Anyhoo, money’s been a little too tight for frills, but then our old (you don’t want to know HOW old) desktops (all three) started nickel’n'diming us to death, so we bit the bullet. I have been given an assignment to return and report the specs and my digital reading experience.

The assignment:

On the Asus, install:

1) Adobe Reader
2) Adobe AIR
3) Adobe Digital Editions (requires AIR, hence 2)
4) Microsoft Reader
5) MobiPocket Desktop
6) Sony eBook Library
7) FBReader

Then BLOG wtf it’s like to use them on that Atom CPU. (You DO have ATOM, right, not Celeron?)

ADDITIONAL: Try a GOOGLE BOOKS PDF!!

Here are the specs:

Asus EeePC 901 (black, if you care)
Intel Atom
CPU N270
1.6 GHz
1.99 GB RAM
Windows XP Home
2-1/2 pounds (about the weight of Atlas Shrugged, I believe)
~5 hours battery life (>2 hours better than my Dell laptop)

Here’s a gallery with examples of Adobe Reader, ADE, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, and FBReader. I have no reason to care about Sony Reader, but will do later, and I haven’t done a Google Books PDF yet.

So, for the reading part. Thus far, I’ve just been on MobiPocket, reading Soul Identity by Dennis Batchelder, in my recliner. For regular reading, it’s a bit heavy, but if you find your “sweet spot” where you can press the arrow with your thumb and still be comfortable holding it, you get used to it. Naturally, the back light is sweet in the dark.

The only real annoyance I have (besides the weight) so far is how long it takes to turn it on and off. It’s not like my eBookWise, where it’s one button and on, it turns itself off after 15 minutes (or whatever you set). The Asus acts like a computer because, well, it is.

More later after I’ve had a little more time with it.

I was sent an EPUB file that had embedded fonts that rendered perfectly in ADE. I cracked the file open and what did I see? Perfection. The file wasn’t bloated, it was neatly organized, the CSS sheet was reasonably tidy for its detail, and the detail was compact. It worked and it worked beautifully. I can see how it’s done.

In Sony Reader, it MOSTLY rendered the way it was coded (still no full justification).

In FBReader, it did NOT render the way it was coded AT ALL.

I then cracked open The Proviso file that BookGlutton made. It was a lot leaner; granted, I didn’t have embedded fonts, but it still rendered nicely.

Then I cracked open the file of Stay I had made as an experiment using Atlantis, and it was lean, albeit not as lean as The Proviso because Atlantis broke out each chapter as its own file.

Both The Proviso and Stay look “nice” in ADE, Sony, and FBReader (insofar as anything looks nice in FBReader). That’s right. They look nice. Not spectacular. They do not have Teh Pretteh.

And you know what? That’s okay. I can see that Teh Pretteh EPUB file would take a whole lot more work than I’m willing to invest in either time to hand code or money in software that will do it automatically. I simply see no return on the investment of the extra time for Teh Pretteh with the tools that are available now. I have no doubt that those tools will become available in time.

I’m selling a $40 736-print-page book in 8 ebook formats for $6. The print version is Verra Pretteh, as is the PDF file that comes in the e-book file your $6 buys you. But let’s be real. People who seek out and read e-books—especially on an iPhone, SmartPhone, Kindle, or dedicated reader—are doing it for the content.

After basics: full justification, paragraph indents, line spacing, chapter breaks, a hyperlinked table of contents (and other hyperlinks, if necessary), and those conventions of book reading that move the reader seamlessly through the text, anything else is a waste of time.

Why? Because at the price point that is acceptable to an e-book reader who believes that e-books are cheap to produce and should, then, cost a whole lot less than print books, either A) hand-coding Teh Pretteh or B) purchasing the software that will run Teh Pretteh yields little to no return on investment.

So mea culpa for saying it can’t be done.

No mea culpa for saying it’s a waste of time to do it.

For now.

