Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

Video in Kindle books, thanks to EPUB3

2013-05-16T10:39:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I wrote about how you can call external audio/video files in an EPUB3 document. This works brilliantly in iBooks and Readium, but so far, nowhere else. What happens when it doesn't work is actually pretty interesting. According to the spec, you can add a fallback message, and indeed a fallback photo or link. In this case, I've used the poster image as a fallback image.

<p>Does everyone have their own cat videos? I sure do. Here are Nighty and a very small Momo playing the box game.</p>

    <video controls="controls" poster="image/poster.jpg" width="384" height="276">

    <source src="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox2.mp4" />

    <source src="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox2.wvm" />

    <p><a href="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox.mp4"><img id="poster" width="384" height="276" src="image/poster.jpg" alt="poster" /> Click to play the video</a> and then return to read the rest of the book. </p>

    </video>

The only problem is that Adobe Digital Editions is the only EPUB ereader that properly displays the fallback message.

But it's nice. If you click the link, your default browser opens, and the video plays.

Unfortunately, if you open the EPUB file on the NOOK, or in Kobo (even the Kobo for iOS app), or even if you open it in iBooks without internet access—and thus the video cannot be displayed—you get varying things—sometimes the poster image, sometimes controls but no video—but no fallback content.

Fallback leads to video for Kindle books

But what about Kindle? Suppose you take that EPUB3 file, and pass it through KDP, or Kindle Previewer, or KindleGen, which all do the same thing—convert an EPUB file to KF8/mobi. And yes, they work on EPUB3 files as well as EPUB2 files. Next, open that converted mobi file in a Kindle Fire.

The fallback text, photo, and link appear, and better yet, when you click the link, Kindle Fire sends you to the browser, and plays the video. When you're done, the back arrows take you back to the book.

If that's not enough, stick it on Dropbox, and open your Dropbox app on an iPad. Once it's been copied, click the Open in another application arrow (upper right corner) and choose Kindle for iOS. Again, the fallback text, photo, and link appear, and when you click them, the video plays. It's true that you get an error message, but I'm guessing there's a way to get around that, but regardless, the video plays anyway. As if it were in a special window inside the Kindle iOS app. And when you've finished watching the video, click Done, and you go right back to the book.

So let's sum up:

1. So far, you can only play an embedded video right on a page in an ebook in iBooks and NOOK. But B&N won't let self- and indie publishers add such books to Pub It!.

2. You can play external video files right on a page in an ebook only in iBooks.

3. The fallback text doesn't appear in NOOK or Kobo.

4. The fallback text does appear in ADE and—if you convert the EPUB3 file to KF8/mobi—it also appears in Kindle Fire and Kindle for iOS (perhaps other Kindles too?), and all of these let you play the fallback video in an external browser.

5. An added caveat: I haven't uploaded a book to KDP with a link to external video. I can't guarantee that such a thing is permitted.

6. This opens up a lot of possibilities.

You can download the mobi file here. And if you liked this post, consider subscribing to my blog so I have time to write more!

Linking to external video (and audio) in EPUB3

2013-05-14T17:28:00.000-04:00

I forget when I first saw the option in the iBooks settings panel, but I know it was a long time ago. Enticingly, it said Online Content, and had an On/Off switch. And underneath was a short explanation: “Allow books to access publisher's content from the Internet.”

EPUB used to be a strictly closed affair; all of its content had to live within the EPUB package itself. But in EPUB3 an exception was made to allow remote access for audio and video elements only. These two things together could only mean one thing: that remote video was now possible in an ebook, at least on the iPad.

Why is it important to be able to access remote video and audio files? For starters, keeping your audio and video out of the EPUB can make your EPUB a lot smaller and much more agile. It will download much more quickly. On the other hand, in order to see that video, your reader is still going to have to download it at some point, and they might even do it multiple times, which can be a drag on your server.

Another reason to host video or audio remotely is to give access to multiple formats of the file. EPUB3 has the capability of looking through a series of links and only using the one that works best in a given ereader. Including multiple versions of a video file in an EPUB file would result in unnecessary bloat. (Of course, this is a bit of a moot point in a world in which video and audio in EPUB mostly works in iBooks, but that is changing with Readium, and surely with newer ereaders. The fact that there is no agreed upon codec for video is also an important factor.)

