ePublishing for fun and profit
680 wordsYesterday, I did some experimenting with Amazon’s DTP — “Digital Text Platform”. This is the service that allows anyone to create eBooks for the Kindle, and sell them on Amazon. Or rather, it allows Amazon to sell them, and give you a 35% cut.
What I discovered is that this publishing lark isn’t as easy as it looks.
Obviously, Amazon’s service doesn’t write content for you, and I didn’t have any scintillating content of my own to publish, so I decided to pretend I was following the good old out-of-copyright publication method:
- Locate some content that’s out of copyright
- Publish it
- Profit
Wanting something that was in the spirit of this honourable enterprise, I found some Marxist literature, in Georgi Plekhanov’s 1985 “The Development of the Monist View of History”, on Marxists.org. That’s $35 at Amazon in tragically unhip dead tree format, you know.
For a computer geek like myself, it didn’t take much doing to rip the whole relevant part of marxists.org to my hard drive. I decided to see whether it would be enough to zip the whole lot up and upload it to Amazon. Amazon DTP accepted the file, and informed me that it was converting it. The preview option showed that it had only coverted one HTML file, the first one alphabetically. This was “app1.html”, the first appendix.
For a second pass, I concatenated the whole lot into one file, and removed extraneous ‘html’, ‘body’ and ‘head’ tags. I uploaded this, and ended up with something that vaguely resembled an eBook.
The next job was to add metadata. The author and title were easy enough. For ‘publisher’ I entered ‘Canal House Publishing’. Then I thought I had better credit the translators too. But this threw up a question. Was the translation out of copyright too? It seemed to be from 1947. Was I sure enough of US copyright law (Kindle publications are only sold to the US market for now)? What about the people who transcribed this edition to the Web? Were they entitled to anything? That’d really sting my margins! Then there were keywords and categories. Er… ‘politics’… ‘marxism’… ‘political science’? ‘monism’? Things were getting a bit questionable now. It soon became apparent I was out of my depth, even before I came to the ‘Description’ field.
Still, I could come back to that. I started looking into tidying up the HTML. Cleaning out extraneous display-oriented elements, such as repeated headers, ‘top of page’ links, and so on, was simple but irritating. Next were the footnotes. Were these part of the original text? Were they part of the 1947 translation? Were they subsequently added by the marxists.org editors? Most importantly, who, if anyone, held the copyright for them? I wasn’t sure. Safest to edit them out. Likewise the editor’s preface.
By now I was left with a vanilla text, perhaps stripped of the author’s own footnotes, certainly stripped of valuable context. If I had ever really intended to go through with it and click the ‘publish’ button, by now I would have been ashamed to do so. Before I could have done, I would really have needed to create a cover image. It would also have been polite to my readers to have added section tags in appropriate places, and to have generated a table of contents.
I had spent an hour or so discovering that creating a quality eBook from free sources is not free of effort. Having said that, what I had very early on was shoddy but usable (if you really want it, it’s free: as OPF or PRC), and I’m sure you’d get similar results by sending HTML or text to your Kindle using Amazon’s service for Kindle owners.
I have some new found respect though, for the Wordsworth Classics type publishers of this world. There’s more to producing a book — even an eBook — than just dumping a chunk of Project Gutenberg to the page. You need legal skills, you need some copywriting skills and some knowledge of the book’s subject (for cover bumph), and you need graphic design skills for the cover even if you find public domain images.