I was talking to my author friend, Guy Stanton III, today and he shared this with me. Many of you already know this, but it’s worth a mention anyway. You know what’s really ironic, David, about combining all the books into one boxed set? I will make more money on the sale of the boxed set than if I had sold the entire series individually, but what’s even cooler is that the customer is going to pay … Continue reading →
This has been an interesting question for the past decade. There are several things which enter into the equation. The two most important are defects and general quality. Aaron Shephard falls on the side of Createspace in a radical change this morning. He’s always taught that Lightning Source is necessary for quality. Defects are a normal aspect of printing Printing is an amazingly complex manufacturing process. Most people tend to think that on-demand digital printers are much better … Continue reading →
Here’s a fun article from CreativePro about the process. Many people do not realize that a lot of the “free type” and a good deal of the professionally designed type is made from or started with digitized characters from printed works using old letterpress fonts outside of the copyright period (normally pre-1940, at this point, in most cases). Doves Press type is one of those The link to the typespec.co.uk site gives more info on the discovery. … Continue reading →
For example, I got this official word today: “Yes, Kobo now accepts FXL EPUBs exported from InDesign and they can be put on sale, they have confirmed the same. The FXL EPUB output from ID also renders correctly on a Kobo device.” Now that is certainly good news which is to be added with the existing iBooks acceptance of ePUB3 books. But the real change has happened more subtly. All distributors now accept ebooks with embedded fonts I … Continue reading →
There have been rumors around for several years now that multiple master fonts might not be gone completely, or that a new solution might be in the works. Nick Sherman wrote a long, but exciting article about the new possibilities on A List Apart. Superpolator (on the left) shows some exciting possibilities. My personal hope is for OpenType features in ePUBs. Variable type has some big guns behind it Recently, Adam Twardoch made a proposal along these same … Continue reading →
Michael’s comments are worth reading I didn’t ask his permission this time, but this is an excellent comment by Michael in reply to my posting about the probable need to go back to using Amazon’s Kindle Export plug-in in InDesign CS6. Michael’s comments are again right on target as far as I can tell. My only hope is that someone at Amazon reads them. Many thanks for such a detailed explanation. My main take-way is that Amazon … Continue reading →
One of my Christmas presents to you this year is my video course for Practical Font Design using FontLab 5 on Udemy. It’s normally a $99 course. But: Until New Year’s Eve: Only $19.00 USD It would make an excellent gift also. It includes complete ebook copy of the PFD book which sells for $9.99. Use this link for the special price
Continue reading →I sent my new book (see the cover to the left) to Kindle KDP. I exported it as ePUB2 with embedded fonts and so on. I converted it with Kindle Previewer.My first reader complained that all the graphics were destroyed. (A graphic 600 px wide by 35 px tall was displaying 600 px wide by 500 px tall.) Plus, the embedded fonts were gone. Plus, nested styles were gone. The custom dingbat bullets were gone from the lists. … Continue reading →
OK! I’m a little punch-drunk I’ve been through this before. In fact, I’ve been through it five times now. it’s been pretty much non-stop since 1991. My life and career [yours too, probably unless you’re a kid born after 1980—especially after 1990] has been radically transformed on a continual basis since 1990 with five major paradigm shifts. Hand-drawn art and metal type to photo-production [Offset Lithography]—the 1960s & seventies: I started in the midst of this change. My … Continue reading →
This posting is a slight expansion of a comment made by Michael Perry of Inkling Books on my “Designing ePUBs With InDesign” New Release posting this morning Michael has been a long-time friend of The Skilled Workman, and his comments have made this a much better blog. He is much closer to a traditional publisher than I. His opinions are worth analyzing and I agree entirely. As you can see in his comment, Amazon is not interested in … Continue reading →