Finally, if the video is hosted remotely, that means you can update it at any time. Note, however, that you must be careful to maintain the same link that exists in the EPUB file.

The code

So how do you do it? I've tried a bunch of different techniques in the last few months, but couldn't make it work. Today, while reading Matt Garrish and Markus Gylling's EPUB 3 Best Practices, I discovered that they have figured it out. It's not complicated at all, I should have figured it out too :)

The code is very straightforward and not that much different from embedding video files right in an EPUB document.

1. First, in the HTML document (mine's called outvideo.xhtml), create the video element as usual, obviously using the proper URL for the src attribute:

<video controls="controls" poster="image/poster.jpg" width="384" height="276">

<source src="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox.mp4" />

<source src="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox.wvm" />

</video>

Although the controls attribute isn't required, I recommend it. Otherwise, your reader won't be able to start (or stop) your video. Also note that I was playing around with WebM video, but wasn't really able to get it to work. But I haven't given up yet.

2. In the content.opf file, you have to do two things: list your video in the manifest as if you'd included it in the EPUB document, and then declare that the HTML file that contains the video points to an external resource.

a. First, we'll manifest the video.

<item id="vid" href="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox.mp4" media-type="video/quicktime" />

b. Next, in the manifest of the HTML file that contains the video, declare that you're using an external resource:

<item id="outvideo" href="outvideo.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml" properties="remote-resources" />

And that's all there is to it. What does it look like?

If your reader has the Online Content option in iBook preferences Off, all they'll see is the poster image:

If your reader has Online Content On, they'll be asked if they want to access your online content. It's good that they have a choice, since they may want to wait to download videos until they have wifi available.

Finally, once they click the Allow button, the video will download and become available.

Keep in mind again, that if they no longer have connection to the Internet, the video will stop being available (even if they never close the book or leave iBooks)

It works in Readium too:

You can download the example file here.

Controlling spreads in EPUB3 Fixed Layout

2013-05-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

EPUB 3's spread settings should allow you to decide when individual documents are placed next to each other on a 'synthetic' spread in a book. For example, you might want to show two consecutive pages in a spread if the device is held in landscape orientation but individually if it's held in a portrait orientation. According to the spec, that's possible. In real life, on real devices, it's not.

Let's look at the different options, since they're not very self-explanatory.

First, you can find a quick overview on this earlier article about EPUB 3 fixed layout.

EPUB 3 has three important fixed layout rendition properties, layout, spread, and orientation. The first is the one that determines if an EPUB 3 document is fixed layout or not. So, if you want a fixed-layout book, you'll add the following code to the meta section of your opf file.

<meta property="rendition:layout">pre-paginated</meta>

And if you want a flowing book, you'll leave it out to use the default value of reflowable. Can you mix fixed layout and flowing pages in a single book? Theoretically, yes, by adding the property to individual pages in the spine section, but unfortunately not in the real world. At least not yet.

The spread property determines when pages should be placed next to each other in a 'synthetic' spread. The default is for the first page to be shown by itself on the right, and each two pages after that to be shown opposite each other in a spread. With EPUB 3's spread options, you can choose to have pages always be shown independently (none), only when the device is in landscape mode (landscape), only when the device is in portrait mode (portrait), in both orientations (both), or just use the automatic settings of the reading device (auto).

So, for example, here's what it looks like in iBooks if you choose none. Each page is shown in its own spread.

Unfortunately, iBooks doesn't support any of the other options, which would be very welcome. You might have a fixed-layout book that looks great in two-page spreads in landscape orientation, but that is too small in portrait view. By choosing landscape, you could force the spread in landscape, but allow for the individual pages to fill the device in portrait as well. Hopefully some day in the future.

There are additional page-spread properties that you can apply to individual pages (in the spine section) to indicate that a page should always be shown on the left side of a spread or on the right side of a spread. But I have not been able to get them to work in iBooks either.

It does work in Readium, though. Notice how the Introduction page here has been forced to display on the left, which both leaves the previous page by itself (not shown), and pulled the subsequent page next to it:

Readium doesn't seem to support any of the other spread options. No matter what I choose, it always initially shows a single page, and then if I change the options in the Settings box, it shows two.

