Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

I have used a whole lot of various small computer devices over the years. Went through a long run of PDAs, starting with remarkable HP 200LX, which was a calculator sized machine which opened to a keyboard and was a full IBM PC compatible, with 2MB of memory (640K for MS-DOS 5.0 and 1.44MB for a virtual HD). Ran Microsoft Word 5.0B and had Lotus 1-2-3 2.4 built-in ROM. Hoo-boy! Remember, this is back in the day when laptops were enormous things. (grin)

While I was in the hospital, at first I did very little webbing. Even SUMMER, the small Fujitsu U810 UMPC seemed heavy and awkward -- and hard to read with its small screen. But a gift card from the UCF allowed me to get an Amazon Kindle Fire HD (DW). No mouse to farble with and lightweight, the Kindle Fire HD was a godsend. Probably kept me sane during the Year Without a Summer. Mrs. Dr. Phil's original first generation Kindle Fire had been a very good unit, and this next generation was even better. I even wrote a 17,000 word story with just a stylus (DW) on it while in the hospital.

Kindles come from Amazon preset for the user. What's amusing is that when I set up my Amazon account A Very Long Time Ago, my default address was the Physics Dept. at WMU, so my address was listed as Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon. Which is why the Kindle Fire HD says in the upper lefthand corner that it's Dr.'s Kindle. (grin)

Then on 27 August 2014, I received Dr.'s 2nd Kindle (DW) -- a Certified Refurbished Kindle Fire HD 7", 32 GB - Includes Special Offers [Previous Generation]. The first Kindle Fire HD had worked so well, that I got a second one to use at the office, so I wouldn't have to carry it back and forth and run down its battery in the winter. Since I've been home for all of 2015 so far, I've been able to swap those two units as the other recharges. Handy.

So last week I picked up a 7th generation Kindle 6". This is the straight Kindle eReader, not a Fire tablet. And it's the base model without a backlight. Very small, very light, very simple. Also an OMOTON cover with auto-sleep. It was a fraction of the cost of the Amazon branded covers -- a real departure from the two covers for the Kindle Fire HDs I bought last year after they were priced as obsolete. (cheap-grin)

The Kindle was $79 -- I missed the $59 sale price by one day as I thought about whether to buy or not. Technically it didn't cost me anything, since we used some Discover rebate money on it.

Why buy an eReader when I already have two Kindle Fire HDs? Well, the Fire HD is a tablet -- and I tend to use a tablet like a real computer as much as possible. Email, Silk browser, PDFs, etc. Getting set up to do eReader versions of my Beta 1 novel took some work, but also reminded me that someone using a Kindle or a Nook, etc. can't just run to a webpage and download.

Also, much like why I don't have a smart phone -- I need a cell phone's battery to be there for emergency phone calls. I don't need to many MORE functions to spend all my time on the tablet. And the Kindle 6" is small and light.

Amusingly the auto-sleep case on the Kindle has more powerful magnets than the Amazon case for the Fire HD. I know this because I set a Fire HD on top of the Kindle 6" while it was on -- and the Fire HD shut off. (magnetic-grin)

Anyway, when the new unit arrived, it was yet another easy piece of cake to get running. Nice packaging, pull it out of its clear plastic bag -- the battery still had at least three-quarters of a charge. Hooked up to our WiFi/DSL without any problems, and I had my handful of e-books downloaded. Including the MOBI version of my Beta 1 novel. It does not have a gravity sensor like the Fire, but you can go into Settings and change from Portrait to Landscape mode manually. I can live with that -- when I want to read a book, I want to read a book. I don't want the display flipping around if I set the thing down.

I haven't bought many Kindle books -- an out-of-print WWI novel I read as a kid, a Scandinavian phrase book. And I also had a copy of Steven Savile's novel Silver. Steven was one of the past winners who was a guest at the 2008 WOTF workshop. He'd mentioned on Facebook that the Kindle edition was reduced to $0.00 for an indeterminate time. So I snatched it. And hadn't gotten around to starting to read it until about two weeks ago. Now I'm reading in on Dr.'s 3rd Kindle. The book opened to the place I'd last been on the Fire. Go Whispernet.

While putting together this post, I was amused to see that I'd "bought" Silver on 17 July 2015. Lord, for some reason I thought it'd been languishing for a year -- and it's only been a month. Time gets distorted when you are working very hard AND not doing the daily job. I guess over 100,000 copies of Silver have been sold and so far it's a ripping good tale. But when I glanced at the webpage tonight, I noticed that the Kindle edition is again/still $0.00. So if you have a Kindle -- or the free Kindle for PC app -- you, too, can snatch a copy.

