Putting books on my kid's vintage ereader and my vintage ereader too and good grief an epub for a fiction book does not have to be thirty megabytes yikes
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So my ereader's choking on this elephant of a book because someone decided the author mugshot had to be four thousand pixels wide just in case someone wants to zoom in on their individual nose hairs
🦝 "Thank goodness for Calibre" and other sentences I thought I would never say.epub
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The Actual Story: 100kb
A cover image four times bigger than the screen of the most high-resolution ereader ever made: One Hundred Times As Much, have fun looking at that on your black and white e-ink screen
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30 megabyte ebook shrunk down to 200k and even with my glasses on I can't see any difference at all
Except that it loads faster
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🐰 I believe it's "Author headshot," Dan, HEADshot, not "mugshot"
🦝 buddy lemme tell ya something about the kinda books I got on my ereader
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reading a thread about bookshop.org's gonna do ebooks and oof
OOF
ebooks are a hot mess, lemme tell ya
Like I have been on every different side of ebooks and they're a mmmmeeesssssss
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actual quote from thread:
"I looked up some stuff about the Kobo-ADE process; so, if I get this right, you have to download ADE and use that on a PC or Mac or Android or iOS device, and make an Adobe account, and then you can download even Digital Restrictions Management*-encumbered ebooks and then can use ADE to move the files onto your non-Kobo e-ink reader of choice."
The thing that every ebook shop competes against:
The publishers insist on copy protection and stuff which makes it a pain in the arse to just buy an ebook and read it, whereas the pirate websites just straight-up hand you an epub no questions asked
The ideal perfect-world solution:
What some folk end up doing:
Publishers and authors could learn a lot from how PC game piracy became less convenient than buying a game through steam, the closest thing to "Steam but for ebooks" is kindle but the difference between kindle and steam is that steam is good
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Having said all that I do hope that bookshop.org is successful and manages to put a crack in amazon's monopoly, but I also hope that it figures out how to just straight-up take my money and hand me an epub in return
Like, I don't want another app, I just want pay money, get epub
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This is what I meant when I said ebooks are a mess
The whole ebook scene is another one of those businesses where I have some money, someone has a thing I want to buy, and there's a whooooole lotta folks whose livelihood depends on getting in the way of me just paying for the thing
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🦌 but Dan what if I give my customer an epub without any DRM and they email it to their friend
🦝 Then you'll have five dollars, rather than the zero you would've had if they got it from a pirate site
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@ifixcoinops Yep. We here in the public library business would like a way we could buy (not lease) ebooks and then lend them to people. We can do this with print books, we can't legally do this with ebooks because of the aforementioned "folks whose livelihood..." problem. We'd even pay decent money. And Libby mostly works and I don't begrudge it, but we'd love something that allowed us to spend the public's money on ownership not leasing.
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@jessamyn @ifixcoinops LOL, yes that would be wonderful for libraries. #SROP has special (i.e., #free) library pricing. Check with our customer service rep.
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@smashedratonpress @ifixcoinops Very good to know and thanks for letting me know.
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@jessamyn
So, in the interest of SUPPORTING public libraries am I helping more by picking up the hard copy or e-reading? I’ll do whichever better supports our libraries.
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@craigburdett In the US, it mostly doesn't matter, they all count towards stats. Technically ebooks have a higher cost-per-use for a popular book but it's not a big deal, if it's the format you prefer. Return ebooks when you're done, that helps. (Kanopy/Hoopla, iirc, charge per view) Though please just USE YOUR LIBRARY. Support it. Encourage people to support it. Especially if your library is somewhere where they are dealing with book challenges and other static. Show up and be present for them.
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@ifixcoinops you have five dollars and an extra reader! Who might pay you another five dollars since day, if you make it possible
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@ifixcoinops maybe the disruption will come from someone making a self-publishing system to compete with Amazon's, and a store to sell those ebooks, without DRM. (right after micropayments)
(Amazon has never said what % of its ebook sales are self-published. I bet it's a bigger% than most would guess....)
Or is that already LeanPub?
https://leanpub.com/bookstore
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@ifixcoinops come to think of it, don't even have any self-publishing tools, it's just DIY/upload. (Everyone can use calibre.)
