But first, what the ?&$# is World Book Day? I do get cynical about all these ‘world XXXX days’. When I was growing up in England, we had Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Mother’s Day and my birthday (I’ll leave you to wonder which was the most important). That was about it. In theory there were other things such as St George’s Day but that was not (and still isn’t) a public holiday and no one ever did anything special for St. George’s Day and so it didn’t really count. As for Father’s Day, I’d never heard of such a thing.

I just looked at this Wikipedia entry listing commemorative days. The calendar is full and yet misses many of the special days I’ve heard of. World Book Day doesn’t even make it to this list. Of the ones that did, I’m going to watch out for March 15th as the next big day: World Consumer Rights Day. What???

Most of the days on the list look like worthy causes and I guess they can benefit from focusing campaigning efforts on a special day, but most of the time I suffer from commemorative day fatigue. But when my son’s school in Bromham asked for volunteer dads to read to the class for World Book Day, well… books are kind of my thing.

So this morning I read Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss to my son’s class. The children enjoyed it, especially when I stumbled over the tongue-twisting words. I may have given some nightmares when I assured them that your tongue can get twisted into a permanent knot if  you don’t read the words properly. Oh, well. Children like being scared.

I loved doing it too. I’ve trained adults many times on topics such as software testing techniques and how to access data cubes to track software development projects. But I’ve never talked to a school class. It felt very easy (which is, of course, really a tribute to the quality of the class teacher ).

When I got home I looked up World Book Day. If you’ve been scratching your head wondering why you haven’t heard of this international celebration, it turns out that the World Book Day has been set up by the British (and now Irish) book publishing industry in order to sell books to British and Irish readers.

Some Brits like to tease Americans when the latter talk about ‘World Series’ baseball. Well, now the World Book Day is the perfect riposte.

In any case, I’ve taken a big view of World Book Day by opening up the publishing arm of The Repository of Imagination, a interstellar story factory that has opened up a branch  on our planet in recent months. If this sounds familiar to followers of The Mighty Tharg, alien editor of 2000AD, then that is certainly one inspiration.

The senior branch repositorian is named Crustias Scattermush. He might turn out to be the front for a number of human writers. At the moment, there are some stories from him due soon and (ahem!) the words for those stories might have something to do with me.

That’s his Twitter header above. Come chat with @Crustias for some off-world commentary.

Enjoy World Book Day!

A week ago I took some photos of a tree in full autumnal bloom that stands just outside my house, and then took the family to the RSPB lodge at Sandy, Bedfordshire, where we enjoyed the burnished leaves in the afternoon sunlight.

Autumn leaves outside my house in Bromham

It’s rained since then. Not very heavily but — following an official drought declared in April — we’ve had the wettest summer for a century or so, and the ground is so sodden it has nowhere to go around here except the rivers (via whatever the water decides is the easiest path).

So the river just down the road from my house is subject to an official flood warning. The river has burst its banks as it often does here. I took some photos around 11:30 am today, Tuesday, which should be about at the river’s peak. The scene looks dramatic if you’re used to the modest little flow of the River Great Ouse, but the area floods frequently and so the use of the flooded fields reflects that; livestock was evacuated in plenty of time.

Floodwater at Bromham Bridge 27 Nov 2012

The flood plain under Bromham Bridge glories in the name Snake Island — apparently grass snakes live there, though I’ve never spotted one. I hope they slithered away to dry land. In drier times, the snakes are supposed to be to the left of the picture above. Incidentally, if you click on the pictures, you can see larger images.

Bromham Bridge Flooding

It looks as if this time we’ve gotten away with it. It’s the next time the rains come that we’re a little worried about, as the ground is going to stay saturated until the spring.

Both autumn leaves and river floods are a timely reminder of the beauty and power of nature. We’re lucky that we can enjoy and learn from them without having to cope with crisis and tragedy. When I used to live in the city, it was easy to feel isolated from nature, living in a high-rise box and with a landscape painted in grey, with barely a blade of green. Don’t get me wrong, I still miss the human-hive vibrancy of a big city, but I took a half hour off work this morning to breathe in the cold and relentless force of the floodwaters, and feel grateful it wasn’t expected to rise further.

As a writer, I think it’s important to get out there and breathe in a little of the world. Hopefully some of the vibrancy of nature comes across in my writing.

As for the tree outside our house that looked so spectacular last week, my son’s been reporting a leaf count each day of the remaining leaves.

Today three leaves remain.

