Spontaneous ∂erivation

Previously I made Journey of the West available in nicely formatting Mobipocket and ePub formats. Kate Nepveu, who also runs the illuminating Lord of the Rings Re-Read columns over at Tor.com, has converted the HTML to eReader format. Thanks, Kate!

Journey to the West, now available in:

  Journey to the West: Epub (1.5 MiB, 889 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 903 hits)
  Journey to the West: eReader (1.8 MiB, 296 hits)

Link for iPhone Stanza Users

I’ve also updated the source files so that the EPub now has better margins, paragraph indentation, and no more big spaces between paragraphs in Adobe Digital Editions.

And I managed to set up things such that (a) Mobipocket interprets the cover correctly and (b) ePub cover resizes image when window is resized.

Yes, I still have the Table of Contents in both, because the very long chapter names don’t work without a little extra formatting. (And how will you ever remember which chapter the alligator demon showed up otherwise?)

Downloads:

  Journey to the West: Epub (1.5 MiB, 889 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 903 hits)

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5
Attribution: Based from work copyrighted 2005 by Silk Pagoda (also CC Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 Licensed).

I noticed that Journey to the West got slower and slower to read in Adobe Digital Editions. I found out why, and fixed it. Here are the download links again:

Download:

  Journey to the West: Epub (1.5 MiB, 889 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 903 hits)

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5
Attribution: Based from work copyrighted 2005 by Silk Pagoda (also CC Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 Licensed).

The reason Adobe Digtial Editions was slow on the ePub version is based on the structure of ePub versus the structure of Mobipocket.

Say that all of my book’s content is in one HTML file. When I stick that into ePub, it’s still just one HTML file. Adobe Digital Editions—and really, just about any ePub reader—unzips and puts the entire file into memory.

That’s fine if the file is, say, the size of a 50 page story. But for a story that’s over 1200 pages long, that method is going to run into problems.

Solution: break up the huge HTML file into 100 much smaller files—one for each chapter.

Now as you go through the book, Adobe Digital Editions will only have perhaps a few small chapters in memory—the ones immediately before and after your position in the overall book.¹ This speeds everything up considerably. And thus you can read as quickly at Chapter 1 as you can at Chapter 100.

Why didn’t this problem affect the Mobipocket version? Because the mobigen compiler automatically does what I had to do for the ePub—it automatically broke up the longer book into 100 separate files², and thus the reader never had more than a few chapters loaded at a time.

And this is where I say Computer Science! and drop off for a good night’s rest.

1. Or Adobe Digital Editions is dumber than I think it is, and only has the current chapter in memory. Still, it’s better than having all 100 loaded. [↩]
2. 100 separate records in its internals, which is actually a Palm database. [↩]

Updated December 14th! New ePub version, optimized. Adobe Digital Editions is now just as responsive at chapter 99 as it is at chapter 1.

Downloads:

  Journey to the West: Epub (1.5 MiB, 889 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 903 hits)

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5
Attribution: Based from work copyrighted 2005 by Silk Pagoda (also CC Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 Licensed).

Journey to the West is sort of the source of all the Kung-fu kool and kookiness, embodied by the enigmatic Monkey as he accompanies a monk, a sentient tool-using pig, a fallen seneschal of Heaven, and a dragon horse.¹ The story is around 400 years old, but still kickin’ it. You can read more about it at this kick-ass Tor.com post by Jason Henninger, Wu Cheng-en Ain’t Nuthin To Fuck Wit:

Xiyouji can be read by those who know nothing about Chinese religion or folklore as an epic adventure, full of humor, monkey violence and poetry. For those who study Asian culture, the story provides an even richer experience, as the subtext offers a fascinating look at the perplexing religious multiplicity of Chinese society. And poop jokes.

[continue reading]

Now quite a few people are interested in reading it, and given that in print it’s a rather thick book—100 chapters long, and in print some 1200 pages—an ebook would be ideal. But while there is a version up at Munseys in ePub, Mobipocket, and many other formats, they’re all poorly formatted. Some reading software will actually crash on page turns (including FBreader, calibre, Stanza, Adobe Digital Editions, which is a very wide swath of software to do wrongs to).

Thus, I decided to create new ePub and Kindle/Mobipocket versions of Journey to the West. Through much scripting (and re-scripting, and re-scripting) and editing (power-Vim user here), I reformatted things as nicely as I could. I think you’ll like the new versions better; here’s a side-by-side comparison gallery of the Munseys version versus mine as displayed in Adobe Digital Editions (clicky to embiggen):

	Munseys	S∂
Title Page
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Mountain Poem (Chapter 1)
Chapter 15

The ePub version is also completely compliant with the ePub standard, which is not a small feat when you’re flying without Adobe InDesign.

And here are screenshots of the Mobipocket version on the Kindle. I tend to read at the font size of “3″, which is a little bigger than most people (who would read at a font size of “2″); the differences are very noticeable, mostly because I’ve chosen to indent the poetry inwards (and the subtitles in the Table of Contents), a choice I may revisit.

Kindle Home Kindle Guides Title Page
	Font size 3	Font size 2
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Mountain Poem
Chapter 15

1. A dragon hiding out in horse form. Cool, but not as often as it could have been. Ah well. [↩]