{"id":1468,"date":"2009-06-27T09:47:32","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T14:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=1468"},"modified":"2025-07-31T14:00:57","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T19:00:57","slug":"eating-a-little-bit-of-crow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/eating-a-little-bit-of-crow\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating a little bit of crow…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I got a little mouthy (see this post<\/a>), which will surprise no one.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In Sony Reader, it mostly<\/em> rendered the way it was coded (still no full justification).<\/p>\n

In FBReader, it did not<\/em> render the way it was coded at all<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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

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

Both The Proviso<\/em> and Stay<\/em> look \u201cnice\u201d in ADE, Sony, and FBReader (insofar as anything looks nice in FBReader). That\u2019s right. They look nice. Not spectacular. They do not have Teh Pretteh.<\/p>\n

And you know what? That\u2019s okay. I can see that Teh Pretteh EPUB file would take a whole lot more work than I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019s be real. People who seek out and read e-books\u2014especially on an iPhone, SmartPhone, Kindle, or dedicated reader\u2014are doing it for the content.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So mea culpa for saying it can\u2019t be done.<\/p>\n

No mea culpa for saying it\u2019s a waste of time to do it.<\/p>\n

For now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I got a little mouthy (see this post), which will surprise no one. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[529,558,222],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-production","category-creating","category-ebooks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16923,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions\/16923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}