Kindle only

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by carld

Those customers are perfectly free to buy a Kindle and purchase from Amazon's catalog. Should I be complaining that Apple, B&N and Sony are refusing to accept my money because they don't publish Kindle compatible ebooks?

No. Because those companies are wonderful, intelligent, beautiful companies that have seen the glory of EPub and are not locked behind a wall like evil, nasty, short sited Amazon.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Night-time mode? (I gather this is a feature of LCD-etc. screens? I don't think any of the e-ink screens have it.)

I suspect that's a "feature" of the Meatgrinder, although I'm not sure; would have to check if it supports default-color text. Because it insists on using Word's styles, a color may be hard-coded into those.

I just checked the Smashwords build of one of my own books, on my PDA in Freda (the only place where night-time mode has any relevance). It displayed just fine. I'm sure every reading app is different, though.

I find that SW produces quite decent ebooks if you go to the trouble (and it is, truthfully, a lot of trouble) to produce a really clean Word doc. I also find that a conversion from Word to html to epub via Calibre can produce very good results, even without touching the html in between. You won't get fancy embellishments, but you will get a good-looking, readable ebook. Same with mobi.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

No, I am against eBooks that are available in only one format with no forward look to getting them in other formats.

Why can't the author make sure his/her eBooks are available in ePub as well? It sends the wrong message to to potential customers. And there are a lot of people out there who do not format convert. It's either available int he format they use or it's not available. This is not just about me. Sure, I can convert. But I don't want to be FORCED to pay amazon for any eBook. If I do, it's going to be because I want to.

I generally agree, but getting a book out in epub format can have its problems. If you're in the U.S., then Pubit is easy, and Smashwords will distribute to Apple, Sony, Kobo, and Diesel. (See my previous comments about getting a good epub out of SW.) As others have said, if you want a B&N browser to know that your book is DRM-free, you have to make sure you put that information in the book description. Still, there's no guarantee it'll show up where the casual browser will see it.

If you need to apply geo-restrictions to your book, you're in a lot of pain. Kindle and Apple permit restrictions, but Apple is a huge PITA to upload to directly--including the fact that you need an Intel-based Mac with the right OS, and you need to have an ISBN. Just try getting an ISBN without paying an arm and a leg, if you're not going through SW. That, in fact, is why I have yet to get the "world edition" of one book out in epub. I will, eventually, but it's not as easy as you might think.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by starrigger

I just checked the Smashwords build of one of my own books, on my PDA in Freda (the only place where night-time mode has any relevance). It displayed just fine. I'm sure every reading app is different, though.

I find that SW produces quite decent ebooks if you go to the trouble (and it is, truthfully, a lot of trouble) to produce a really clean Word doc. I also find that a conversion from Word to html to epub via Calibre can produce very good results, even without touching the html in between. You won't get fancy embellishments, but you will get a good-looking, readable ebook. Same with mobi.

Freda tends to strip a lot of CSS (definitely the case in WP7, maybe not so in early Windows Mobile builds). If the issue is hard-coded black text in the CSS, a reader that strips CSS won't show the issue. However a reader that doesn't, like Stanza on iPhone, will show black text on a black background in "night" mode.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by toddos

Freda tends to strip a lot of CSS (definitely the case in WP7, maybe not so in early Windows Mobile builds). If the issue is hard-coded black text in the CSS, a reader that strips CSS won't show the issue. However a reader that doesn't, like Stanza on iPhone, will show black text on a black background in "night" mode.

Ah. Since my wife's iTouch died, I haven't had a good way to test anything in Stanza. But as one who uses night mode myself, that's not something I'd like to see.

Can you post a snippet of what the offending CSS code looks like? I wonder if it makes a difference whether the Word style (for Normal, for example) has the color set to "auto" rather than black. Maybe it's a problem that can be avoided by carefully setting the styles in Word.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Ah. Since my wife's iTouch died, I haven't had a good way to test anything in Stanza. But as one who uses night mode myself, that's not something I'd like to see.

