After six months, unceasing wailing, and a solid refusal to censor myself, The Proviso was finally approved for sale as an application in the Apple iTunes store.

Go get it!

(Now I don’t feel hypocritical by naming iPhone names in Stay, because, you know, Eric would be on top of all manner of gadgetry.)

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Before you read any further (if you are still reading or the least bit interested), please go to these websites and study them. Ignore the content; I want you to see what they’re doing. Then come back. I’ll wait.

B10 Mediaworx.

My Bookstore and More (mostly Samhain Publishing’s titles, but look under the “manufacturers” tab and see the other e-book publishers).

Loose-Id.

Ellora’s Cave.

Baen Books.

Zumaya Books.

eBooks.com.

Project Gutenberg.

Fictionwise.

Back? Cool. Now, please go here:

Amazon Kindle.

Sony e-book reader.

iPhone.

iTouch.

BlackBerry.

Palm Pre.

A more complete list of e-book readers.

Did you understand what I wanted you to see? Awesome!

As a consumer of e-books, I would like to offer you a friendly suggestion, which is to embrace the digital distribution of your titles. The e-book publishers I linked are making money hand over fist. The devices I linked are the way people read e-books. This will grow.

You probably don’t understand the seduction of having an entire library in your palm, and that’s okay. There are lots and lots of people who say they won’t give up print for anything, and then they get to live with an e-book reader for maybe two or three days, and they’re hooked.

There’s also something very seductive about being able to log onto an e-bookstore and download a bunch of books onto your device immediately. No driving. It’s all about impulse. I can talk myself out of an Amazon purchase because it involves shipping time. It leaves the shopping cart and goes into the wish list, never to be seen again. I don’t even want to go to a bookstore anymore.

I’ve now encountered three small LDS presses and individuals somewhere in the LDS publishing arena dismiss e-books as so much of a passing fad, a waste of time or, worse, think that “e-book” is synonymous with “PDF.” I simply have to shake my head at their short-sightedness.

Be on the cutting edge of the digital age of books. Take a cue from the church’s rabid embrace of the interwebz and streaming audio and its ability to reach its members nearly effortlessly.

But beyond that, the take-home message here is this: E-bookstores are dangerous to the health of my checkbook.

Want to know the real reason I don’t buy anything from Deseret Book, Zarahemla, Signature Books et al? No e-books. I want to read your books; really I do, but I’m not going back to paper unless you give me something terribly compelling. I buy e-books on impulse. Impulse. Hear that? IMPULSE.

Please give me a reason to throw my money at you in the middle of the night when one of your titles catches my eye. Pretty please?

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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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Twitter. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. My thoughts run in small bursts, so it’s perfect for me. Better than blogging. Follow me!

I’m giving up Facebook. I can’t stand it for many, many reasons, all of which would make me mad were I to enumerate them. If you friended me there, I’m so sorry. Catch me on Twitter.

I’m still banned at the Apple iApp store. However, you can still get THE PROVISO on your iPhone using the PDB (eReader) or EPUB files we offer, through SmashWords, and through Scribd.

STAY, book 2 in the Dunham series, will be appearing at all of the above venues some time this winter. Crossing fingers it’s around Thanksgiving.

That is all for now.

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Author Moriah Jovan had a book rejected last month on that basis (although the rejection didn’t mention the book’s more creative obscenities).

Let me be clear about one thing. My other obscenities are no more or less creative than the average steamyhawt romance novel. In my opinion. However, if the steamier novels could make the cut because of the absence of the F-bomb, then yet another level of hypocrisy will have been reached. (I’d be interested to know what, if any, romance novels get converted to apps and put in the store.)

The article talks about the difference between rejected apps that are NOT e-books because e-books do have an alternative method of distribution to iPhone. (Ahem, my book is available through the SmashWords/Stanza catalog.) Anyhoo, I’m hearing that there is absolutely NO organization to the iApp store, so maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.

Except, you know, my cover Bewbies are totally eye-catching, no?

