Quote:
Originally Posted by hamishmacdonald
Just dropping by to say hello, and to say thanks to Dan (be well!) for all he's doing to get Finitude out to potential readers. The novel is just intended to be a fun adventure story, but hopefully, several layers beneath that, addresses some of the important questions about our approach to the possibility of a climate crisis -- instead of debating the science, which we get more than enough of already. And the science, as I see it, isn't the real issue.
As for the technicalities of presenting it as an e-book, I recognise the importance of this as a distribution channel, but as a publisher I'd also like to present the book as well as possible -- partly because I care, and partly because "poor attention to detail" seems to be corporate publishing's main attack on indie work. So I respectfully request that, if you'd like the book in another format, we work together to create that. If you've converted the book for your own purposes, that's fine, but please don't distribute that file.
As has been said here, most conversion processes strip away important formatting/typesetting work -- and I realise (from my Palm and Pocket PC days) that some formats like .PDB only allow for raw text. I'm not sure how to proceed in those cases, because in raw text, some passages in the book will simply not make sense. I realise I could probably rework the whole text to make allowances for that, but, honestly, I'd rather spend that time writing something new.
Hm...
Meanwhile, there are .PDF, .ePub, and HTML versions of the book to download. Apologies for the bad links I provided earlier; I've put files at those addresses, so they will work now.
Thanks, everyone, for your time. If you do download the book, I hope you enjoy your time in that world.
All the best,
- Hamish MacDonald
http://www.hamishmacdonald.com
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Hi Hamish, welcome to the forum ! thanks for sharing your book and for all your efforts to make a really nice digital edition ; attention to details makes all the difference.
Please don't hesitate to ask any questions you might have about ebook creation here in the forum ; we've got some really friendly and knowledgeable people who would be glad to help you with anything.
Creating ebooks is not actually difficult once you understand how to do it, but it can be very tricky when you first get started. And depending on the format of your source file, it can require a lot of work to make the result look good. This is particularly true if you start from a pdf for instance. Starting from an xml flow or html or even a .doc file will give much better results with less cleanup work.
It sounds like you are off to a good start ; Sigil is definitely the best tool for the job and although it's fairly minimalist for the moment (still in alpha release) it's already very powerful and promises to get much better in the future. i recommend you take a quick look at the code view to see how your text is formatted and make sure there isn't extraneous, unnecessary code cluttering it up. if you've got any questions, you know who to ask !
it's great to see you here !