Small Publisher expands Formats

[Chriskander]

Hi All:

My own publisher, Double Dragon, one of the original e-publishers and with the largest list, announced to the authors today that the 2010 titles were all available on iPad and Nook as well as all the original readers. All e-books still sell for the price of $5.99, as they have done for many years.

As a (virtually) one man operation, it will take time for the extension to progressively include all the earlier titles. I'm sure that all the other independent e-book publishers are working to make their titles available to users of these devices as well. I'd like to point out to members of MobileRead that these publishers and authors are the people who have driven the e-reading market from next to nothing to its present state. It wouldn't do any harm to support them now that the big companies are trying to obscure their contribution.

Christopher Hoare
http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/

[basschick]

Chriskander, i have a question. some of the excerpts in your site show question marks rather than quotation marks. here's one example:
http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/...=DDP002JDAVIES

i'm wondering if these also appear in the ebooks themselves. that would be very distracting for me. if they don't, it would make sense to fix the excerpts so that they are true samples of what the books have to offer. of course, if the questions marks DO appear in the books, that's not a good thing

[neilmarr]

Hi, Chris: As I recall, Double Dragon started by offering PDF only (as did my own house when ebooks were little more than a by-product of the paperback). Just checked, though, and I see they now offer some titles in a choice of formats. That's the way to go, obviously, and we're currently in the throes of doing the same (with Smashwords auto-conversion options as a stopgap). It's a pretty big job to convert a large catalogue to several formats in house AND to carefully re-proof each version, though, so DD has my sympathy. I hope we have theirs. Cheers for now. Neil

[Chriskander]

Originally Posted by basschick

Chriskander, i have a question. some of the excerpts in your site show question marks rather than quotation marks. here's one example:
http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/...=DDP002JDAVIES

i'm wondering if these also appear in the ebooks themselves. that would be very distracting for me. if they don't, it would make sense to fix the excerpts so that they are true samples of what the books have to offer. of course, if the questions marks DO appear in the books, that's not a good thing

Hi Basschick: I didn't see questionmarks in your example. Formatting errors are always a problem with cross platform access. If you have formatting problems with an e-book you buy you should certainly complain to the publisher. If you experience problems on a website that offers a free sample, you might want to look at using a different browser. Firefox has always rendered my publisher's pages correctly for me.

Chris H.

[Chriskander]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

Hi, Chris: As I recall, Double Dragon started by offering PDF only (as did my own house when ebooks were little more than a by-product of the paperback). Just checked, though, and I see they now offer some titles in a choice of formats. That's the way to go, obviously, and we're currently in the throes of doing the same (with Smashwords auto-conversion options as a stopgap). It's a pretty big job to convert a large catalogue to several formats in house AND to carefully re-proof each version, though, so DD has my sympathy. I hope we have theirs. Cheers for now. Neil

Thanks for your reply Neil. It was good to point me to your company as I have a novel looking for a home and want to start with a second publisher. I have one series with DDP and this title is in a different genre. I'll contact via your site.

Chris H.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Chriskander

Hi Basschick: I didn't see questionmarks in your example. Formatting errors are always a problem with cross platform access. If you have formatting problems with an e-book you buy you should certainly complain to the publisher. If you experience problems on a website that offers a free sample, you might want to look at using a different browser. Firefox has always rendered my publisher's pages correctly for me.

This is not a browser issue. I run Firefox 3.6 as my standard browser, but I see the same question marks instead of double quotes in the provided link in Firefox, IE 8, Avant Browser and Maxthon (based on IE's rendering engine), SeaMonkey 1.1 and 2.0, Safari 4, and Google Chrome 5.

It's not just double quotes that aren't being correctly rendered. An assortment of other punctuation is getting shown as question marks.

The page is using the iso-8859-1 character set, which does include the punctuation symbols, so something else is going on, but I don't have the tools installed in FF at the moment to tell what.

Update:
Installed a tool or two. The site's developer should look at
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...DDDP002JDAVIES
and
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/v...DDDP002JDAVIES
______
Dennis

[basschick]

i've attached a screencap of what i'm seeing, and btw, i checked and the same thing is in the source code. here's a piece taken directly:

?? She smiled. <BR><BR>Adam smiled back, trying to ignore what she had just said, and looked over his shoulder for help. The rest of the Toorak party went on around him, chattering and giggling quite reasonably, probably about perfectly reasonable things. Typical. He lifted his glass to drink and spilled the shiraz down the front of his white cotton shirt. ’Shit.? <BR><BR>She stepped in close to him ? too close ? and touched the wine stain. ?You?re the quiet type, aren?t you Adam.? She smelt of flowers, carnations maybe, and earth and tequila. The top of her head was no higher than his chin, but she was wide and full so that it seemed to him that he was looking up at her. He could see the age in her face, the lines around her eyes and mouth like lashes from a whip. His eyes followed her neck into the shadows between her breasts until he was suddenly aware that she was watching him watching her.

i checked the page is opera, and am seeing the exact same thing. was interestingly enough unable to get the page to open in ie8. anyway, click the thumb here to see the full sized screencap of the page.

[lene1949]

Shocking! I would give up reading that...