The Kindle came with a free month of Kindle Unlimited, but I'm going to give up on that. The first search I tried was littered with these stupid little books which are really just repackagings of the Wikipedia article on the book. I do not have time to wade through stupidity.

Will I miss not having a backlight? Dunno. Right now, I can tilt the unit and get enough reflected light, even when the only room light on is across the living room. And it's nice and contrasty during the day. And if you're not being cheap, you can always spring for the Kindle Paperwhite. Or get a clip-on LED reading light.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Ugh. Egad. eBooks.

I must really like some of you a lot. Because I did this all for my Beta readers -- just as I am not self-publishing the hardcopies, I am not selling the eBooks either. But I'm cheap and some people have access to eReaders. Plus there's always the merry hunt of the chase of a challenge. I mean I was going to play with all this someday anyway -- I just had the time here in August 2015.

If you don't want geek adventure details, just scroll down to the pretty picture further down and start there. (practical-grin)

Early Monday morning, I posted that I had achieved generating the proper files and order four copies of the Beta 1 reading copy of Book 1 from Lulu(DW) (LJ). I've done some work with eReaders before, mostly for readings at cons. RTF files downloaded onto my Sony eReaders. More recently PDF files onto my Kindle Fire HD. Some earlier playing with files on an HP Jornada 548 PDA.

Since I'd just set up the files for Lulu and Lulu also does eBooks, I thought I'd check there. Surely they have a Convert Print Files To eBook option. Nope. There was, however, an eBook Creator Guide -- a free EPUB format download. Great. "Buy" it for $0.00 and download it to ZEPPELIN... and I can't open it. Nothing on the machine can eat an EPUB.

(Okay, I can sort of see it Lulu's way -- if you're going to make eBooks, you probably have a way to read them. But still...)

I know I've read EPUB eBooks on WINTER and SUMMER, but those are both Windows XP Pro machines and they have the full version of Adobe Acrobat Professional installed -- I think EPUBs were read by Acrobat. Alas, the Acrobat Reader DC on ZEPPELIN under Windows 7 Home Premium can't and it looks like maybe the EPUB functionality of Acrobat has been spawned into Adobe InDesign, maybe?

So, next thing is to look at reviews on CNET and PC Mag for free Windows 7 eBook readers. I finally settled on Calibre (64-bit). (An Aside: Really guys, both CNET and PC Mag have their download pages littered with big green DOWNLOAD buttons -- most of them are for installing other Windows utilities crapware. This is how you get infected machines. And frankly, given that people come to CNET and PC Mag for good info, this doesn't reflect well on them.) Download the 68.2MB installer and end up with some 196MB of application. Gee, I hope it isn't just an eReader -- that seems excessive.

Good news. Calibre is perfectly happy to read Lulu's eBook Creator Guide in EPUB format. Alas, as I expected, Lulu is doing due diligence in making sure you're creating valid eBooks for fun and profit. Like their Word style templates for print, it's overkill and not what I want to do. Again, I'm not self-publishing here. Still, there was a lot of useful information -- including the admission that:

Do I Have to Use Styles?
We know many of you are groaning right now at the thought of using the Styles menu to format every paragraph in your book. We hear you, and have provided tips for quickly applying styles in subsequent chapters. The good news is, you only need to use a few styles and most are available out-of-the-box in popular word processing programs. The most important thing to remember is that every chapter or section needs to use a Heading style, so we can ensure it shows up in the EPUB TOC.

The Table of Contents thing is understandable -- all the rest of the Style shit has to do with making sure your eBook dots all the T's and crosses all the I's to be commercially published. Not an issue here.

For laughs and giggles, I fed my PDF into Calibre -- and it barfed all over the screen when I looked at the default MOBI version. Not unexpected, since the PDF represents page images, so depending on window width, individual lines don't wrap.

Second attempt. Feed it the .DOC file. Despite Calibre saying it takes .DOC, my Word 97/2003 DOC file wasn't a readable format. Okay... on to creating an RTF file, which it will also take. And I might as well address a few other issues.

