The State of Ebooks Update

Standard Ebooks

I continue to make ebooks for Standard although my rate has slowed down. This is mostly due to choosing longer projects instead of sticking to plays. I think I am on number 38 now (a collection of Wodehouse’s golf stories). I also do reviews of others’ submissions, which is this weird mishmash of proofreading, code checking and editorial oversight—a combination of skills I didn’t think would be all that easy to acquire.

All in all I enjoy it immensely and intend to keep participating for the foreseeable future.

Bright Wing Media

Back just before the new year I interviewed with Bright Wing for a job I hadn’t applied for. That didn’t turn out (afaik they just didn’t fill the position) but I kept gently reminding them of my existence and finally picked up some work. So far I have created/remediated four public domain ebooks for them: Theodore Dreiser – An American Tragedy, Charles Dickens – Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South and T.E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And it looks like I have another project in the pipeline for next week and it might even be something original this time. Hopefully this will turn into an ongoing gig.

It’s been interesting work, mostly for the understanding of different publisher’s systems and requirements and I was finally forced to learn to use Sigil (which I had played around with previously but ultimately ignored in favour of using a straight-up text editor).

The General State of Ebooks

This (different publishers’ systems and requirements) brings me to an important topic that I am trying to learn/participate in/promote. Just a disclaimer first, this is a huge topic and well worth a much, much longer post, but I am just going to give you a bit of a rant and leave the meat of the issue for later.

Ebook Accessibility

A traditional bound book sucks for accessibility. You need two good hands and two good eyes to read it. You could probably get away with one of each but the experience starts to deteriorate rapidly. But what could you do? But ebooks, ah, ebooks offer a world of possibilities, don’t they?

Way back when, when ebooks were in a fledgling state and sales were minimal, publishers embraced ebooks reluctantly and, quite frankly, poorly. But these days — sadly (to me) much under the influence of that monolith of capitalism Amazon — ebook sales have increased to over 20% of a publisher’s total book sales revenue. The books themselves are getting more and more sophisticated in design and format and the readers much more ubiquitous.

Industry standard programs lie Adobe Indesign has made great strides in their approach to converting a print book to digital format and many other tools have continued to progress to the point where creating an ebook is relatively simple for any publisher.

In conjunction with all that the issue of accessibility has also continued to be addressed and many working groups like NNELS here in Canada, Accessible Books Consortium, The DAISY Consortium
Creating the best way to read and publish, Benetech, and the World Wide Web Consortium have all been working together to develop and modify standards that will hopefully help the broadest swath of disadvantaged readers.

As a result there exists now a robust standard now that allows an ebook to be created in a way that helps various technologies to present the material to make the experience enjoyable and fluid for a broad range of disabilities.

Great stuff.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is change is hard and publishers are stubborn.

I know, I know, that’s not totally fair but it is a realistic overview of the situation. In order to create a born-accessible ebook certain jobs have to shift around, new skill sets have to be learned and priorities have to change. To remediate old ebooks to the current standard takes more money, more time and an even more specialized skillset. All this costs money and time and most small publishers don’t have either. The big ones — the ones who should be showing leadership and have a bit more money — are a bit more on the stubborn side if you ask me; although I admit shifting a production process is infinitely harder when you produce 1000 books a year than when you produce 10.

Still, you get the point.

What’s the solution?

Hah, if I knew that I would be a lot richer than I am now. But…

1. First they need to look at the problem from a different angle. It’s all just code and if there is anything this world has a lot of, its coders. It’s not that hard to automate a lot of this — working Standard has taught me that.
2. Second we need to stop focussing on profit. There is no profit incentive for wheelchair ramps, braille letters on elevators or TTY machines. Just invest in making the process easy and publishers will fall in line and someone will figure out how to make money from it later.
3. Publishing needs to grasp that change is good and rearranging and retraining some key personnel will make this go a lot smoother — and they will eventually reap the benefits of that change. Personally I don’t believe it means hiring more people or spending more money. It’s no worse that the transition to desktop publishing from paste up — eventually the benefits spoke for themselves.
4. And finally, and most importantly someone needs to conk the standard setters on the head and remind them that just because standards organization have been speaking in something even worse than legalese for decades, that it really, really isn’t helping anyone. In fact, even for me, it is a huge disincentive.

You’d think if the technology types could sit with the communication types to make the process clear and then the government types provided a bit of money then this would straighten itself out pretty quick. Right, I know. Lol.