My family at Sandy, Bedfordshire a week ago. A location I used for The Reality War Book2

Reblogged from Greyhart Press:

• 

What perfect timing! Today is Halloween, and I just happened to stumble across a blog called Bricks of the Dead. It's main thrust is an ongoing epic zombie webcomic filmed in Lego-vision. I had a quick look at the first few episodes. My son was very impressed. I would ask him for a comment but he's out trick-or-treating right now.

Read more… 143 more words

From my point of view the key learning point is to avoid any of these phrases if, like me, you’re a Brit who often writes in American English. I would like to think I recognize all these examples as Britishisms, but my editor, James, did spot a naughty use of ‘holiday’ in my last novel.

A quick trawl brought up this YouTube video. It’s only a few images, but the person who put it together has a sense of humor I approve of. Anyone who signs their video ‘One Brick to Rule then All’ is pretty impressive in my book.

There’s more on the Lego site, including online Lego Lord of the Rings games, and  a Danish-sounding Lego designer. That’s pretty cool.

Book1: The Slough of Despond

As from today, the eBook version of the first novel in this two-book time travel series is free from Kobo (free) | iTunes (free) | Smashwords (free) |Nook (free) | Sony (free) From Amazon (Kindle) its list price is only 99c or 77p, but amazon.com are currently price matching to be free there too.

So try this adventure series today. Residents of Elstow, Bedford and Bedfordshire should certainly try this book. How many science fiction novels have you read set in Bedfordshire? If you don’t have an eReader device, then that’s not a problem. All the major retailers have free reader apps for PCs, Macs, Apple and Android tablets and Smartphones. Alternatively, get the free copy from Smashwords and read it on the free reading software: Adobe Digital Editions.

The eBook edition of Book 2 is available to buy for all those platforms except for Nook. I’m expecting Barnes & Noble to load it up any day now.

See The Reality War web page for interviews, articles and more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19965058

Good luck!

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/34580-the-slough-of-despond

What attracted my eye were not comments about the story, but about the eBook formatting. For specific combinations of Kindle or Nook reader device and firmware (firmware is the software that tells the device how to display the book) Casual Vacancy was unreadable. You simply could not set a font size to a setting that was practical to read.

There were a lot of angry comments online, initial confusion from Amazon customer support, and the finger of blame pointed at the publishers for clearly not bothering to test the book. (Here’s a summary from The Atlantic) which led to an admission of guilt from Hachette, the book’s publishers, and a fix the following day. (If you buy the book now, you will be fine. If you had the problem, B&N/ Amazon customer support can guide you to the fix).

Should Hachette have done a better job? Absolutely! You might not have heard of them, but you will have read books from their imprints. They are the second largest publisher in the world, with sales last year of over $10billion. You would think they would have done a better job at checking such a key release. I feel sorry for JK Rowling, and for disappointed readers.

And yet, I do have some sympathy for Hachette. Actually — no — not for Hachette but for the individuals who worked on the project, some of whom may well have been asked to collect their belongings and leave the building for the last time. Take my comment that Amazon customer support had no idea what the problem was — well, they should have done! Because the symptoms seen  in Casual Vacancy have been seen in hundreds, probably thousands, of other Kindle titles since the spring. I’m sure the individuals on customer support were trying their best; they didn’t know what the problem was, but Amazon as a company did.

Letting Hachette off the hook sounds ridiculous, but I’m going to explain why I feel some sympathy in this article by letting you in on the wacky world of building eBooks. Normally I would say: do a shabby job and you deserve to be out on your ear. But I reckon that building eBooks is not always as easy as you might think, and almost certainly not as easy as it will be in a few years’ time.

I had similar comments directed at a book I once built for the Nook. 1-star reviews because the book wouldn’t load up at all. As soon as I heard of this I looked into the problem. It didn’t take long to find that hundreds of people had the same problem and they were having problems with a seemingly random selection of books from a wide range of publishers. In fact, what the victims had in common was not the book title, but their Nook device itself. The cause was a faulty software update that Barnes & Noble had rolled out that didn’t work on some older Nook devices. It made no difference which books you had in your library, but if you were unlucky some would fail to load. Of course, as a reader seeing some books load and some not, I would naturally blame the publisher. People did! But there was nothing we could have done to build the books in a way that would have been immune from this problem. By the time I was aware of the issue, Barnes & Noble had already rolled out a fix to their faulty software.

As for tiny fonts on the Kindle, I have certainly seen something that sounds suspiciously similar.