The third property is orientation. This is how you force a book to always be displayed in one orientation or another, regardless of the way the reading device is held. The choices are landscape, portrait, and auto, and the first two options constrain the display to the given orientation.

So, if you choose auto, the book rotates with the reading device. Here's what it looks when held horizontally:

And here's what it looks like if it's rotated to a portrait orientation:

But if you choose either landscape or portrait, then no matter how the reader holds the device, the book will always be shown in that orientation. Here's a book with the landscape orientation chosen, with the device being held vertically:

Getting rid of faux pages and binding in iBooks

2013-04-30T10:35:00.003-04:00

Apple's iBooks has been accepting EPUB3 documents for some time, which means they can now benefit from EPUB3 features. One of those features is whether or not the binding should be displayed, which in iBooks takes the form of a faux spine:

To make the faux spine disappear, you simply have to add this line to the <meta> section of your opf file (in an EPUB 3 fixed layout file):

<meta property="ibooks:binding">false</meta>

And as long as you have version 3.1 or later of iBooks, the faux binding (and the faux pages at the edges) disappear:

Note, however, that if you designed your pages to fit perfectly in a landscape-oriented iOS device, the disappearance of the faux pages will make your book slightly more narrow, and you will have some empty gray space as shown above.

(Thanks to Jean-Michel Dentand for reminder to update to new version of iBooks!)

How much did you sell on the Apple iBookstore?

2013-04-11T12:42:00.001-04:00

Did you get a whole new slew of Apple iTunes Connect reports yesterday in your email inbox?

I did. They're pretty useless. Each one simply reminds me to go download the full report from iTunes Connect. And I get a separate one for each currency in which I've sold books. It would be nice if I just got a single email, perhaps detailing which currencies.

So, then you head over to iTunes Connect. I always go first to Sales and Trends, only to remember, a few glacial seconds later, that I have to download the reports from Payments and Financial Reports. Click the Earnings Tab and you'll see a long list of documents to download, one for each currency and for each month. Ugh.

As you can see, my earnings on the iBookstore are paltry. Good thing I sell books elsewhere! This is certainly due to a combination of my books being very niche categories (extreme EPUB and Catalonia!) but I'm certainly willing to lay some blame at Apple's door. I wish they would beef up the iBookstore and make it a place that was friendly to book buyers. They do a number of things right: being available in the largest number of countries, creating the best ereader software (iBooks), and more, but the store just isn't up to snuff. It needs search desperately. It needs reviews, and ways to share, and comment. Anyways.

When you click those download buttons in the right column, you get gzipped files (who knows why!?) for each individual period. Before you proceed, count up the ones in the list and count the ones you downloaded just to make sure you haven't missed any. (I always miss a couple.) Then, double-click each one to unzip. I wish, oh I wish, that I could choose the period myself! Maybe I want a single period, maybe I want all the data for a year.

When you open the files up in a text editor, you'll see that they are partly a tab delimited collection of sales data, but with totals at the end.

That first line contains the field titles, and the second line is a sales record. If there were more sales records, there would be additional lines. Each field is separated with a tab (shown here by a triangle). Those sums at the end will mess up my database, so I eliminate them.

But this data on its own is not that interesting. What I want is to be able to compile the sales data from each currency and indeed each month into a single report. This is where FileMaker comes in.

I created a database with FileMaker into which I can import Apple's files, and then generate reports that tell me how many books I've sold, and which months and countries I've sold them in. If you're a subscriber, you'll have received a free download link.

Before importing, remember to make a backup of the FileMaker database, and to have removed the total lines from the Apple reports, as described above. If your fields have accented characters, I also recommend saving them with a Mac Roman character encoding. It's a hassle, but it will ensure that those characters are properly read into FileMaker.

Then choose File > Import Records > File in FileMaker. Choose an Apple report and click Open.

In the Import Field Mapping box, first make sure that each of the Field Titles matches the corresponding Field in the database. Click Add new records, and also Don't import first record (contains field names), since that is precisely the case with the Apple records. Then click Import.

You will see that a record is created for each title that has been sold in that currency,during that period.

