The Beekeeper's Apprentice Free on April 1

[columbus]

Originally Posted by astra;

Examples of well formatted PDF?
PDF is a cul-de-sac. Please, don't confuse people. TXT? No italics, no bolds?

Agree totally!!
PDF is out of the ark technology for e-readers. Epub is likely to become the industry standard.

[hannah]

I reformatted the file to prc, and it's readable, even if there are some headers left. I loved the story. And am now very frustrated to find out that almost none of the other books are available for my liseuse.

Laurie R. King
(and would like you even more if I could read your books ... )

hannah

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by vickivanv

Hi, y'all! *waves* I help Laurie King with her online outreach, and we had several emails pointing to this thread. I hope y'all don't mind my peeping in. This is a terrific community! I've joined up and look forward to being a part of it, since I read a lot on my iPhone (just finished Little Brother--good stuff!) and hope very much to be reading via Kindle as soon as I can afford one.

I'm so sorry that the download format was unworkable for many of your devices (I feel your pain, btw--I can't get it to download to my iphone). I've sort of been the one pushing for this giveaway since last fall because the Mary Russell series is my very favorite series of all-time, and The Beekeeper's Apprentice is one of my most beloved books. It's long been a dream of mine and many others in the Russell fan community to bring the series to a wider audience via the internet, in addition to merely pushing our extra paperbacks on RL friends and relations.

Ultimately, the publisher handles the giveaway and sets up the process, and although we don't have control over that process, we do pass along feedback we hear about it. And I think the feedback will be well-received--the people at Picador really do seem to be a good bunch and they got behind the giveaway right away when some publishers would have just nixed it outright.

I've made notes of all the comments and concerns here and those that have come through email. One thing I want to make sure I have straight are the formatting issues. My email feedback suggests that straight html and mobi formats are currently the friendliest formats for the most devices. Would y'all agree? Is one better than the other, if you had to pick? I'm hearing that PDFs are very unworkable for many of your devices--and that preprint PDFs cause additional difficulties for some because of the printers' marks on the pages. Is that right? Y'all let me know if I'm missing anything.

Thanks for all the comments here and for the emails sending the link. Oh, and a special hi to Dixie Gal, I'm from the <3 o' Dixie, too!

LRF and ePub would also be a big help. The Sony Readers can handle LRF and the 505 and 700 can handle ePub as well. Some other devices can ePub as well like the BeBook. If you start with a well made HTML, you can use Calibre to convert to ePub, LRF, Mobipocket, and MS Reader. If you'd like some help, feel free to ask. I'll be happy to help.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by vickivanv

Thanks for the kind welcome!

cbell, it's good to see another Russellphile here in the forum--like you, I want all the books in eform. The first four are coming to the kindle store in a few weeks, last I heard. And the newest, The Language of Bees, is supposed to be in the kindle store the same day as the print version debuts on April 28. That will leave only #5, O Jerusalem unkindled for some strange reason. I'll send Bantam a reminder that OJER is feeling lonely and wants to join its siblings in the kindle store.

I do hope none of these will be in Topaz as a lot of people with Kindles really dislike Topaz.

[vickivanv]

Wow--this is great input--thanks! I'm taking notes and will assemble the information to send on to the PTB. The comment about it being a steep learning curve is right. With so many devices and file types, there is a lot of room for confusion.. I really think it would be worthwhile for the major publishing houses to have an ebook room containing a wide range of devices for testing and checking how files work. They may already have something like this--it would certainly make sense.

Oh, and the publisher got a lot of urging via email during the download (which they've actually extended several days btw, in case anyone still wants to grab it) to get the series into ebook form asap, and they seem to be very encouraged and interested in doing that, which is cool. I'm hoping all this feedback will help them in that process. I'd love to see the books in front of ebook readers all over the world And I'll pass along the offers for technical assistance in getting files converted, too--it sounds like it can be a tricky process.

[Ea]

Oh, btw., forgot before... It's a small matter, but it was stated that the book would be up for download in the *morning* - but apparently that was morning in America. We were a handful of people living further east who went looking in the (our) morning of the 1st of April only to get an error message.

[vickivanv]

Very true, Ea. We should have made a note on the landing page that April 1 meant EST in the US, so as not to confuse those outside the US. I'll have to ask our European and Aussie regulars on the site to remind us to keep a more global perspective.

That's one thing that's really cool about this community--that it is so strongly international. If more people were involved in international communities online, we'd probably have a more peaceful world, if you think about it. People wouldn't be quite so insular and would have access to more global perspectives and different ways of looking at things.

[koland]

Originally Posted by vickivanv

Very true, Ea. We should have made a note on the landing page that April 1 meant EST in the US, so as not to confuse those outside the US. I'll have to ask our European and Aussie regulars on the site to remind us to keep a more global perspective.

You might want to note what time as well, since here in EST land the page was dead at midnight (and for quite a while after that). If you mean "april 1st, after 6am EST when we come in to work", just say so.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by vickivanv

That's one thing that's really cool about this community--that it is so strongly international. If more people were involved in international communities online, we'd probably have a more peaceful world, if you think about it. People wouldn't be quite so insular and would have access to more global perspectives and different ways of looking at things.

i absolutely agree.

thanks for having such a world-wide perspective ! it would be so nice if everyone thought the same way you do !