Monthly Archives: January 2011

E-editing

30 Sunday Jan 2011

Posted by in Editing, ereading, Writing

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E-editing

I’m enjoying my ereader very much – it’s such a comfortable and easy way to read. One way I’m using it which I hadn’t anticipated is as an editing device. I’m slowly working on The Viking and the Vendetta, when I have time. I’ve written about half the book, so far. The other week, I converted the Word file into epub format and started to read the work-in-progress on my ereader. I soon found that it was much more pleasurable than trying to read the book on a computer screen (as is the case with every other ebook, so of course it was!).

The ability to make notes on the ereader makes it even more useful. When I notice something that needs changing, I can insert a note and then, when I’m back at the computer, I can go through the file, note by note, and make the alterations to the master Word document. The limitations of the stylus and on-screen keyboard mean that I won’t be making major additions to the book using this method, but it is great as a line-editing device.

It’s interesting that having an ereader is changing the way I write as well as the way I read!

Ebook quality

28 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by in Editing, epublishing, ereading, Free reads, Libraries

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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

She was watching them and biting her Up.

…from the sideboard as! I held their attention…

Ill work on Terence and make another stab at the diary.

“J think he lost the battle because of his hemorrhoids.”

Kõiõing-neeaies as sne spoêe.

Authors of self-published books are often criticised for poor editing. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to edit one’s own writing – this is one area where a book that goes through the traditional publication process is almost always going to have an advantage. Almost always…

The examples above are not from a self-published book. They’re from the first ebook I borrowed from my public library (via the OverDrive service I discussed the other week). In theory, from a book which has undergone a rigorous quality-control procedure. Oh yeah?

They’re clearly errors which have crept in through an OCR (optical character recognition) process. Which has been poorly checked. Now I haven’t paid anything for this book, having read it through the library service, but if this is the same file that is made available for purchase, then I would have paid between $6.07 and $7.99 for it. And would have been even more annoyed by the mistakes. It’s not just self-published books which need careful proof-reading.

The book is an excellent read, by the way, despite the distracting errors.

Cover again

13 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by in Artwork, epublishing, Software, Websites

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Revised cover, January 2011

One day I might stop tinkering with the cover of The Roman and the Runaway. Probably when I finish The Viking and the Vendetta and have a new toy to play with. No time soon, then…

The book is in so many different places now, that it becomes a major task to update the cover in all of them, which means it isn’t something to be taken on lightly. Top marks to Feedbooks, who make the change instantaneously. Smashwords comes a creditable second, with a very quick approval process. Amazon is slower and won’t let you make more than one change at a time, so I still have to go back to them and submit the final version, as my first wasn’t quite up to the job. For sites which are more heavily mediated (ManyBooks, for example), I have to send an email to make changes. As you might imagine, the version of the book on those sites doesn’t get updated very often!

I’ve uploaded a copy of the book to Goodreads now too. This involved using Calibre to convert my Word document into an epub file. Sounds easy, but turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Not Calibre’s fault for the most part, but Word’s. For some reason, the navigation had gone screwy, even though I’d diligently labelled all the chapters as ‘Heading 3’ and all the parts as ‘Heading 2’. When I saved the file as HTML before importing it into Calibre, this meant that the table of contents was messed up, too. I must have done that conversion six or seven times before I was finally happy with the epub. I could just have downloaded the Feedbooks version, I suppose and used that (Goodreads does suggest doing this), but I wanted to see what the conversion process entailed (and wanted to use my chapter numbers, instead of the ones Feedbooks insists upon). In this respect, Smashwords is less obliging – they won’t let you use the files that they create from your Word document, in other places. I recommend Calibre generally, as a management tool for ebooks.

It’s all very complicated, I must say. Makes you quite nostalgic for the days of print…

A tale of two semi-autobiographical novels

12 Wednesday Jan 2011

Posted by in 'Show me the free' challenge, Reviews, Websites, Writing

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Hm, that title doesn’t roll off the tongue too well, does it?

One of the wonderful things about getting an ereader is the availability of out-of-print classic books. Project Gutenberg is a good source, but you can also find them at places like Feedbooks, Open Library, the Mobileread site and ManyBooks. It’s a chance to catch up on reading all those books that you feel you really should have read, but haven’t.

This month, I’ve read two books from Project Gutenberg which, on the face of it, might be thought of as quite similar. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes, was published in 1857 and tells of the experiences of a Rubgy School student. David Copperfield was first published as a book in 1850 and follows the life of a young author, including his days at school in Canterbury. In both books, the character of the boys’ headmaster is an important one.

If I had not looked up the dates of publication, I would have said that the Hughes book was much older than the Dickens one. Its style and content is more formal, more didactic, more moralistic and much less enjoyable to read. Then I thought perhaps it was a difference in the age of the authors, but no: they were both in their thirties when their respective books were published. I’m not at all surprised that Dickens was so popular during his lifetime, and continues to be so today, while Hughes remains relatively unknown. It seems that Hughes was well aware of my concerns with his book, as he said (according to Wikipedia):

Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great fault of it is ‘too much preaching’; but they hope I shall amend in this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn’t do so myself.

I think Hughes missed an opportunity here. If he’d made his book more enjoyable to read, then he could have got his message across to many more people without the necessity of preaching. As it is, I certainly can’t recommend Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

David Copperfield, on the other hand, is gripping, entertaining and often funny. At over 700 pages, it is a long read, but a satisfying one. My suspicion (as always) is that I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t read this particular classic, but just in case that’s not true, this one is a worthy addition to anyone’s free ereading library.

The covers on this page were taken from Open Library. The images are links to the Project Gutenberg versions of the book.

Book review: Smallworld by Dominic Green

04 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by in 'Show me the free' challenge, ereading, Free reads, Reviews

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My first free read of 2011 was Smallworld by Dominic Green, available free from Smashwords. Sci-fi is a little outside my comfort zone, and there were so many strange words in the first few pages that I began to wonder if I’d be able to continue reading. But I persevered, and I’m glad I did. The story concerns a tiny moonlet which is home to the Reborn-in-Jesus family, their various adopted children, a mysterious hermit and a Devil. The Devil has a habit of killing anyone who threatens the peace of the colony. The reason the Reborn-in-Jesuses have so many adopted children is because their parents were all killed by the Devil.

The novel has some great side-swipes at issues of genetic engineering (the McChickens), religious indoctrination, slavish exploitation of technology and the abuse of power in general. There are some laugh-out-loud moments: I liked this description of the state schools on other worlds, for example:

“Those schools incorporate electric shock discipline, chemical aversion therapy, and subliminal messaging.”
“Granted,” nodded the Pastor, “but it is not all good.”

There were a few minor typos and, in some places, I felt there was a paucity of commas. But nothing major. I will admit that the ending left me feeling slightly puzzled, but maybe I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

I’ve come to the conclusion (after a whole week and a half of ereading) that there are two types of ebooks: those where you keep checking the page number you’re up to (and how much further there is to go), and those where you don’t care what page number you’re on, because you’re enjoying the book. Rather like being on a long car journey – if it’s a tedious one, you keep looking at the road signs to see how many miles/kilometres you’ve got until your destination. If the scenery is beautiful, you’re not so worried. At the beginning of this book, I was checking the page numbers, but by half-way through, I was enjoying the ride. Thanks, Dominic!