In the wee hours I was able to compile an ebook. The pictures don’t display, but the frames are there, so I’m close. It is just as much an ebook as any out there, consisting of an executable file that would be ready for sale upon paying the registration fee. This is actually quite exciting work for me as this event has been pending for probably five years now. By nightfall, I know one hell of a lot more about ebooks than when I got up. I was right to go it alone, it seems every time I need to do something I get no help from nobody. I’m sad to admit there is not one person I’ve met in the whole lot of Florida that could have given me a hand with this.
Sorry if I sound cranky on this point but damn it, just once it would be nice to bump into somebody who isn’t all talk. I’m not referring to the guys I work with, they are professionals in what they do. But I just miss my cerebral crowd, I remember how we used to discuss and problem-solve over coffee nine hours a day. You just can’t do that in this town, nobody is into anything except themselves. The fact is not one person I’ve met in Florida has really accomplished anything since I met them up to seven years ago, much less, say, counted a million toothpicks. Not one.
I’ve looked at the two formats, exe and pdf. Both have weak points, but the lesser of the two is exe which I used this morning. The exe is based on HTML, which is a text format designed by a total retard who didn’t know a thing about typing. It is a piece of garbage we’ll be stuck with for a long time to come. The pdf, which most people associate with Adobe, does a much better job of displaying what actually look like pages.
The places that distribute ebooks use FTP and cryptic file names, it is like looking at a list of DOS files. I’m an old DOS hand and I still had problems figuring out how the University of Virgina download system works. I spent a few hours looking at what was offered and examining how other authors had done things. All of it needs vast improvement and it will be a while before real books are replaced. The sites I visited had a “Top 100 Authors” list and every one of them could stand to take a few typing lessons and maybe a refresher on elements of style. Most of it seems hack-written.
I’m ducking out early tonight, as I want to completely go over both methods again before making a decision. The choice seems to be fancy or flexible, while my concern is to find the one has the least non-typing work. I’ve upgraded all my Adobe readers and I now have ebooks about ebooks. All this takes time. Later, I’ve read a 66-page manual Adobe manual and there may be a way, using a series of products called things like InDesign and Distiller, to render ordinary text into pdf ebooks.
Then a startling discovery. I’ve been reading ebooks for years, but did not know they were ebooks. Whenever you get a CD with the instruction manual, that is a ebook. I just never thought of them that way. To me, those were pdf documents and that was that, no need to think further as them being also ebooks. So I used the software to open Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, which does go on, to note the differences in margins and sizes for display compared to print. The pages are much smaller, the print larger.