For Lulu, eBook default fonts are Times New Roman, Arial and Garamond. My PDF version has embedded fonts, since it is in Book Antiqua, Courier New, Modern No. 20 and Copperplate Gothic Bold. Time for Ctrl-H Search-and-Destroy:

change Modern No. 20 to Times New Roman Bold
change Courier New to Arial
change Book Antiqua 12 to Garamond 14
change Copperplate Gothic Gold to Garamond Bold
delete indents (5 spaces)
change Garamond 14 to Paragraph | 1st Line Indent 0.3"
remove Gutter
delete old manual Table of Contents
remember to rename Title on Summary Sheet ***

Note the Book Antiqua 12 to Garamond 14 font change. I've always found Garamond to be a small font, and so on the screen, where I normally write in 12 points -- Garamond 14 looks better. And in fact, using the same 6x9 paper size, the 336 page printing version of the book ended up as 337 pages in the eBook version -- so I'd say I've got the size question right. (grin)

I also changed my Chapter Title lines: Starting from the end of the book, I used Shift-F11 to go backwards through the AutoNum fields from 25 to 1. "25." was highlighted, so I type a hard "25.", click on the whole line and apply Heading 3, then do the next. Make a new Table of Contents using the Header 3 info. Boom... That was WAY too easy. It made a TOC in half a second. Okay, that's ONE use I have for Styles in Word. One. Only.

New attempt and Calibre did in fact make a MOBI eBook, which Calibre could read. Next try to make an EPUB. This could be read by both Calibre and Kindle for PC. Now we're getting somewhere. But I really couldn't get them to run on the Kindle Fire HD -- which was the whole point of the exercise. (double-trouble-grin)

So I went to Der Google and asked it what is the file format for a Kindle reader. Turns out, it's currently AWZ3, though MOBI also works. And Calibre makes an AWZ3 file, which not only can be read by Kindle for PC, but also gains a Kindle icon. But...

Here's where Big Brother and closed ecologies comes into play. You cannot download an AWZ3 file to a Kindle. Amazon.com acts as a gatekeeper for downloading books. So it's their way (or sideloading). Some more Googling reveals that you CAN Send-email-to-Kindle a MOBI file. Each Kindle has an email address-- which you can find under Account | Settings | Managing Your Kindle at Amazon.com -- and you email the file as an attachment. Then Whispernet takes over and downloads it to your Kindle.

Damn. It worked. There is my Cover sitting in the Carousel on my Kindle Fire HD. Each Kindle has its own email address, but once something is in Amazon's cloud, you can Whispernet it to another Kindle -- so my 2nd Kindle Fire HD got the file, too.

Now, the Kindle doesn't consider it a Book -- it's a Document -- so the only place it shows up on the Kindle is on the Carousel. But, it does all the usual things about finding your last place and synchronizing between readers.

All in all, a pretty respectable day's work. It's not perfect. The Table of Contents worked perfectly in the .DOC and .RTF files, but is screwed up on the eBooks. This is not a priority for me. Maybe the Bug Fix Committee here at Princess Central will get to it Real Soon Now. (yeah-right-grin)


Now I have PDF/Lulu Trade Paperback, EPUB, MOBI, and AZW3 versions.

Negating, as always, that my several days of time don't count in this experiment (grin), the printed books from Lulu cost me money. The PDF (L) is exactly the same as the printed copy (LL), including page numbers and I think the map is more readable, so it is useful to me and I recommend it if possible. The AZW3 can be downloaded and run in the Kindle for PC program. The MOBI can be Send-to-Kindle and show up in the Carousel on my Kindle Fire HD -- though it is not a "book" but a "document" -- but it does my have book cover mockup. Yay.

Presumably owners of other devices, such as Nook and Kobo, could tell me what format they want and figure out how to get it onto their machine. Sigh. Standardization -- not for computer users, alas.

The files:

08/10/15  02:01 2,486,772 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13L-pdf.pdf
08/10/15  02:05 2,132,527 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13LL-pdf.pdf
08/11/15  01:57 4,947,471 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E.rtf
08/11/15  02:02   986,967 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E - Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.mobi
08/11/15  02:03   475,660 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E - Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.epub
08/11/15  03:11   851,762 PLK-Reading-115-1-1c13E - Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon.azw3

Voila! Like the process for creating the Lulu book, once one had enumerated a Procedure, it will all go smoother The Next Time. We hope. Maybe. (sly-grin)

Dr. Phil

*** NOTE that the Book Title comes from the Summary Info Title and NOT from the filename or the title line of the book.

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Some Awesomeness

jimhines posted about people who are awesome. Among those listed were:

Tobias Buckell - Toby wanted a group of professional speculative fiction novelists who could share information and support one another. So he sat down and founded SF Novelists.

That's pretty good. But SF Novelists is now offering 25 free SF/F first chapters:

FREE EBOOK

Twenty-five First Chapters from Twenty-five Writers

SF Novelists proudly offers you OPENING ACTS, a free ebook presenting twenty-five first chapters across the spectrum of science fiction and fantasy. Twenty-five tastes, to tempt your appetite for adventure...to lure you into unknown worlds...and give you something new to read.

Not sure what to read next? Or just researching how to write openings for novels? One-stop shopping!

Win.

Dr. Phil