Hong Kong 2012: The Ebook
Started: 2013-02-06 20:44:06
Submitted: 2013-02-06 22:26:22
Visibility: World-readable
In which the intrepid narrator unleashes an ebook on the unsuspecting populous
If you're still catching up with my adventure in Hong Kong, or you want something a bit more convenient to digest than the blog version, I present my first-ever ebook, written in the time-honored fashion of concatenating a bunch of blog posts into a manuscript and calling it a "book". (Mine actually tell a story from beginning to end, though there's not really much arc to the story.) I have two versions, depending on your e-reading device of preference:
- hong_kong_2012_the_ebook.epub, epub version, for pretty much everything except a stand-alone Kindle;
- hong_kong_2012_the_ebook.mobi, mobi version, for stand-alone Kindles.
(If you're running an iOS device, iBooks will read the epub version. If you're running an Android device, Aldiko seems to be the most popular reader, though it does unkind things to the images at the beginning of each chapter on my phone. I tried to format the book so it would be roughly equivalently legible on a smartphone and on a large tablet (which means the images are way too big for a smartphone and a bit on the small side for a full-sized tablet), but I have a better appreciation now for the problems that ebook publishers face. But they're paid to do that sort of thing so I'd hope they had it figured out by now. This is something I cobbled together in a few spare evenings using free software; they don't have an excuse.)
All of the content for the book came from my blog and Kiesa's blog. I used Sigil to create the properly-formatted epub file (which is really just a zip file with a bunch of html files and some metadata) and Calibre to convert it to Kindle's mobi format. (I'm also working on a printed version, which will feature the same text with much better graphic design, though I want to tweak the manuscript a bit longer before firing up my desktop publisher again.) The further reading came from our catalog on LibraryThing.
(I've tried these books on the devices I have available in my household, but I'm curious how they appear on your devices and software, so let me know.)