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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.

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Apple rejected my book from its iApp store on the basis that it has the F-word. Now, I’m sorry, but the fact that the F-word is in my book is the least of its crimes (they must have missed the “cunt”), so…“fuck”? Really? But that’s not the point.

And you can download the Stanza (free) or eReader (free) applications to your iPhone, download my book, and read it that way, so all is not lost. But that’s not the point.

Some people call this censorship. I don’t; they’re well within their right to accept or reject any book they want. But that’s not the point.

The point is also not that Apple is cutting off its nose to spite its face. For whatever reason I don’t understand, they’re wishing-washing on e-books.

1) There is no iBooks.

2) There is no restriction of explicit lyrics and explicit/violent games and R-rated movies in the iApp store, which leads me to believe that the restriction is solely for e-book applications. Why? Are we discriminating against reading as a leisure activity? Why?

3) At the same time, Apple made a deal with ScrollMotion to provide a host of e-books as applications, but I notice they are of the young adult variety, which is a pretty safe bet, content-wise. However, they’re wrapping these up in DRM. Why?

4) Not only that, but some of them are seriously over-priced. More than the hardback!!! Gah.

5) When I actually looked at what was in the e-book section if the iApp store, it was classics in the public domain (good!) and puppies-and-kittens (no, seriously, books on puppies and kittens) and manga (in which I have no interest whatsoever). Yeah. Selection. I can get a better selection of books to read at Wal-Mart, albeit I have to go there and buy dead-tree books.

6) On Teleread, the speculation is that spikes in iTouch sales are good for e-books, but is that true for e-book applications?

Nothing Apple is doing on this front makes sense to me. David Carnoy’s Knife Music (read his whole post) was rejected for the F-word, but this wouldn’t have even come to light if he weren’t already semi-high-profile (which fact is okay with me, but it’s happening all over the place, not just with him). I mean, they’re adding e-book applications a little bit. Here and there. Snootily.

On a purely capitalist pig basis, wouldn’t you think this would be a market they would want to exploit? I can only conclude that Jobs simply carries an utter abhorrence for The Book and does not want to exploit it for another revenue stream.

Seriously.

Music.

Movies.

Games.

But not…books?

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Between The Apple Blog’s annoyance with books-as-applications and Booksquare’s rant about the newest ScrollMotion book app costing more than the hardcover edition,

When the ScrollMotion App and titles and prices were announced, I had one question for the publishers involved: are you on crack? Seriously, what were you smoking in that meeting?

I think I’m okay with getting banned by Apple.

I gotta find the cachet in having gotten banned. Somehow…

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Roger from eBook App Maker tells us that Apple is in the process of applying a ratings system to their games and he doesn’t think it’ll be too long until they start in with the ebook apps. So instead of sanitizing the book, we’ve decided to wait until Apple has a rating system.

UPDATE:

Today Richard Curtis (I love this guy, really) discusses Steve Jobs’s dismissal of ebooks as a viable revenue source a la iTunes with the comment, “People don’t read anymore.” I’ve discussed this before and it makes my head explode every time I think about it.

Fortunately, a number of determined and enterprising programmers took it upon themselves to spec – or hack – a reader application for the iPhone. And even more fortunately, Jobs did not discourage them. One hopes he realized he had spoken recklessly.

There is another way to read The Proviso on the iPhone/iTouch and that’s using Stanza and our EPUB format (included in the zip file).

But he also talks about Fictionwise:

Aside from the satisfaction of seeing Steve Jobs proven wrong, it’s also inspiring to see Fictionwise taking this initiative. We at E-Reads are big fans of Fictionwise. It is our principal e-book distributor and a major reason why this industry is beginning to thrive.

Now, I like Fictionwise, I do. But we can’t get on Fictionwise, either, because they require a publisher have 25 different titles by 5 different authors and although B10 Mediaworx does have titles in the works by people other than I, it’ll be a long time before we see that goal realized.

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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.

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