[Hitch]

Ladies and Gents:

Well, if you've been playing along on our home version of the game, you know that when we last left off, I was up the proverbial creek. iBooks said that the FXL ePUB was bad, and removed it from sale. Smashwords assured me in no uncertain terms that they don't mess with FXL ePUBs; they don't change "a thing," to quote them. Mark Coker had, more or less, insulted me by saying that they never had problems with FXL, "when they are properly created." (Do we have a growing dog emoty????).

I'd emailed back and forth, back and forth. I saw screenshots of the alleged corrupted book. I ripped open that eBook and did a necropsy. I looked at pretty much every. line. of. code. All in all, I'm hoping that all the hair will grow back in.

TODAY, I get an update, from my "guy" over at SW:

I just heard back from our techies. Turns out that something did change
when we shipped the file to Apple. They've gone ahead and corrected the
code, and I've just set the book to reship to Apple again. We'll know
within a couple of days whether they accept the book this time.

Thanks again for reporting this in the first place. We were able to fix
this minor issue and correct the shipment of a handful of books affected
by it.

[italic emphasis added]

MINOR issue? You mean, the one that is making the book not work at freaking all?

Nonetheless:

I ask him exactly what it was, and he replied:

Yes, it's all a little over my head; but the way I understand it is that
our shipment process dropped the following tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1200,height=1200" />

But, this shouldn't be a problem from here on out.

Sweet baby Jesus! Ya THINK that might have wreaked havoc with an FXL book? Eh?

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Classic.



Does Smashwords not use "the grinder" any more? Or they only use it on the submitted Word documents and not EPUBs?

I must admit, I haven't paid much attention to Smashwords in years.

Well, before today, they swore to me, repeatedly, that they don't even TOUCH an FXL ePUB, but obviously, their understanding about that was..flawed.

In re: Beyond Compare:

Probably me. I mentioned it quite a few times on the forums + emails.

I settled onto Beyond Compare after testing all the other code comparison tools... most of the other tools didn't do the greatest when larger changes occurred. At a certain point, whoops, everything beyond this point "doesn't match", and the algorithm would have a hard/impossible time realigning itself later in the document. This was especially true if you did large changes like getting rid of a ton of InDesign/Word cruft, doing mass useless span removal, and adding/removing paragraphs (moving footnotes to the end of a chapter, [...]).

Yes, I think it was you. No complaints on that front!

Also, speaking of hashing... does anyone else use checksum by corz?

http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

I also settled on that program after quite a few tests (around the same time I settled on Beyond Compare). It is just the best damn thing since sliced bread when I used to hash a massive (or not so massive) amount of files.

Not prior to this, but I'm never too proud to steal a good idea when I hear it. :-)

Yeah, I say this sounds quite plausible as well. Probably loading an iBooks FXL EPUB into some other program.

How about iBooks on the iPad and iBooks on the Mac? Are there differences?

As it turns out, the purchaser wasn't, this time, the issue. It was, well and truly, SW' fault.

I will say that I tweeted Mark, and said something (privately), but I also asked him that while it's great that it's fixed, now, HOW will they be able to find the other FXL books that have been affected? I mean, think about it--the very thing that most of us would think to search on, the very thing that is a FXL "tell" in the database/code, isn't in the file any longer. So...how will SW find, and fix, all the other corrupted book files????

I mean, sure, they could try to find something in CSS, I guess, that might do the trick, but the viewport tag is the fastest/easiest, in my humble opinion. Juzzz sayin'....

Nonetheless, boys and girls, we conclude this week's episode of "Bookmaking: The Untold Horrors." In today's episode, the forces of good triumphed, yet once again. Next week, tune in to find out if our heroine will again trounce the dark forces of sloppy bookmaking and unrealistic expectations! Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel!

Hitch