Spontaneous ∂erivation

Photography: audreyjm529

The Christmas Count
by David B. Coe
SCIFiction: Original • Kindle-friendly¹

Of the various things I learned since eBookifying the SCIFiction archives for myself is that bird-watching enthusiasts have a holiday tradition called The Christmas Bird Count. Basically, you wander out and count the number and kinds of birds you saw.

The results are sent to the Audubon Society, which generates statistics to identify environmental patterns and issues. It’s a win-win situation: a fun outing for bird watchers, and information for the Audubon Society.

But what if you see something a bit… out of the ordinary?

David B. Coe’s website has free samples from his books, and he also blogs, on a relatively frequent basis (every few days).

S∂’s full 2008 Advent Calendar.

1. The Kindle-friendly version is NOT hosted on my site; this is a CGI script that filters the more annoying framing HTML from the story text. You can still save the filtered HTML and convert it for your Kindle (with some help from Amazon). And remember: don’t distribute this thing. [↩]

A long time ago (in Internet time, anyways), Scifi.com had a section called Scifiction, where they published science fiction stories online—both “classics”, from writers hoary with age (well… maybe not that hoary; Robert Silverberg, Avram Davidson, Barry N. Malzberg, etc), and “originals”, from newer writers (you know, like Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, M. Rickert, etc).

Then, for whatever reason, Scifi killed Scifiction. All links to the stories were evaporated.

But the Scifiction archives live on. Horribly slow, badly formatted, aging and uncared for, and nearly unreadable in mobile readers like the Kindle, but still there. (Of course, I’m inserting extra drama here. Cue timpanis.)

I got tired of this, so I created eBooks of them, one per year. This was actually my second serious endeavor in the world of eBooks. It was amusing, because the archives are huge; some 325+ stories reside there, spread out over five years. I can’t distribute them, of course, because the stories are all under copyright—and tracking down over 50 writers, some dead so I’d have to contact their estate, is not something I’m about to do. Nor would they wish me to, I think. So I don’t distribute them, and never will.

But the knowledge of how to do it, for people who wish to make personal eBooks, is distributable.

So here’s a description of how I did it, after the cut. It’s not complete in every detail, because some of the process was manual—there are multiple pitfalls in how the archives work, a lot of it because the archives are spread out over five years, and templates and presentation change enough to cause unwary scripts to die with gurgles halfway through the work. And even so, you end up needing to massage things by hand anyways.

Note: this is quite a bit of effort, but it was still less effort than doing it all by hand. I’m rather proud of this. And, of course, it’s a very tl;dr, mid-level technical discussion. I think it’s mostly a geeky thing.

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