Ebook Linkdump: Epub, PDF, etc
By Robert Nagle
Amazon.com is requiring Librarything to remove links to other booksellers on its book page On the bright side, it looks like LibraryThing is upgrading its interface and offering more features. As a practical matter, I almost never did book hunting via librarything’s book page, especially because it didn’t list books on half.com (which usually had the cheapest prices).
Mike Cane notices that Google search results is now opening up PDFs directly in Google Docs.
Aspose Word for MS Word lets you save MS Word files as .epub. It’s a free plugin, and a cursory test seems to work with images. However, you still need to format MS Word docs very carefully.
Speaking of word processor plugins, here’s eScape, an OpenOffice template you can use to make .epub files. Basically, the OO template loads a batch of designated styles, and a free downloadable Windows utility for handling the conversions. They have a nice tutorial and a Style Reference Sheet (PDF). Again, this doesn’t eliminate the complexity of the task; you just have to understand the styles on the OO template which they provide. By the way, I noticed that they have a special style for verse. Nice! The eScape interface lets you manually specify a different CSS file, so that gives you some control over layout. (The Infogrid Pacific people include two css files specifically for ebooks).
In the technical publishing worlds, did you know that DITA has a plugin to output epub and so does docbook. The docbook xsl uses ruby to zip everything, but you can simply use the docbook XSL to output everything and zip things with your favorite zipping tool. Here is a list of the epub parameters which you can modify. Generally, the epub xsl sheet uses the Chunked HTML stylesheet and adds a few epub-specific parameters. Here’s a guide to all the user-configurable Docbook parameters for HTML output and here’s Bob’s Staynton’s guide about how to customize your html output with docbook parameters.
Time to make your bets about the Nobel Prize for literature. Don’t laugh. M.A. Orthofer notes that last year LeClezio was listed as 2-1 odds on the days preceding the announcement.
I received an email that the Fictionaut writer community site (which had been in private beta for over a year) will be going public next week. I’ve been keeping tabs on it for a while; it could be a major source of quality content. The fictionaut blog seems to be full of articles about new writers. Highly recommended.
Matt Mullenweg wonders aloud about why the Kindle can’t provide statistics about a reader’s reading habits.
You may know that many of the Paris Review interviews before 1990 are available as PDFs. Here are some of my favorite interview quotes.
Someone has a listing of TED talks as a Google spreadsheet.
MLA 2009 Guide about how to cite online sources.
Onfiction, an academic blog about the psychology of reading.
Jake Seliger wonders if reading is like a gateway drug. Alex Rose argues that the “at least they’re reading” excuse doesn’t wash anymore:
If the argument applies to one form of entertainment, though, it should apply to all. Why is it that when kids become enraptured by some idiotic program, no one says, “well, at least they’re watching TV?”
The answer is obvious: we don’t expect much from television. Call to mind the act of channel-surfing across a virtual sea of mediocrity–the officious network anchors, the blaring car commercials, the interminable daytime talk shows. It’s no wonder HBO established its high-brow reputation by defining itself in opposition to its own medium.
But is the literary marketplace really all that different? Step into a Barnes & Noble, with its endless shelves of celebrity hagiographies, its window full of diet books by suspiciously photogenic doctors, its rack of movie novelizations, and ask yourself if publishing is a classy industry.
It may be that the reason we’re so quick to defend the Written Word, to pedestalize its power and grandiosity to the detriment of all other media, is that it’s been here the longest. We can chart its evolution from primitive iconography, to ideograms and glyphs, to alphabets and punctuation, up through epic poetry and drama and novels. It’s earned its place as civilization’s posterboy. Where were the Sopranos when Homer, Cicero and Shakespeare were shaping the Western Canon?
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