For those of you EPUB designer/evangelists who talk about the way EPUB allows you to embed fonts, listen up: It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

The only thing that makes a difference is what the EPUB reader has available to it, to wit: Adobe Digital Editions will display one font and one font ONLY.  ITS OWN.

So will Sony reader.

So will FBReader.

You can mark up the text like crazy, but I’m here to tell you, your CSS theatrics is a big fat waste of time. Ask me how I know.

Now, I didn’t set out to become in anywise an expert at this and I’m not and I’m not saying I am. But until such a time as you can make ADE, Sony Reader, and FBReader  display your brilliant design, the EPUB “embed font” “feature” is a non-starter.

Remember: People who seek out and read e-books DON’T CARE about fancy design. They care about content and the ease of its readability.

1. Last fall, when I was formatting The Proviso for e-book consumption, I made a decision to include the EPUB format, which is the heir apparent of the title “The MP3 of EBooks. ” I’ll spare you the geek politics of this.

2. I formatted it in HTML, went to BookGlutton to use their HTML-to-EPUB API. I plugged it in and voilà! a nice EPUB version of The Proviso. No muss, no fuss, and at no cost to me. Beautiful. Perfect.

3. Fast forward to March and I’m trying to format The Fob Bible.

You must must MUST go buy this book. It’s not Mormon-centric in the least (except for one poem, which made me cry, and a story that doesn’t seem Mormon if you’re not). The writing is exquisite and really digs into some of the Old Testament stories we all think we know but…maybe we don’t, right? What might have Job’s wife thought and done throughout Job’s affliction? What might have prompted Jonah to go forth to preach at Nineveh? What the freak kind of email was Ezra getting??? At the very least, go download the sample. And I didn’t write any of it, so this isn’t me plugging my schtick.

So moving along. I’m trying to format the e-book abridged version of The Fob Bible, Plain and Precious Parts. Everything’s going along swimmingly. The illustrations are coming out, the poetry formatting is acceptable, if not perfect, but good within the limitations of the display software. Then comes time to run the HTML through BookGlutton’s API, which had recently gone through an upgrade.

It didn’t work.

Panic set in because I hadn’t figured out how to convert to EPUB other than BookGlutton.

That’s where the journey starts, along with the rant.

If you geek types want EPUB to be the MP3 of e-books, you better damn well figure out how to make it easy for people to create an EPUB format. I spent weeks with your nonsense gobbledygook about XML and XHTML/CSS (hello! I do that!) and yet…not one conversion tool worth pissing on. I can have the best XHTML/CSS in the world, but that still doesn’t give me an EPUB file if I don’t have a grinder to put it through that fucking WORKS!

(Deep breath.)

With regard to The Fob Bible, I knew I couldn’t use SmashWords’s meatgrinder (as I advocated) because of the illustrations and the formatting of the poetry.

You know what? I don’t demand things for free, but if they’re out there and they’re free and they work right, I’m all for it. But I’m always willing to pay for something that does what I want it to do. I couldn’t even find that.

I then used Calibre (an otherwise excellent, excellent program, which had recently gone through an upgrade) and couldn’t get the normal text to show up at all in Adobe Digital Editions (which had recently gone through an upgrade or six—seeing a pattern here?) or the Sony Desktop Reader. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is when the simplest code gets thrown out or doesn’t work or or or…something. I didn’t know what was wrong.

I hied myself on over to Twitter to weep and wail and gnash my teeth over this and one particular TwitterCrank e-book militant invested himself in my issue and we began to hash this out together. (If you read Mike Cane’s [@mikecane] post, you can see where this is going.)

We narrowed the problem to the EPUB reader, which in my case, is desktop Adobe Digital Editions and Sony Desktop Reader (and then, later, FBReader). It would honor <h1></h1> tags, but it would NOT the most important one: <p></p>. I mean, if you can’t get your p-tagged text to show up, there’s something seriously wrong.