Can you post a snippet of what the offending CSS code looks like? I wonder if it makes a difference whether the Word style (for Normal, for example) has the color set to "auto" rather than black. Maybe it's a problem that can be avoided by carefully setting the styles in Word.

I don't have any real-world examples on hand at the moment (having fixed them myself on my local copies), but it generally ends up as "color: #000000;" or variations thereof ("black", "#000", "#0", "rgb(0,0,0)", etc; basically all the synonyms for "black" that CSS accepts). This almost certainly comes from Word styles that explicitly set the font color to black rather than using the default "Automatic". I'm not familiar with Smashwords' publishing process, whether they provide a Word template or if authors accidentally break things themselves ("The guide says, 'don't use colors', so I'm going to explicitly set my font to black", despite black being a color and the guide should've said leave font colors as default/automatic). That's assuming it's not meatgrinder itself breaking the styles.

[carld]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If they don't care about their customers, they can go out of business and good riddance to them.

Then let's bid a hearty good riddance to Apple, B&N, Sony and all the other ePub publishers out there who don't care about me as a customer since they don't sell titles for my Kindle.

[carld]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But what a lot of people do not realize is that 70% is BS. There are also claims of B&N having 25%. That makes it 95%. So 5% split between Sony, Kobo, Jetbook, Pandigital, etc? Not possible. So the numbers for Amazon are seriously inflated and highly incorrect. This is US only of course.

Or perhaps Amazon's numbers are correct, and Apple & B&N's numbers are seriously inflated and incorrect.

[BenG]

Or, more likely, everyone fudges their numbers.

[GoSharks]

Originally Posted by BenG

Or, more likely, everyone fudges their numbers.

Apparently you haven't been listening to JSWolf. Please pay attention so he doesn't have to repeat it 10000000 more times: Amazon is the ultimate evil, Sony is our savior.

[ProfCrash]

no EPub is our savior. Sony is just the best EPub device

[GoSharks]

Let's not forget that touch screens do NOT show smudges even if you dip your hand in motor oil before using!

[Tome Keeper]

Originally Posted by GoSharks

Let's not forget that touch screens do NOT show smudges even if you dip your hand in motor oil before using!

[starrigger]

I managed to resuscitate my wife's iTouch well enough to look at my books in Stanza on it. I wish I hadn't. Stanza basically destroys the formatting. Indents gone, centering gone, spaces added between paragraphs, etc. This is true of both the SW builds and the Calibre builds. I don't know what to do about that.

However, the nighttime setting works fine.

Originally Posted by toddos

I don't have any real-world examples on hand at the moment (having fixed them myself on my local copies), but it generally ends up as "color: #000000;" or variations thereof ("black", "#000", "#0", "rgb(0,0,0)", etc; basically all the synonyms for "black" that CSS accepts). This almost certainly comes from Word styles that explicitly set the font color to black rather than using the default "Automatic". I'm not familiar with Smashwords' publishing process, whether they provide a Word template or if authors accidentally break things themselves ("The guide says, 'don't use colors', so I'm going to explicitly set my font to black", despite black being a color and the guide should've said leave font colors as default/automatic). That's assuming it's not meatgrinder itself breaking the styles.

SW does not provide templates. I suspect where this problem occurs, it's in the way the author has set the styles. An easy thing to screw up, as I know all too well.

I guess I'll go over to the support side and see if anyone knows why my formatting is going to hell in Stanza, and if there's anything to be done.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Stanza basically destroys the formatting. Indents gone, centering gone, spaces added between paragraphs, etc. This is true of both the SW builds and the Calibre builds.

Belay that...somewhat. I found controls in Stanza to adjust some of that. It still doesn't center text reliably, but I got the indentation back (even where it's not specified, blast it) and got rid of the extra spacing.

Good enough for now.