dearest friends, peeps and commiserators:
This thread probably should have been entitled "you can't make this s**t up," but hey...I try to be thoughtful about offending people only when it's intentional.
Anyway..
Some months back, we made some FXL books for one of our more prestigious clients. So, great: we made them. ePUB for iBooks/Kobo, and MOBi for Amazon. I should mention that the ePUB is ePUB3, although honestly, not sure that that plays into it.
Fast forward...now, the client has us making another FXL book. She writes and says "it looks GREAT! Could you put the Smashwords copyright language on it, so I don't have issues when I upload it?" I'm surprised. I didn't know that Smashwords took FXL these days, and of course, I asked her.
She assures me that sure enough, they do, although she adds "there's some problem with the other one, though." I'm like...huhn? I ask her how she knows, and she sends me an error message from Smashwords, in which iBooks tells her that they have removed the book from sale, because a reader complained that the pages were essentially all "scrunched up in the upper-left hand corner."
I invest a boatload of time trying to figure this out. I epubcheck the file again; sure enough,
it still passes. I put it on
all the intended devices at the office (1st Gen iPad, later iPad, iPhone, iPad mini, Kobo) and I check it on Readium, too. All great. I tweet Mark Coker, who says "yup, we take them" (although he couldn't resist adding
"if well designed," which only
slightly made me want to smash him in the face).
<----fast forward a few days--->
I've now BOUGHT the bloody ePUB from the Smashwords site, as I can't do that from iBooks (removed from sale). Tweets and emails with the SW personnel. NOTHING makes any sense;
this book SHOULD be fine.
I've been emailing back-froth with a SW person. The gist is, "hey, it's not our job, man." So, Smashwords, which is the distributor, says it's an Apple problem. Apple won't talk to us, or the client, because--surprise!--we're NOT the publishers, Smashwords is. Thus, we can't get there from here. My client cannot sell their book.
More emails back/forth with the SW guy, who persists in talking to me like I'm a Word-file uploader. He says I should read the Apple guidelines (...), I should make sure the file ePUBchecks (...)...and so on. Now, being my normal self, I provided my email address, website URL, and all that, figuring that knowing we're a commercial firm SHOULD expedite things, right?
The icing on the cake came Thursday night. I get an email from this helpful person, who tells me this (verbatim):
Quote:
As mentioned earlier, we offer limited support for EPUB FXL file. However, I would encourage you to visit MobileRead's forum
(https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=179). Many designers and formatters congregate there to help one another with these kinds of technical problems.
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.....
(And before you ask:
hells, no. The damn file's issues--if any--still can't be determined. There seems to be NOTHING wrong. When I download the for-sale version from SW, it's exactly--exactly--the same file as the one we gave the client; I'm compared it using Beyond Compare. There is NOTHING wrong with the damn file. But we have zero standing--and that includes the author/publisher, mind you!--to contest this with Apple. I'd give a lot to know if they made sure that this alleged "issue" really existed, or if some
moron bought the book and then downloaded it to, say, Marvin or some other e-Reader that doesn't support FXL.)
Yes, mods: I know that this isn't about ebookmaking, from a technical standpoint--not really. But the vent & rant thread isn't really a good place for eBook-making-related angst. Sorry.
Hitch