Kirk Biglione [@kirkbiglione] (who spent quite a bit of time explaining this to me and talking me down out of the trees) verified my code, said it wasn’t up to snuff (a wrong &mdash; tag—really? it’s that touchy? fuck it), but then Mike Cane (who apparently has more disposable time than I) had run a MOBI format through Calibre to convert it to an EPUB and…voilà! again! It worked.

That was simple. That was easy. I could do that, no problem.

But still it nagged at me, the whole problem of EPUB creation and EPUB rendering (how it shows up on the various software intended to display it).

Somewhere in this process (don’t remember where), Mike Cane pointed me to a little program called eCub and I tried it. It wasn’t intuitive in the least and it didn’t take HTML code without an error or outright refusal. I thought its recalcitrance was my fault and I determined to figure out this program as soon as I got The Fob Bible done. So then I moved on to The Proviso Vignette & Outtakes.

I couldn’t get a handle on eCub. I played around with it enough to know that the best result would be to start with plain text and code it within the program itself (but oh, what a bitch!). I planned to do just this and write the manual for it (cuz there ain’t one, I don’t think), but then I thought, “Why should I?” The programmer doesn’t have a manual for it (that I’ve been able to find) and I’m not spending time I don’t have in email back-and-forths to figure out what should be intuitive if there’s no manual.

Then it was suggested to me (I don’t remember where, sorry) to download OpenOffice and Azardi’s eScape plugin-type thing that would enable OpenOffice to…do something? comparable to “save as PDF”?…and make an EPUB file. Frankly, I never got around to playing with it. Seemed like too much hassle after the tiring processes I’d already been through.

Thus, instead of trying yet another method, I reverted to Mike Cane’s K.I.S.S. advice to put a MOBI file (which I already had formatted) through Calibre, which worked adequately, even if not thoroughly satisfactorily.

Anyway, I decided I didn’t even want to think about it until I had to do it for Stay. except it did occur to me that learning XML would be easier and possibly more effective anyway.

Next up, a tweeter I met through Mike Cane [@alphabitch] had purchased The Proviso through SmashWords in EPUB for her iPhone. Now, disregard the fact that I kept her up two nights in a row for reading this thing on her iPhone, and disregard the fact that she thinks Mormons and Objectivists are crazy (“Knox Hilliard: The crazy never lasts long enough”), concentrate on the portion that she stayed up two nights in a row to read it in spite of the fact that the formatting was awful. Good gravy. I still don’t know if they got that fixed.

I sent her the file I made through BookGlutton, which she said was just fine.

So my problem came back to me sooner than I expected. I needed to provide GOOD EPUB files and I had to have a creation tool to do it. Putting a MOBI file through EPUB would certainly solve a couple of problems, but I still wasn’t happy with the whole situation. I felt like there just weren’t any good options to make a “standard” file everybody seems to want and the geek squad is pushing like they’re the Tony Robbins of ebooks. Rah rah sisboombah blah blah blah. *yawn*

Then last week happened.

David Rothman [@davidrothman] of Teleread tweeted this post by Paul K. Biba: Atlantis Word Processor Can Create EPUB Books. I had a smidgen of hope, you know, like when you’re a freshman and you have a crush on the big man on campus and one day he says “hi” to you? That kind of hope.

I bookmarked the site, intending to go back and really dig into it.

Heh. Not only did the big man on campus say hi, he took me out for dinner at a five-star restaurant, took me dancing, took me home and stayed the night (oh, so fabulously), then fixed me breakfast in the morning, presented me with a ring and declared his eternal love and devotion.

Atlantis Word Processor.

With a few exceptions, it kinda looks like Word, kinda acts like Word, intuitively enough that you don’t mind the exceptions.

It has a template for creating ebooks, and explicit instructions within the template.

It has a “save-as e-book” option.

And…that was all there was to it.

After a little tweaking (and I mean, very little—some of my pet peeves are curly quotes, line spacing, paragraph spacing, and full justification, which it does without question or hesitation), I got the e-book to look the way I wanted it to in Adobe Digital Editions (within ADE’s limitations, as discussed in Mike Cane’s post, linked above).

