Not just one #FridayFlash - but a bunch of them!

Not mine, not mine, let me be the first to say.

The great Cathy Olliffe-Webster has taken many of her excellent #fridayflash stories and packaged them into a book.

Full details on Cathy's site. Not only that, the book's available at Amazon, et al, for free for the next while.

So, go for it. Therein you'll find tales to laugh and weep to.

Enjoy.

The iBookstore is a little different

The exercise of formatting my sci-fi novella, Not by Dark Alone, for multiple distribution outlets has been interesting.

Kindle was easy. As was Barnes & Noble and, by extension, Kobo as they both use ePub format and so the only thing I had to change was the front matter (Nook edition vs. Kobo edition and so on.)

Smashwords was a little trickier, ensuring that the Microsoft Word document conformed to their specifications. But I got it done — although I think there are some additional, unasked for, blank pages in the converted books.

The iBookstore version should have been as easy as B&N or Kobo. Again, it's in ePub format. However the book is not available in iTunes as yet.

I now know why. The book's metadata, the information that goes along with the book, is at fault. That, and the title.

The title? Yes. The title cannot be all caps. That makes sense. Nor may it be all lowercase. OK, although I can imagine an author wanting that for style reasons. Nor can it be the mixed form of case that I chose for my title. "by" cannot be as it is written. My title will need to be "Not By Dark Alone."

And the autor's name in the cover art must match the name in the metadata. Ah, I have included my middle initial on the cover, but left it out when assigning my name in the metadata.

So, adjustments to the cover art, both for the author's name and the book's title and also the title in the metadata. And they'll be different to all the other forms of the book. Well, the Apple edition will be "special."

It's these little things that irritate me with the way Apple goes about its business. And I am a user of a number of Apple products.

No - you may not buy this book!

And why ever not, I ask.

"The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke is one of Science Fiction's great works. I don't know how often I've read it. It bears re-reading.

And I bought it for my Kindle some time ago, from Amazon, in the US. I read it. Archived it. Today I was extolling the virtues of the book. We went to see what it cost on Amazon. Not there.

I thought I remembered buying it, nay buying and reading it, so I checked. Sure enough, there in my Digital Items it was. I clicked on the product information and the cover showed up.

And a note that it was not available to people living in the US. I live in the US. It is, however, available for purchasers from the Amazon UK site.

And there we have it, a concern I have about electronic books. If I want to read a book, but it's not published  here in the US, I get a friend or a relative to buy the book on my behalf (a friend of mine did that once for me - but instead of buying one copy of Paul Gallico's "Jennie", titled "The Abandoned" in the US, she bought six! The Lady C was ever thus.)

You can't do that with ebooks. Somehow, I'm not "allowed" own a book not made available in the US.

This is not good.

Lest anyone think that I'm not "for ebooks and e-readers", allow me to present my credentials. I've owned e-readers for well over a decade. My first was the Rocket E-Reader in the late nineties. The side of a large paperback and an ugly gray screen, it was a marvel in its day.

I progressed, after a couple of years,  to the Gemstar color e-reader, which had an Ethernet port (wired) that allowed, what today we would call, in-app purchases. In the end, I bought two of the Gemstars, as the device was discontinued after a few years.

Both of them are alive to this day. Both of them still capable of displaying the content they contain.

A Sony e-reader followed the Gemstar, later traded in for the next version of Sony's technology. Both versions were the new e-ink displays. The Sony still works, and still displays the over 100 books I own on that platform.

The first Kindle, then a Kindle DX, one iPad with Kindle software and now a color Nook (so I can see e-books I publish for that platform) mean that I am very much part of the e-book/e-reader enthusiast group.

Yet there is a restriction placed on me as a purchaser of books in the digital realm that does not, nay cannot, exist in the world of dead-tree books. In the world of dead-tree books I could phone a book store in another country, order the book I wanted, and have it shipped to me. I could even do so using the online-store of such a book store.

