A couple of months ago, Alun Salt did a very nice thing for me: he unexpectedly assembled some of the posts I've written here about phantom airships into an e-book. Using that as the basis, I've had a go at learning how to do e-books myself. (Alun recommended using Jutoh, an e-book project manager, and I'm glad he did.) So I've tweaked things a bit; added a few of the recent phantom airship posts I've written recently, played with the cover image, and the result is The Scareship Age, 1892-1946, available in the two most common e-book formats: EPUB, an open format, and MOBI, the format used by Amazon's Kindle. You can download them here, from the Downloads page, or from the sidebar on Airminded's front page. They are of course free, as in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
I have tried this sort of thing before, with my Sudeten crisis posts, but that was as a PDF which is not really suited for e-books; and with all the images it turned out to be quite bloated at 5.6 Mb. The Scareship Age comes in at 0.5 Mb for the EPUB and 0.9 Mb for the MOBI, which is much better. Now that I have a better idea about how e-books work, I'll have another go at the Sudeten crisis. But not now!
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Neil Datson
Well done Brett.
I'm interested in epublishing myself so I'll be following your progress closely.
JDK
eThumbs up! Well done.
A critical aspect that Brett wouldn't state is that he's one of the few people I've come across who can self-edit his work effectively. Speaking as an editor, that's damn rare, and that (or external editing) is a vital element.
Brett Holman
Post authorJDK:
Well, after you wrote that I checked out the files on my iPad and found a couple of formatting errors, so you're right, I wouldn't say that :)
JDK
Guffaw!
Formatting? Blame your designer, not your edito... Oh, that's you too?
Brett Holman
Post authorYes, my various hats are already busily blaming each other!
I've now created a Downloads page for these and other files, accessible from the top menu and the front page sidebar.
Avinash Machado
Thanks a lot,Brett.