In Sony Desktop reader, the right was still ragged, but no matter.

In FBReader, it didn’t honor the serif choice for the font and it didn’t indent the paragraphs, but no matter on that, either, because apparently, they’re upgrading it to have better CSS support.

I experimented with the first four chapters of Stay (which took me all of half an hour), sent it off to @alphabitch for her to test drive it on the iPhone and she came back with a thumbs-up (no screen shots, though).

If you can use Word and you understand how to use styles, you can make EPUB e-books out of your manuscripts. I don’t know how else to explain it; it doesn’t NEED explanation for anybody who can use Word. That’s the beauty of it.

Atlantis has a 30-day free trial, and then it’s $35. I paid for it an hour after I installed it for its test run. It was that easy and that quick.

Oh, yeah. The big man on campus did li’l ol’ me up right’n’proper.

UPDATE: I was asked if you can embed pictures. Yes, you can. The template recommends a 400×500 image. I can only presume this is to accommodate the default size Adobe Digital Editions opens up as.

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April Hamilton, independent publishing crusader extraordinary, built a new site called Publetariat, which will serve as kind of a clearinghouse/gathering space for independent-like authors. As soon as I figure out the Nixonian Drupal (you know, tricky dicky), I’ll be adding my voice over there. At least, uh, that’s what I’ve been s’posin’ to do for a while now and haven’t gotten to it. I’m sure April will find a suitable punishment for me.

The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference went on earlier this week and I followed the comments on Twitter. Fascinating! although I’m not sure any conclusions can be drawn in any direction. Frankly, it seems to me nobody really knows what the hell’s going on in publishing right now. I will just keep on keepin’ on. By the way, a free e-book rundown of the conference is available for anyone who wants one.

A lot of what I saw related to the creative monetization of fiction, which ties in perfectly with The Urban Elitist‘s and my cross-blog series on the same.

The EPUB format drum continues to be beaten and pleasepleaseplease, PTB, do IT! All for one and one for all! The mp3 format of e-books. I cannot tell you how I salivate at the thought.

DRM was preached against as the Great Satan (which it is).

The guy behind the Espresso Book machine spoke. I don’t know what he said, but check out this video.

Some of my independent publishing cohorts and pals had a session. I wish I’d been there!

I’m coming to the conclusion that it will be another few years before e-books are widely read and that at that point, the value of the print book will be in POD pretty, well-made editions, hardback with gorgeous jackets and/or the ability to offer leather-bound and tooled editions or other specialty editions, where the object of the book is the art as well as the content. Until then, the market’s going to be in flux with regard to price, from free to outrageously overpriced. (I’ll blog this later; I have lots to say about this.)

In other news, the XY Tax Deduction went rooting in the cabinet and brought me a can of corn to make for him. So I did. He said, “I not hun’ry.”

And don’t forget! For those of you who’ve read the book and would like to know more about those wacky kids (or you’d like to know where the Dunham series is headed next), you can find a whole slew of stuff at theproviso.com. More content. More entertainment. For free.

To commenter Steve Davidson #3: Dish!

You know what? I’m a capitalist-pig whore* and I’m full of shit, too.

SmashWords partnered with Stanza and Stanza’s iPhone store, so naturally I got over my formatting/design hubris immediately and figured out a way to do all my special little touches with your bare-bones Word settings. So, yeah. Apple, bite me. Or rather, let me bite you. The Proviso is now available on your iPhone/iTouch at the Stanza store via SmashWords in EPUB, LRF, MOBI/PRC, PDB (the PalmDoc source file, not the eReader container), and PDF. You can read 30% of it free there, too.

*Yeah, I know it was redundant and probably went without saying anyway.

But, erm, be patient. Their servers are very popular at the moment.

Yay Stanza and a big THANKS! to Mark Coker and Bill Kendrick for going out of their way to help me.