I cannot do that with an e-book - the store won't sell it and thus I cannot get it onto my device for reading.

I've just now tried to download the copy I purchased at some time in the past to my Kindle app. There's an error in synching - so no book.

This is not good.

Haiku - Through a Lens

As mentioned in my previous post, "Haiku - Through a Lens" is a collection of some sixty-odd ("don't say it, Kevin, just don't...") haiku teamed with photographs I've taken while out and about.

To celebrate its publication, I'm offering some (seventeen - but of course) copies to commenters on this blog.

After some time futzing with settings, the book is now available for purchase(!) at Amazon: Haiku - Through a Lens for reading on Kindle and various app formats of same. A version in ePub is available from Barnes & Noble for reading on their Nook - it can be purchased here.

Given there are many color photographs in the book, viewing on the Kindle hardware itself, or the original Nook will take some of the impact away. I have checked the book out using the Kindle app on a laptop, an iPad and and iPod Touch. Other than needing to shrink the font size on the iPod Touch to avoid wrapping of the text, it reads very well.

It also previews nicely on the software version of the color Nook and on the Nook app for the iPad.

I tried to use Smashwords for conversion to additional formats and ran up against a size limitation. Haiku - Through a Lens is just short of 5.5MB in its Word Doc format. This, even after taking the Smashwords suggestion of getting Word to compress the images (things were worse before that step.) The current size is above the 5MB limit for Smashwords' Meatgrinder conversion tool.

Short of taking some of the photographs out (my own first thought, but swiftly rejected), any thoughts on what I might do?

So, what about these seventeen copies? The first seventeen haiku comments on this blog entry will gain their authors a copy of the book. I have versions suitable for Kindle and Kindle app, Nook and also PDF. Let me know what format suits you best.

Here's an example of the book's contents:














I hope you enjoy it.

What to do with all these Haiku?

Those who have seen my tweets passing by in the timeline (what an odd construction that is...) or as part of the "news" page on facebook, or yet again, off to the right on this blog will have detected my fondness for the simple, though not easy, form of poetry known as Haiku.

How I love a sentence that runs pell-mell all over a page!

According to my Twitter page I've sent over 1,900 tweets. The vast majority of these will have been the short seventeen-syllable scraps of thought in poetic form. With enough practice you can get competent at anything. So, some of the haiku I've composed are good, arresting even. Some, by the same token, are pretty bad - but then, I'm recovering from a lifetime of perfectionist tendencies (not, I assure you, of perfection).

What to do with all these Haiku, I ask? Well, nothing actually. Nothing, at least with the vast majority of them. I quite like the fact that most of them are ephemeral. Less so than I thought as it turns out. I was quite surprised to discover how far back I could go along my Twitter timeline.

No matter, once composed and dropped into the timeline, I consider them off on their own. (Write if you get work, y'hear?)

However (there's always a "however", isn't there?), I've sometimes included a photograph I'd taken with a tweet, combining an image with the verse. These, of necessity, had to be hosted on some web site for viewing. And so they remained.

It was suggested that I might assemble them into an electronic book form. It's possible others might enjoy viewing and reading a collection of these #PhotoHaiku, as I called them within Twitter.

I imagined I might have sixteen or twenty to pull together. So it might make something interesting to view. I was wrong, I assembled over sixty of these photo and poetry combinations, grouping them into three sections:

• Light and Darkness
• Travel
• Seasons

I wondered how I was going to do it, and found that Scrivener, the tool I use on the Mac for my writing, has all the capabilities I needed to handle both the images and the text, in addition to generating native Kindle and Nook formats. The ePub format it generates also works for Apple's iBook - but Apple requires an ISBN - and I didn't have $125 handy.

And so, Haiku - Through a Lens was born. I'm currently thinking through how best to launch it, but the act of pulling together the images and text, grouping them in some coherent way and generating the final output was invigorating.

I must do this again.