You know, I shove a tanto in my gut and bleed all over the interwebz about my issues with embedded font evangelism in the name of book designer job security, then I get over it and I think I’m done.
Well, Penguin Books has reminded me this morning that not only am I not done, I’m now pissed off as a reader and not as a writer/publisher/e-book mark-up-er, except . . . this is really not about Teh Pretteh. It’s about DRM. I’m fighting the wrong battle. The book designers can go figure out their own lives. I’m a reader first, dammit.
You Can Count on Me novella by Roxanne St. Claire, in this anthology
Way back in the day (six months ago), Penguin offered the novella “You Can Count on Me” by Roxanne St. Clair as a free PDF download you could snag from Ms. St. Clair’s site. It was part of a Christmas anthology called I’ll Be Home For Christmas and features characters from her long-running series called The Bullet Catchers. I believe there are currently three books in this series, with probably more to come.
Now, I don’t like romantic suspense and I don’t like anthologies and I don’t like Christmas romance novellas, but this looked like a good way to ease me into a romantic suspense series that already had me intrigued.
And it was free. No question.
Yet I forgot the cardinal rule of life: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Dear Penguin:
You suck. And not in the good, hot, naughty kind of way.
The novella is 97 PDF pages long, but it’s 5.25 MB. Why? BECAUSE IT’S A SCAN WITH A BIG FAT KANGAROO WATERMARK ON EACH PAGE.
To give you an idea of how big this is, my 736-page doorstopper’s PDF is 7 MB. 736 pages >97 pages.
I converted this novella before I realized it was a scan. Easy enough. PDF → RTF → IMP.
Except it wouldn’t load onto my eBookWise. WHY WHY WHY? Well, because it’s just too big. The IMP file is 68 MB.
eBookWise reader
To sum up: Not only am I NOT going to read this free PDF (because I don’t read books on my computer), I’m also going to dump it from my computer (which I never do because even the bad books still belong to me) because it’s a space hog and severely cramps my Vostro’s innards when it tries to open the damned file, and I’m going to remember Ms. St. Clair (poor dear, I know it’s not her fault) for this and only this.
You cost me a lot of time with your chastity-belted freebie, time I could’ve used to make money to buy the anthology the novella came from and buy more of Ms. St. Clair’s work if I liked the novella.
Perhaps authors and agents negotiating contracts with you would do well to remember that your DRM process never gave me a chance to get hooked off your free hit.
Love,
Mojo
Update @8:38 p.m. It was just pointed out to me that the PDF file didn’t actually have any DRM on it. It was just a wildly bloated scanned-and-watermarked PDF. The effect, however, is the same: Make it as difficult as possible for the consumer to read the book. Every time I open the PDF, whatever else is in those graphics (it’s a scan, remember), it nearly crashes my computer.
One could argue that this is where book design and fear of piracy converge to create a virtually (heh) unusable product.
Usually I wouldn’t just straight-link someone else’s piece without using it as a springboard for something I want to say, but Jane said pretty much all there needs to be said. Oh, except, use a common format like, oh, say EPUB.
very nice – and in most repsects I completely agree with you. But I’d like to hear your take on one specific, seemingly outlandish scenario.
Please accept the scenario as the working environment, rather than worrying about its seeming ridiculousness.
Suppose that in advance of publication, you know two things about the market it is targeted for: 1. a closely related market is not only hostile to the book, but to the author as well. 2. that same community has amply demonstrated in the past that they are both capable of and motivated to use whatever means possible (including pirating) to damage sales, sell pirated versions, etc., etc.
Would you still advocate an e-book version? Staying away from DRM? Simultaneous release (print & e)?
This is a real scenario and if you feel that you haven’t gotten enough info to make a considered judgment, I’ll be happy to supply more off-blog.
So let’s try this again and I will make myself very clear: I’m seriously pissed.
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.
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.
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:
offer more than one file format (PDF) and/or
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.
[07/15/2025: At the time of cleaning this post up, I can’t retrieve “25 to Life” from the archive where I put it, so instead, I made my story from Monsters & Mormons, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself” available for free to demonstrate.]
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:
“Allow Me to Introduce Myself” uploaded 07/15/2025 for demonstration purposes Now you can read “25 to Life” here for free.
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.
Note: I cross-posted this on Publishing Renaissance on December 24, 2008.
I’ve been thinking about offering a quick’n’dirty series on how to create various ebook formats, wondering if independent publishers (or even micro- and small presses) know how to disseminate their wares effectively in electronic format. I know PDF is the fallback position and while I have a love/hate relationship with PDF (formatting, yay! reading on computer, boo! hiss!), most people who don’t have an ebook reading device pretty much are stuck with the computer.
(This is one reason I have issues with places like Lulu, iUniverse, AuthorHouse, etc. Their electronic delivery is exclusively PDF. I don’t know if the authors have the option to create other formats or even if they’re inclined to do so, but I urge those indies who choose such providers to check it out and diversify.)