I AM AGAINST DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM). ANY VENDOR I RECOMMEND WILL SHARE THIS STANCE AND ANY INSTRUCTIONS I GIVE WILL IGNORE ANY POSSIBILITY FOR ENCRYPTION. IF YOU WANT TO LOCK UP YOUR WORK, FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF.

In my last episode, I instructed you to go learn (X)HTML/CSS. I was gently taken to task for that with the point, “writers shouldn’t have to learn code.” While I am of the opinion that for some writers, this is not only true, but that they should be kept from any computer interaction whatsoever, I’m afraid it’s just not realistic in the long run. You will learn something, even if it’s only the paragraph tags and all of it will be useful to you at some point.

Yes, you can use blogger.com or wordpress.com or any other sign-in platform for your blogging.

Yes, you can use Word and PrimoPDF to set type and distribute your work as a free PDF.

If you want to:

A. want to offer more than one file format (PDF) and/or

B. want to charge for your work

you’re going to have to either pay someone to do it for you or learn how to do it yourself.

There are quite a few places that will help you with #A.

FEEDBOOKS. As far as I can tell, if you use this service, you must offer your work for free. If this is not acceptable to you, just don’t use their service. (And if this isn’t true, let me know because I scoured the site and couldn’t find any “payment” type information. ) Also, you must manually build your book. Now, this has its pros and cons. The con is that it takes a while. The pro is that you can make it look purty with a little care and attention without having to learn much (if any) (X)HTML/CSS.

BOOKWORM. This is a peculiar service in that you may upload your own book, but the only format you get is the EPUB format. It is also more for reading than publishing (as far as I can tell; more information on this is welcome).

SMASHWORDS. This is the Q-DOS of e-book building/formatting. It’s very quick. And yeah, sometimes it’s dirty, especially if you don’t format your Word document correctly (as in, according to standard word processing practices and to SmashWords’s style guide). That’s the con. The pro is it’s fast and you can charge for your work.

I’m making several assumptions here. The FIRST assumption is that you want your book to be in as many electronic formats as possible. The SECOND assumption is that you want to have those formats available to you on your own hard drive for dissemination as you please. The THIRD assumption is that you want your work to have widespread visibility across the interwebz. The FOURTH assumption is that you might want to get paid for your work.

So let’s talk about SmashWords.

I heard about SmashWords from Eugene Woodbury quite a while back, who used it for his novel Path of Dreams, but I dismissed it because I thought the work had to be offered free. Then Zoe Winters used it for her free novella “Kept.” Okay. But then Aaron Ross Powell used it to offer his draft of The Hole in more formats than Kindle right after I bitched about it. Then RJ Keller used it to offer Waiting for Spring, and that’s when I had the V-8 moment.

I figured, well, what the hell, I’ll try this thing. So I took a vignette from The Proviso‘s world (not in the book) called “25 to Life” and decided to put it on Smashwords.

CAVEAT: “25 to Life” did not call for fancy formatting like The Proviso does. The Proviso has blog posts, e-mails, news clippings, court transcripts, social services records, a wedding announcement, and other specialized formatting that required different fonts, spacing, and margins to make those items look good. If you have something like that, this WILL NOT WORK for you.

Assumption 1. That you want your book to be in as many electronic formats as possible.

They have this nifty little API they call the “MeatGrinder.” It will turn a plain, properly formatted Word document into any one or more of the following digital formats:

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As you can see, that’s a lot of variation. I got both The Hole and Waiting for Spring in the RTF format, as that was the easiest for me to convert to my eBookWise reader. Powell asked for $2.99 and Keller offered hers for “you set the price.”

Assumption 2. That you want to have those formats available to you on your own hard drive for dissemination as you please.

I don’t even know if you have to buy it yourself (if you set a price) to download which formats you want to offer from your own site or elsewhere, but even if you do have to, you got off cheap in both time and money.

Don’t be an ass. Be courteous and leave it up on SmashWords. They did the work for you.

You will NOT be able to get a straight HTML document to download and then tweak to other formats, which is good.

Assumption 3. That you want your work to have widespread visibility across the interwebz.