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@ifixcoinops start with the romance authors/buyers https://magazine.catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/should-i-self-publish-my-romance-novel-indie-authors-how-to-bryn-donovan#:~:text=The%20most%20common%20places%20to,book%20available%20on%20several%20platforms.
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@ifixcoinops I think all the big stores give the self-published author the option of not using DRM, but I don't think it's the default, and some people intentionally keep it.... (it would be funny if Amazon added a "no DRM" filter)
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@billseitz
Bill, thanks for the link to leanpub. 2025 is my year to move off the vampire media.
This looks like an option to ditch KDP.
As for the last bit Calibre has its uses, but surely no sane person would use it to create epubs. :awesome_rotate:
@ifixcoinops
As usual Dan your service to the internet is greatly appreciated.
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@lynfox @ifixcoinops you don't compose in calibre, you create HTML docs elsewhere, and then use calibre to convert the folder into epub.
I did that 10ya.
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/HackYourLifeWithAPrivateWikiNotebookGettingThingsDoneAndOtherSystems
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@lynfox @ifixcoinops heck you can write in GoogleDoc then export to epub, then use calibre to do finishing touches. (probably still won't be beautiful)
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@billseitz
@ifixcoinops
I'm too OCD for that!
By the time I've done the html for the book itself, building the .opf is trivial.
Then it's just one line in the Linux terminal to zip the OEBPS onto an epub.
@ifixcoinops
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@billseitz Isn't that what Smashwords has done???
@ifixcoinops
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@billseitz
I don't think Lulu allows DRM for their own store anymore and they're almost as big as distributors for self-publishing as Amazon?
@ifixcoinops
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@ifixcoinops Also, breaking the protection is trivial. Setting it up in calibre the first time took reading a page of instruction and downloading something. In the years since I just drag my kindle files onto it and poof, free file. So they can have my five bucks and decide to piss away a bunch of programmer and infrastructure money or just have the whole five bucks. Either way I could send the file to someone if I wanted to.
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@ifixcoinops also like people lend physical books and give them away, you still only get $5
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@ifixcoinops And another fan
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@ifixcoinops rather if you look at actual recent history (and why Baen and Tor do DRM free...)
Then you get $20 because that initial user likes the author and the experience and buys a few more of their books... and you get $15 because that other person discovers the same thing and goes out and buys a few newer books.
So that "lost $5" is actually de-facto advertising and causes more money to come in.
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@ifixcoinops oh, and another thing that has been found is that people who pirated music files actually spent far more money on music than the average person who didn't download pirated files.
Similarly people who read books like to spend money on books.
And those who downloaded some stuff just because it was free who did not go on to buy some were people who never would have paid for some (music or books) in the first place. So, again, not a "lost sale".
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@ifixcoinops I don't put drm on my ebooks. There's a note in each one telling readers they can convert to the format they need. & if they don't know how, to email me and I'll send it.
If you buy an ebook it should be yours. If you switch e-readers, you should easily be able to read your books.
I agree - make it simple to get a book. Most people will pay for it.
I have book 1 of a series on gumroad for free/pay what you wish. Folks routinely pay me more than I sell it for elsewhere.
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@ifixcoinops
I believe the best approach is to just buy some version of the book then grab an unrestricted epub of it off Anna's Archive and load anyplace you want.
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@ifixcoinops may be interested in https://libreture.com/bookshops cc @libreture
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@morenonatural @ifixcoinops Thanks for sharing the list, Filipi.
I started putting together the bookshop list, and building Libreture for the exact same reasons Dan mentioned in his thread.
There are so many more bookshops that sell ebooks the right way, it's just that readers have to know about them and find them.
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@ifixcoinops DriveThruRPG has managed to do this with TTRPG books (as admittedly as PDFs rather than ePubs) for 20 years now. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolves_of_Freeport#DriveThruRPG dropping DRM led to a 30% increase in sales
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@ifixcoinops I bought a paperback book the other day and got sent a DRM-free epub too. I was able to start reading before the book arrived. This is how things should be
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