Conversation

It’s easy enough I might get back into doing my own manuscripts, modulo cover designs. Don’t know if last inch PDF tweaking is any better now. When I did Tempo in LaTeX in 2011, Lulu screwed up initial print. Print-stability and ebook-render-stability are still unsolved problems
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For Tempo, I eventually went with Lightning Source, which delivered solid print stability, but by demanding a weird old stable PDF version that I couldn’t generate myself, and had to outsource to who also did the cover. Updates are therefore hard, so I have never updated.
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Tempo ebook was weird. I outsourced to a pro shop that asked for Word as input but grudgingly accepted LaTeX generated PDF instead. This was 10y ago. Tools outputting ePub directly have improved, and conversion to mobi is also easy. But the auto layouts are generally atrocious.
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For my ebooks 2 and 3 (be slightly evil and Gervais principle, circa 2013), a friend wrote a script to convert blog/mailchimp export html to LaTeX first and then render as ePub/mobi. Weird, but worked.
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ebooks 4-9 were done by using some custom wrangling, and ebook 10 by … I genuinely have no idea wtf they did but the manuscripts turned out okay, and better than any of the auto-layout half-ass pathways I’ve tried.
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Basically, ~15y since first Kindle reader (2007), ebook production is still janky. But Vellum suggests we’re close to getting to the sort of low-skill predictability and stability that LaTeX+Acrobat delivered (with 10x pain) for print. And might be light enough for easy updates.
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I’ve never considered print again after Tempo partly because of climate, but partly because of sheer jankiness of web-to-print workflows, since poor production is far more visible in print. But since Vellum produces print too, I am experimenting again.
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But this time I’m not doing the whole heavy lightning source pathway. The higher margin and theoretical non-Amazon sales are not really worth optimizing for. Gonna use kindle paperback unless they screw up. You’d be surprised how much can break in production print.
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Replying to
>You’d be surprised how much can break >in production print. No I would not. But I cannot bring myself to read anything but a short eBook on a Kindle. Half the pleasure I get from books is being able to read beautifully typeset copy on high quality paper. eBooks=music on AM radio
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