Spontaneous ∂erivation

Yes. It is here.

Update! Ask and ye shall sometimes receive, if it is within my power. A PDF version is now available, with clicky links and everything. Please see Locations below.

Update #2! No one asked, but I created an LRF file for older Sony Readers that can’t read ePub files. I don’t have a Sony Reader, though, so I’m not sure how it turns out; I think the formatting might actually look different than the corresponding ePub, even though they’re all from the same source files….

Note: Remember: these are an unofficial—if legal—conversion. Both the original and these conversions are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Schedule: I plan on doing the episodes as individual files, with “up to now” season compilations as a separate, updated ebook file. Eventually the individual episodes will expire (but that won’t be until season end) and there’ll just be the Season 2 Ebook.

Exciting Features:

• Episode 1 in mobile reading form.
• Pretty cover for your ebook device/software.
• Typographical quotes and dashes!
• All episode-specific easter eggs and extras included.

Locations:

If you own a Kindle or other device/program that can read Mobipocket files (.MOBI):
  Shadow Unit - 2x01 - Lucky Day (Kindle/Mobipocket) (153.9 KiB, 437 hits)

If you own a Sony PRS-505 or later, Adobe Digital Editions, or some other device/program that can read EPub files (.EPUB):
  Shadow Unit - 2x01 - Lucky Day (Epub) (344.3 KiB, 286 hits)

If you own anything that can read a PDF file (bonus if it can deal with links in a PDF file):
  Shadow Unit - 2x01 - Lucky Day (PDF) (135.5 KiB, 313 hits)

If you own an older Sony that cannot read EPub files and don’t want to use the PDF above¹:
  Shadow Unit - 2x01 - Lucky Day (Sony) (157.6 KiB, 276 hits)

Enjoy!

Need Season 1?

It’s currently only available for the Kindle, but can be converted via calibre for Sony. (It’s a huge file, relatively speaking, for an ebook).

Screenshots!

Below the cut.

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1. It’s not form-factored for a small screen, still need to figure out how to do that with the tools I have on hand. [↩]

I added a new quick reference, which is the workflow I currently use to produce two formats (alongside with what might be considered a by-product, HTML): Epub and Mobipocket.

It’s very much geared towards someone with a Mac; however, much of it is easily adaptable to a Windows or even Linux machine, since many of the tools mentioned are either cross-platform or can be run under CrossOver.

The RubyEpub tools mentioned from time to time aren’t necessary, but they make life easier. Right now to get at them you need Subversion knowledge. At some point I want to make them a standard release in one fashion or another, probably as a Ruby gem.

Problem: Convert PDF to reflowable text, preferably HTML.

Why: This is because text that reflows based on the size of the screen, or the size of the font, or the length of a page (or indeed, without the concept of a page) is what suits mobile ebook readers, with smaller screens, best.

Apologies for two Geekery posts in a row. The rest of the discussion is under the fold.

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As of this writing, calibre, which can convert many things from one format to another featuring command-line tools, does not convert LRF to HTML, or indeed, to most anything else other than LRS, an XML format. Currently this is not a high-priority item to fix in calibre itself, because calibre is aimed at converting things to LRF. (The ePub conversion is still relatively new and shiny.)

ETA: Here’s the LRS specification.

So. Heck. Why not. I’m using Ruby, by the way, because Ruby has the kick-ass REXML library, which also forms the cornerstone for my ruby-epub stuff (still in the making).

Geekery after the cut.

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All because I’m still on a West Wing jag and I drank a bottle of this about eight hours ago and I’m still hyper. So I started this (well, yesterday apparently) evening and ended just now.

Here they are:

Below the cut is a gallery of images on the Kindle, wherein I also describe and demonstrate the highlighting and note-taking features of the Kindle. As the movie reviewer with his or her notepad, so I with my ebook reader.

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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, 876 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 894 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, 876 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 894 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, 876 hits)
  Journey to the West: Kindle/Mobipocket (2.1 MiB, 894 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. [↩]

Julian: A Christmas Story
by Robert Charles Wilson
PDF¹ • Kindle/Mobipocket² • ePub³⁴ • Hardcover

The world of Julian Comstock: events of the 21st century have resulted in near-complete technological collapse, tossing the world into an age akin to the mid-19th century. In the United States, the President rules alongside a puritan theocracy, and the country is warring with Europe.

During these troubled times, the friendship between a rural low-born boy and the aristocratic nephew of the President carries them through a holiday of rediscovering the past; but not all is quiet in Williams Ford as the prospect of war shatters the idyllic rural town.

Plus it’s an election year.

A Christmas Story is a self-contained part of a forthcoming novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America.

S∂’s full 2008 Advent Calendar.

1. From kith.org. [↩]
2. Robert Charles Wilson has been gracious enough to let me put up free versions of Julian: A Christmas Story as Mobipocket and ePub versions. Unlike other works I’ve turned into eBooks, this one is under copyright and without a Creative Commons license, which means that permission is required for distribution. [↩]
3. Yes, this is the first work for which I’ve created an ePub version. The Sony Reader, Adobe Digital Editions, and quite a bit of other software can digest ePub. Calibre helped quite a bit with creating a rough version from the PDF to work with. [↩]
4. By the way, Safari and possibly Internet Explorer sometimes want to unzip the ePub file. Use save-as instead. [↩]

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

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