When you write the software for an eBook you have many ways to specify how big something should be, whether a margin or a font size. In fact, it is a rag-tag mess that represents the evolution of HTML and CSS, the languages used in eBook code. You could choose to specify font size as small, medium or large, as a % of the parent font size, as smaller or larger than the parent font. You could decline to give any information about font sizes and hope you inherit a sensible default. Or you could use a unit called an ‘em’, which in theory should be the same as using %, but in practice, isn’t. You could use ‘absolute’ units such as cm, pixels or… the unit you are probably familiar with from word processors… points.

If you’re having difficulty getting to sleep, try this as a typical online discussion about setting font sizes. It’s talking about web pages, but they use the same html/ css software language as eBooks.

What I find interesting is to see there are over two-hundred comments for an article written in 2008. It was written 4 years ago, and the last comment was posted just 4 days ago as I write this. And if you look closely, the answers are changing as the web browsers change. When the article was written, pixels were considered an absolute unit; now many web browsers will scale items sized in pixels. With the Kindle 3, 4, 5, DX and Fire, points are scalable units too. Or they were.

And so it is with eBooks. You can get a book on CSS and read up what all these various size units mean in theory, but that means very little in practice. What the reader actually sees on the Kindle screen is up to the Kindle software and your book’s code getting in a huddle with your user settings, and hashing out a compromise about which of the device’s font sizes it will choose to display.

I bought my first Kindle device 18 months ago. Until last Friday, it had seven font sizes. That’s it. There was no point in specifying 0.875ems or some such — that precision is an illusion — it simply mapped onto fonts 1 through 7. And carefully setting margins in ems didn’t work either. Your alignment and spacing would look wonderful in your web designer or InDesign, but the Kindle device would round everything up to the nearest whole number of ems.

Then on Friday, my Kindle upgraded itself, from software version 3.3 to 3.4 If I had bought Casual Vacancy on Thursday, it would have read fine on my device. If I had bought it on Friday, it would have been unreadable because the software update meant my Kindle now displayed Kindle books in a different way, and a way that the Hachette eBook coders hadn’t accounted for.

I myself had a problem with a book that worked fine when I built it, but between building and publication there had been an update to the Kindle 4 and Kindle Touch devices that rendered it unreadable, and with what sounds like exactly the same problem as Casual Vacancy.

A lot of people are saying Hachette didn’t test the book. I think a more likely explanation is that they didn’t re-test the book. I worked for 20 years at a software organisation delivering software that was expected to be maintained for many years. We would always take a lot of care in thinking about which configurations we would test against. In fact, our customers would expect us to tell them exactly this sort of information before we would issue a release. If a new version of Oracle or SQL Server, or Windows had come out, our customers would expect us to say whether we supported that new version.

My guess is that this book was tested by Hachette but several months ago, and was not re-tested against new Kindle software versions as they came out. When we made a software release at my old company I would encourage everyone in the organization to spend a morning installing and running the new release. I called it Bash Testing. With all the secrecy about Casual Vacancy, I imagine the exact opposite happened, that the book was kept securely locked away — during which time the book quietly stopped working.

Should the Hachette coders have anticipated this problem? Actually, yes, because it’s a problem that’s been known about since the spring. The question of culpability can get quite heated online, but it’s a bit of eye-opener if you don’t know anything about how eBooks get made. It comes down to the question of how to set font sizes in the code.

For small and self-publishers, Amazon suggest four main ways of making Kindle books, two of them assume you will set font sizes using points, and two of them made no assumptions about how you would specify font size (although Amazon changed its guidance this year to suggest those two solutions should use %’s as the unit). To get the problem you need to specify font sizes in points, but it also depends on which tool you used to build your book, which Kindle software version is reading the book, and possibly which phase the moon is in (okay, I still don’t know precisely which combination brings up this problem). The most compelling guess that I’ve read on the internet is that someone at Amazon who wrote the Kindle software update got pixels and points confused. You specify 12 point text but the Kindle displays it 12 pixels high. That’s unreadable.

Even though Amazon has always recommended that eBook designers shouldn’t try to set font size for the body text (because it might override the reader’s settings) they have always encouraged you to do so with headings and other text. Units such as ems or %’s are theoretically scalable, so it’s a fair argument that eBook designers should always have used these measures because they were always more likely to be robust, even though Amazon’s own coding samples used points to set sizes. So I don’t believe this change was deliberate from Amazon, because there was a point earlier this year when one day you could build a book that followed Amazon’s coding guidelines to the letter and it would work fine, and the very next day that same book would not work for readers who had received the new Kindle software update.