But I watched a panel a while back talking about the issues surrounding ebook remediation and two things struck me.

1. Someone said that publishers can’t expect to retain people with all the right skillsets. Granted he was talking about the broader idea of accessibility and that included braille, audio books, etc. as well as accessible ebooks but still… It’s not that hard to train/find people to understand standards, code and software as well as design and traditional production — we already did that once back in the 90s. It’s not hard or unreasonable, it’s just different and, again, I acknowledge change is hard. I don’t know what the design schools are teaching these days but this really should be a priority.
2. The person who represented small publishers said she had gone through a back-and-forth process with NNELS to produce a fully compliant accessible ebook and she now has a template. As a result their ebook production time and difficulty has decreased significantly. Exactly. Set a standard and follow it. Any press could do that and if the template was freely available and easily customizable, well…

Of course it’s not always that simple. Especially if you are dealing with textbooks, or specialized publications that require a lot extra coding. But there is absolutely no excuse for producing a traditional fiction-style ebook that is not fully compliant with the accessibility standards. None. It’s just ignorance and/or laziness.

And we can fix both of those. So let’s…

---

P.S. My biggest issue remains the kind of communication and misinformation that surrounds the whole ebook production process. It’s just not that hard, and making an ebook accessible in the first place (or remediating old ones if you have to) is currently wrapped in some sort of mystique and arcane-ness — and a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo. Again, to me, it comes down to piss poor communication and misguided advocacy in an age where driving public perception, propaganda, and manipulating the message have reached a high art. I can’t help thinking it’s a matter of mistaken priorities.

P.P.S. If you want to learn more about ebook production, coding and even what’s necessary to meet the standards, I encourage you to take a swing at volunteering for Standard Ebooks. There is a great step-by-step and I have even written a guide on how to go about getting started for those of us more editor and less coder.

John Scalzi had a problem and that problem was myriad: Covid, politics and a whole lot of writer’s block. So he decided to pull the plug on his current project despite contractual obligations. Then he had his own The Big Idea (The Big Idea is Scalzi’s vehicle on his blog that gives a platform to other writers to talk about what inspired their latest work.) And the The Kaiju Preservation Society was born (hatched? produced?). Don’t skip the Afterword on this one, it contains a lot of interesting tidbits and insight into the process.

The The Kaiju Preservation Society is set in a near-present-day period and features an aspiring academic who ends up in a go-nowhere gig-economy job during Covid. Until one day a “client” offers him an interesting proposition. What follows is fun, fast-paced and above all the signature Scalzi brand of clever. Throughout the book Scalzi plays with words, tropes and cultural references while weaving a delightful tale that is easy on the brain, yet satisfying and ultimately a darn good read.

In this book, Scalzi depends less on fancy technology or science-fictiony elements and leans heavily on his (admittedly slightly absurd) premise to force his characters to move the story along. It becomes one long string of what-ifs that, in aggregate reads more like a 70s adventure/spy novel than anything else. Given Scalzi was going for a “fun” read, I think that was an excellent choice. I certainly enjoyed the ride.

If this is your first venture into Scalzi’s oeuvre then you won’t be disappointed (unless perhaps you don’t like light-hearted romps) and if you are a long-time reader then, well, it’s 100% pure Scalzi.

---

Also posted on Goodreads

Instead of some senseless blithering this snowy Saturday morn, I wrote another review: macblaze.ca/books/reviews/2022/network-effect/

Well, well, well…

After 3+ years of volunteer work for Standard ebooks, I will very soon be able to call myself a professional ebook developer. (I know, I know, I have actually been paid before but this is somehow different.) I got my first project today and should be able to bill for it early next week. With any luck it will turn into a regular thing.

Details to follow.

So chuffed.

So I signed up for NetGalley after doing two reviews using L’s account. I didn’t have to much in the way of hope at first since I didn’t really have a record of reviewing but I thought…what the hell.

I got my first acceptance from MacMillan/Tor: The Origin of Storms by Elizabeth Bear— which was unfortunately a book I already had done a review for. Not wanting to shoot myself in the foot by submitting the same review twice I did another one. Read it here.

Then I got another book, and another (look for new reviews soon). Which brings me to this post.

PDF Galleys

One of the books I was given was Guy Gavriel Kay’s upcoming new book All the Seas of the World published by Penguin Random House Canada. Unfortunately it was a drm’ed pdf. “Unfortunately” because not only did I not want to read a pdf, and not only did I not want to authorize my ereader for drm, it turned out it was the pdf of the hardcover pages which meant it was meant to be read at 6 x 9 and the type was super tiny on all of my devices — and I actually couldn’t read it without glasses which was a non-starter for me.