SmashWords has a grinder program that allows you to upload your document and then spits out various electronic incarnations of it, but it has formatting issues, which is to say, some it ain’t pretty especially if you have a not-very-well-formatted RTF document to begin with. Oh well and get over it. They do a marvelous job with what they get and it’s a few hundred steps in the right direction—not to mention the fact that once you get it on your ebook reading device, it probably won’t make you any difference.
But in case you do want to know how it’s done (or, more properly, how we did it, properly or not), what tools we used, why—and we invite others to correct us on more efficient ways to do it (that doesn’t involve Book Designer, thanks)—here’s the first and most important thing you have to do:
Learn XHTML and CSS. Really.
O’Reilly at Tools of Change is pushing for all formats to be based on XML, but if you’re reading this post, this is probably a DIY project and XHTML is, IMO, easier to learn. You will need this for every format you might want to offer (except PDB [Palm] and as an ebook application [iApp] to be sold in the iTunes store).
After that, it’s all tweaks and about 6 different pieces of (almost free) software.
Go on now and learn XHTML and CSS. I’m not going to post tutorials on that when others have done it better than I.
Jasmine or honeysuckle, if you’re offering. Lavender and gardenia make my nose itch.
THE JEWEL OF MEDINA by Sherry Jones
A resident of the Ivory Tower, who apparently called dibs on A’isha (child bride of Muhammed) as her personal and exclusive domain of study and forgot to send the memo, raised a ruckus about a book she didn’t like and managed to get Random House to pull it after the author had been paid her $100k advance and the presses were rolling. I say it’s an academic hatchet job.
I remember when I was a kid, going to The Jones Store and Macy’s around Christmas time gathering our Santa choices, then wandering around to find a clerk to take your money. Unfortunately, “there was no one there to take my money and they wasted my time by making me go fetch them” isn’t a good defense for walking out of the store with what you want, even if you can break it out on a wage basis and demonstrate adequate opportunity loss.
Harlequin. Bite me.
I haven’t bought a Harlequin in years. Dunno why, just didn’t get around to it, I guess. But I was reading the recommends on Dear Author and saw Just One of the Guys by Kristan Higgins and said, “Must. Have.” So I scoot myself on over there and what do I get? The runaround. Takes me 30 minutes to buy 4 ebooks, WTF?!?!?
I shopped in Firefox. My bad. Most days I don’t even remember what “Internet Explorer” is.
You have DRM, which means that if I want to put these puppies on my eBookWise, I have to buy the Microsoft Reader version, then crack it with ConvertLit (file name: clit.exe … I grin every time I open file manager and see that).
I have selected my purchases (about 10 books all told—I’m such an addict) and go to checkout, but I have to register for your site.
Yet ANOTHER ONE. Do you know how many passwords I have now? I have to keep a password keeper (portable app, Yadabytes Passwords, brilliant and fabulous) on my thumb drive now. Why do I have to register for your site? Why can’t I just hit “pay,” enter my credit card number (or better yet, allow the use of Paypal), and be gone? [This is a serious pet peeve of mine anyway.]
But wait! I have to download and activate MS Reader.
But wait! I already have it; why aren’t you recognizing it?
But wait! I have to go activate it. For the fourth effing time (I’ve only bought 3 MS Reader formatted books thus far, so that’s an activation for each time I want to buy one).
And then I do that, come back and oh! I can’t get my download from Firefox. I have to open up IE to do that.
I do that. I go to eHarlequin.com thinking it’s the ebook site and fill up my cart with all my goodies again (because you know, it didn’t save my selections in my cart from my excursion through with Firefox), only to figure out (thankfully before I purchased anything) that it was the dead-tree site.
Empty cart.
Go find ebook section of the store.
Fill up cart again (by now I have about 7 fewer books than I would have bought at the front end of this process because I don’t want to go find them all again).
Can’t find the ebook I originally came for using any search parameter you can name. Go back to Dear Author and copy the direct link. Put it in cart.
Purchase ebooks.
Download ebooks.
Blog it because I’m seriously steamed.
Now, I like Samhain’s books and their customer service (’cause I had to call upon them one day and they were super responsive), but I can’t stand their Zen Cart checkout process.
Yesterday I wanted to follow an ad from Just Erotic Romance Reviews and ended up at Total-E-Bound’s Zen Cart catalog—and not at the page for the book I wanted to look at.
I love ebooks. My mission is to convert everyone to the Gospel of eBookIsm. But damn, people. Could you make it any harder to buy the things? Here I’ve been thinking the Kindle doesn’t have a long-term chance in hell, but they make everything so easy for the customer (and when one is out and about, to boot!) that I can’t see how it won’t kick everybody’s ass—because you make it so hard to buy anything!
Harlequin. Really. The only reason you got any money from me last night was because I wanted Ms. Higgans’s book so badly. Otherwise, you would have lost the $23 I did spend. That’s not counting the other $35 I would have spent as well, but you gave me the runaround.
I work hard enough to earn it. I shouldn’t have to work that hard to spend it.