Whether you regard that as a bug or not, Amazon have certainly known since the spring that hundreds, possibly thousands of Kindle titles have fallen foul of this problem. I know less about the Nook problem, but it may well be a repeat of the same story over at Amazon/ Kindle.

None of this is to excuse publishers who put out books that do not work. And that includes myself.

But I feel sorry for JK Rowling. And I do feel a little sympathy for the Hachette people who probably built the book months ago, tested it, and thought they had done a good job. I can almost hear them say: “But it worked on my machine!” I used to hear that a lot from coders in the early 90s, but it doesn’t cut it in a professional software team these days. Hachette Livre — or whoever you use to make your books — welcome to the real world of software development.

Help! How do I fix my book?

I know some Kindle self-publishers read this blog, so if you have a touch of the Casual Vacancies with one of your own books, here’s the fix for Kindle.

I’ll assume you’ve got the html file that you saved from Word (using filtered html file type) AND a text editor. On a Windows PC this would be Notepad. Don’t use Word or another word processor to edit the html

Start Notepad (or your choice of text editor) and open the html file for your book.

At the top of the file you should see a `Styles’ section. You should find one entry to correspond to each style present in your Word document. The styles called `h1′ and `h2′ etc. correspond to the heading1, heading2 styles, and there might be a style called `p’, which is very important because it gives settings for the default paragraph style. This style section is your CSS.

For this problem, you want to take out anything that says something like

Font-size:12pt;

For the `p’ paragraph style and your `normal’ and `body’ styles you don’t want ANYTHING for font-size. Simply delete the font-size line (but make sure the style definition still ends with a `}’ character.

For heading styles you DO want to set the font size, but need a different way of stating it. Instead of something like `font-size:16pt;’ change to a % value such as `font-size:160%’. The % gives the multiple of the default font size, and the default font size is whatever the users set on their Kindle.

That might be all you need to do. But it is also possible that you have set some styling directly in the main body of your html file. Do a search for the text ‘font-size’ If you see that anywhere, change the pt size to % (although you will probably find this a lot in the code for page breaks — I’m not convinced you need to change code for page breaks).

HOW TO TEST

As a simple test, once you’ve saved the html file from Notepad, you can open the html file in your internet browser. That’s just a quick first look, though. Always download the .mobi file from the Amazon KDP edit book details screen once you’ve uploaded the book. This problem currently shows itself on Kindle software versions 3.4, 4.1, and 5.1   The Kindle Fire works fine.

INDENTS

If you get the hang of simple html style editing, you might want to handle paragraph indents too. If you want paragraphs to not have a first-line indent, go to the corresponding style entry in the html file and add

text-indent:0;

AN EASIER WAY?

If coding is not your thing, you could use a third-party tool. Calibre is one. You could convert from html to mobi and upload the result. This might fix your problem, but it might not. It may be worth a try.

Lots of people use Calibre, including Smashwords, to make Kindle books, although the results don’t match Amazon’s coding guidelines, and Amazon sometimes reject books built through Calibre  (probably because the Calibre developers have had to guess how the Kindle header is supposed to work and not guessed correctly. If this happens to you, re-covert through Calibre but this time send the output to a debug folder. Run Kindlegen over the contents of the ‘processed’ folder and Amazon will accept it).

The timing could have been interesting for me. If I had bought the Kindle version of JK Rowling’s new book, Casual Vacancy, when it was first launched, then my Kindle would have displayed it perfectly. If I had bought the book two days later — following my firmware update — it would have been unreadable. You might have read about the eBook disaster that befell the Kindle and Nook launch of Casual Vacancy — the words were unreadably small (the publishers have issued a fixed version of the book, incidentally) on certain device/ firmware combinations. Such is the sometimes tricky world of eBook coding — or perhaps I should say eBook design as there are plenty of self-publishing authors who look upon eBook ‘coders’ with deep suspicion because they see no need for any coding at all, being perfectly happy to do all their work inside their word processor.

Is there really any need to get your hands dirty with html and xml coding in order to produce good eBooks, or is this a conspiracy designed to overcomplicate and obfuscate in order to justify fat fees? I’ve lost count of the number of eBooks I’ve built, but when you add them up and include all the various formats, I must be heading toward 200 books. So I feel somewhat qualified to give an opinion. I’ve a skewed view of this because I know I get the complicated books where an author has had a go, realized that what he or she wants to do isn’t as easy as they thought, and hand on to me. Certainly some of the layouts I’m asked to produce can only be built by writing code. But in many cases the work I do in html, css, or xml is the professional polish and future proofing. Most of the eBook layout work I do is inside Microsoft Word. That’s an interesting topic, but one I’ll concentrate on another day.