But I didn’t want to fail on one of my first acceptances—I am not sure how harshly the publishers judge these things. I tried a bunch of different things including trying to convert it to an epub but the drm stymied me. For some reason the de-drm scripts I was using just wouldn’t work on this pdf file even though the documentation implied that it would.

Getting creative

I put it aside. Then I came back to it, tried a bunch of different software to try and embiggen the type and again failed miserably. At this point I was starting to feel threatened by the “machine” and my stubborn kicked in.

A google search found reference to Adobe changing their DRM in relation to pdfs between ADE 2 and 3 (Adobe Digital Editions) with no recourse except to downgrade. I was running ADE 4.1 by this time so I decided to install an old version of ADE (care of the handy Internet Archive link) on my old Mac Mini 2011. This along with an old Version of Calibre and older De-drm script resulted in a functioning, albeit slow, install that finally was able to strip the drm from the pdf.

A bad, bad epub

Next step: Calibre’s handy convert to epub feature gave me a functioning, yet butt-ugly epub.

So I used eCanCrusher to unpack the epub and started to make a new one. Using Standard ebooks tool suite I made a new container and started to copy the text into the new publication, cleaning it up as I went.

The text was pretty messy since the epub convertor can’t differentiate styles, chapter breaks etc. But I’ve been doing this sort of clean up a lot so it took less than an hour to go from pdf to 90% clean ebook. The last 10% will take a close proofread which is what I wanted it for in the first place. Ta-da…take that technology!

Who owns what?

Now I had been making the assumption that as Galleys these books were essentially electronic ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) which are what publisher’s produce in advance of the publication date to give out to reviewers. It is understood that you aren’t to sell or give away these copies but they make a neat addition to you library…I have a bunch of paper ones from past projects.

But I noticed in ADE that, like a traditional library loan, these books had status dates on them. Does that mean my review copy expires? Boo…Hiss!

I guess I will have to wait the 53 days in order to find out, but if so this is just another way that I think the whole ebook publishing market is one big scam. What’s even more ironic is that the Gladstone book (up next after Kay) is published by Tor who eschews DRM altogether. So if I buy a book from them it won’t have drm—but seemingly these galleys do and it will expire like any other library book. I am not sure the value exchange is fair here…I get to read a book a month or two earlier in exchange for my review and personal promotion, but I don’t actually get to reread the book in the future unless I buy it (or take it out from a library). Sheesh…talk about chintzy…

I mean I get that digital materials are way too easy to pass around but how about a little faith? Of course I guess after all that work I can hang on to my newly converted epub, but that just seems like cheating.

Addendum

I checked the NetGalley site and apparently the books do indeed expire after 55 days with the option for another 55 day renewal, up until the archive date—which is when the publishers pull them from the site. Except for Kindles:

*If you have used the Kindle option to send a copy of the file to your Kindle, that file will not expire, and will continue to be available to you.

Which is a total crock given how proprietary Amazon is. Maybe I will trying the Kindle app instead so I get to keep ’em. Of course that is like jumping from the frying pan to the fire…

Addendum Part 2

A bit more investigating yielded this:

How It Works

To put a book on NetGalley, authors will first need to complete a contract and submit a payment form. Most authors will likely select from one of the following pricing options: the basic six-month listing option, which is priced at $399, and the Marketing-Plus-Title listing, priced at $599, which includes placement in the NetGalley Newsletter. Indie authors who are members of the Independent Book Publishers Association can take advantage of the organization’s relationship with NetGalley. Through the IBPA partnership, indie authors can list their books at discounted prices ($349 for a standard six-month listing; $499 for a package enhanced by marketing features). In addition, IBPA will do most of the work involved in adding books to NetGalley and processing requests.
—publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/pw-select/article/68517-the-savvy-self-publisher-s-guide-to-netgalley.html

Ahh, the world we live in, where everything is for sale. Another “review” site apparently charges $2/review but that’s ok because the money doesn’t go to the reader…it goes to the company. Right. That makes it ok. Not. So the self-publisher is getting screwed, the reviewer is getting screwed, and the big 5 (or is it 4 now?) reap the benefits of increased sales and exposure at a pretty minimal per/unit cost.

TANSTAAFL.