The founder of SmashWords, Mark Coker, says: “Our mission is to give every author a chance to find their audience.”

SmashWords is gradually gaining in name recognition and usage. Augment your presence on SmashWords with placement of your work elsewhere on the ’net. It benefits you and SmashWords (you know, the people who did the work for you).

Assumption 4. You might want to get paid for your work.

There are several payment options at SmashWords, which I’ve addressed. In my first “creating ebooks” post, commenter and indie author champion Morris Rosenthal told me about e-junkie.com, which is a payment portal for downloads. He’s had quite a bit of success with this method, though I can’t vouch for it at this time (although I do intend to check it out).

However, as far as I know, SmashWords is the only independent e-publishing vendor that offers an API process AND a payment portal and quite frankly, there’s just nothing else that beats that, even if you do have to sacrifice a little formatting.

So after having put “25 to Life” up on SmashWords, used their API, seen their output, what do I think?

The HTML and Java versions (the ones that you read on your computer) are very pretty and you can adjust fonts, colors, and sizes as you like.

The plain TXT ones are, well, plain text. It says “may lack some formatting,” but if you know anything about plain text, you know that means NO formatting.

The EPUB (use with Stanza for iPhone/iTouch, Adobe Digital Editions) format doesn’t seem to have centered anything, but I can live with that.

The LRF (Sony) and PDB (Palm) didn’t pick up the italics, which is something I CAN’T live with, but it’s being worked on right now (no promises!).

The PDF looked like a manuscript because, well, it comes from a plain Word document, so you know that going in.

The MOBI/PRC (Kindle, MobiPocket) looked great.

The RTF is obviously going to look just like a Word document, and it’s my go-to for conversion to IMP (eBookWise), so I don’t care how it looks.

If you follow the SmashWords style guide to the letter, you’ll have a slew of decent-looking e-books (including EPUB!) as defined by my last post on “the page” and you’ll get them in about 3 minutes, along with a payment portal.

SmashWords is an elegant little API, and it’s still in beta testing. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be at full force.

Are you serious?

As a consumer and producer of ebooks, let me tell you, this is simple crackpot evangelism. EPUB is the future; I do not disagree and I would love to see it come into its own and beat the competition.

HOWEVER

The competition exists for a reason and that’s because there are competing machines out there. Why in the world wouldn’t a producer find and exploit every digital outlet he could while they exist?

Now, I understand it’s perfectly reasonable for a producer of analog music to give up making vinyl records and 8-track tapes when there are few enough record players and 8-track players that it makes no sense to spend the time to do so. But if there is fairly equal money in each format, it would be foolish for the producer to give up producing even one of those formats.

In short, there is no way we would give up any one of the (now) 10 digital formats we publish in unless and until all devices can and will read one format and that the majority of the users of those devices are choosing one format:

AZW (Kindle)

EPUB (any device using Stanza or Adobe Digital Editions)

HTML (a lot of devices, plus any browser)

IMP (eBookWise)

LIT (Microsoft Reader)

LRF (Sony PRS)

MOBI/PRC (any device using Mobipocket)

PDB (Palm)

PDF (any device that reads PDF), and coming soon,

iApp for the iTunes store (iPhone/iTouch)

The fact of the matter is that once you’ve formatted for one of the above, you’ve formatted for over half the rest with minor tweaks. Yeah, it takes time to make each pretty for its own device, but it’s worth it as long as people feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth.

And every single one of those formats has a serious issue or 3 that consumers don’t like. However, each consumer still has the choice of the format with the least number of annoyances for him. Giving me 1 format (or, in the case of a book I really really really wanted to buy) 4 formats that are pure hell on me isn’t going to get me to adopt those formats; it’s only going to jolt me out of my impulse buy and now that I’m not BUYING paper books anymore, I’ll get it at the library.

So, Hachette Book Group. Thanks for saving me some money, ’cause I wasn’t strong enough to withstand the temptation if it had been in a format I could use.