Today I wanted to share a thought on Calibre. This is a tool designed to help you keep track of your electronic media — newsfeeds as well as eBooks — and organise both your library and your reading devices. It’s a great tool… but for that purpose. It was never designed for publishers to build eBooks, but that’s what a lot of people use it for.

It’s tempting to use it to shortcut eBook development, something crying out to have better development toolsets. I know, I’ve been tempted myself. In retrospect I would have been better off writing my own tools to automate common coding issues such as generating the book navigation.

One route I’ve been tempted by looks like this:

1. Do as much styling, tidying, and screening out naughty things such as tabs while still in Word or Open Office.
2. Save out to html
3. Import into Calibre and convert to ePUB format, taking care to turn off all the things that break Amazon Kindle coding standards, such as font scaling and setting line height.
4. Open up the epub file in Sigil and hand code away coding problems, such as spurious blank paragraphs that have been inserted to simulate paragraph spacing for headers, fix anchor tags in the wrong place, and reinsert images. I also take a good look at the CSS and recode to match the latest Amazon guidance.
5. Run KindleGen over the file to build the Kindle file.

In actual fact, that does work… but only for some Kindle firmware. Kindle 3.4 firmware probably does. Kindle 3.3 definitely doesn’t. At least one of the problems lies with elements with more than one class.

You what?

Here’s an example from the ePUB code of a forthcoming thriller called The Saxon Network that’s been through this route:

<p> ‘Disgraced intelligence officer wanted for murder in Italy on the kill again in World Service newsroom brawl.’ </p>

That paragraph tag has a class attribute. That’s fine… they all have that. But the ePub code gives the paragraph three classes: FirstLine, Calibre7, and SGC-2.

The problem is that Kindle firmware 3.3 only considers the first class, it always ignores subsequent classes. Kindle 3.4 will reflect all three classes. Well, that’s great, I thought; with the advent of Kindle 3.4, the Kindle devices can now understand something closer to ePUB code… I can use the Calibre-ePUB-Sigil route.

Alas — when I looked closer, some of the reader apps, such as Reader for iPad, still don’t support elements with multiple classes. The route is still not safe, at least not without careful testing.

If you’re brave and competent enough, you might want to use this route anyway. Look for examples in the code of multiple classes and recode them. Often you can spot this from the CSS. Take the class ‘Calibre7’ in the example. In the source code fed into Calibre, the paragraph was in italics, coded directly by using an tag rather than CSS. Calibre decided it would be neater to have the italics in CSS and so created a class (Calibre7) that looks like this:

.calibre7 {

font-style: italic

}

While I can see some good arguments for coding the paragraph this way, there remains a compelling reason why we mustn’t do this in the Kindle code: it simply doesn’t work, at least not for some Kindle device/ firmware combinations.

This fix in this case was simple. Locate every use of Calibre7 and replace with tags.

There will come a time when the number of Kindle devices and reader apps that do not support multiple classes will have dwindled to a small enough number that you might consider it too small a group to code for. Perhaps, but that time is not yet now.

(By the way, if you do use Calibre to build eBooks that you go on to sell, please donate to the Calibre project. Personally I pay either $2.50 or $5 per book depending on how much use I’ve made of Calibre. If I start using Sigil, I’ll do the same with them).

In building eBooks, I’m reminded somewhat of early software development with Microsoft Windows. My first Windows coding was for a drugs company using Windows SDK 2.1 By today’s standards it was ridiculously complicated. A ‘hello world’ program was several hundred lines of code and terribly fragile. So much of that coding environment felt unnecessarily complicated. Perhaps Windows needed to be complex, but to code Windows applications shouldn’t be. Within a few years, I was helping to roll out new development environments such as Borland Delphi, which made it possibly to write Windows applications much more quickly and deliver something more robust.

Right now we have a range of tools that don’t quite do what I want: Calibre, Sigil, Jutoh, Microsoft Word (!), InDesign. I think InDesign is probably closest, but at £450 for a licence, the price is steep for something for which the Kindle plugin is still in beta and people still report is buggy. I’m sure within five years, this situation will be a distant memory in the minds of veterans, just as it was 20 years ago with early Windows application development.

I look forward to the time when I’ll look at the newer generation of eBook designers and tell them they don’t realise how much easier they have it, just like I did with Delphi developers in the mid-90s. Until then, there is a lot to be said for those who cut away as much complexity as possible and simply hand Amazon Microsoft their Word documents to be automatically converted into Kindle books.