Import all of the new Apple sales record files. The hardest part of this step is not importing the same file twice! (I've tried saying the name of the file out loud—paying attention to the two-letter key at the end of the code—and also looking at the just-imported file in FileMaker just before choosing the new one. Maybe this is easier for some people?)

Once you've got all the data in my FileMaker database, the rest is easy. I've got automated scripts for creating lists, as shown here.

Here are some samples. Note that they're very simple, and they don't have titles. This is because there are only three layouts that serve the eight lists. But they work.

For example, here's what the list "By Currency, Title, Country, Period" looks like. This first page corresponds to first page of the sales in Australian Dollars, but has summaries for each period, for each country, and for each title. With currencies that are used in multiple countries, like the euro, the country section is more interesting.

And here is the report created with the Script "By Title, Period, Currency":

This page corresponds to the sales of a single title, with summaries for each period, and for each currency. Notice that only the estimated conversion to dollars is subtotaled, since it wouldn't make sense to sum different currency amounts.

And so on. I'm not a FileMaker developer, so I'm sure if you are, you could do this more beautifully. But it works, and indeed gives a much clearer and more complete view of your Apple iBookstore sales. I'm happy to share the database (without my data, obviously) to all my subscribers for free. Or you can buy it separately for $5. Use at your own risk!

Apple's new monthly and yearly reports

As so often happens, just as I was writing this blog post, I got an email from iTunes Connect letting me know that the Sales and Trends module of iTunes Connect had been improved. And that now I could download sales data for the whole year. I was very excited, but alas, it has a major flaw: if you download a yearly report, it doesn't give you the date for each sale; for example, all of the 2012 sales are are marked "December 31, 2012". So if you want a very summarized view of your sales, it might be helpful, but it's not sufficient for my purposes.

The one thing that is in those monthly reports through the Sales and Trends module that you won't find in the Payments and Financial Reports section is data about how many free books you're giving away. That is essential information if you're using free books as a hook to get people to look at your books for sale. I don't have a database set up for that yet (mostly because it would require downloading each monthly report from the Sales module), but I hope to offer that to you in the future.

How do you find those reports? It took me a while, and I even called the iTunes Connect hotline to ask for help (1-877-206-2092 in the US, and there are numbers in other countries as well). They answered almost immediately, but unfortunately said that they didn't know how to do it either! After I rummaged around a bit more, I figured it out:

Start in the Sales and Trends module. Click the Sales tab in the upper-right corner of the window.

Next, click the date and choose monthly, yearly, and then the actual month or year you're interested it.

Then click Download. And you get one of those marvelous g-zipped files, that when unzipped is a tab-delimited set of data (distinct from those downloaded from Payments and Financial Reports.

What could Apple do better?

What I want is a single place where I can choose the period (from all my sales, to monthly, yearly or whatever I want), and then export all the data at once, in a single file. And I want all the data: which book, how many copies, which country, which currency, and on which date. It's not hard. Lots of other distributors offer such tools.

I trust you completely: sharing "What's up with Catalonia?"

2013-03-07T17:54:00.001-05:00

Dear Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis reader:
I hope you're not anxious about my preoccupation with Catalonia. Remember that everything I learn as I edit and publish these books later comes back as dividends for this blog, and the independent and digital publishing communities. That is, everything I am learning, I'll explain here.

I'll begin by telling you about a new phase in my digital publishing life: sharing files. I have just made the electronic versions of my new book, What's up with Catalonia?—my new book on Catalonia's push for independence, written by 35 experts, for a English-speaking audience—freely available on Catalona Press' website.

You can also download them here:

EPUB | Kindle/Mobi | PDF

(Note that I did make special versions with extended explanations about the licensing scheme. I hate forking ebooks, for just this reason, but I think it was important to explain the new system.)

I've never been a fan or user of DRM on my own computer-related ebooks, but this is the first time that I am explicitly allowing people to make copies of one of my books in order to share them with friends and acquaintances. You might say I'm crazy, on that I've simply written off any hope of selling the book, but I believe (and hope) that neither of those ideas is correct.

To begin with, since we've been making books, people have shared them. Digital publishing has not changed that, indeed it makes it easier. That spreads fear in the hearts of big publishers but it shouldn't. We often find out about books that we want to read through the books that our friends have lent us. My idea is that if you share "What's up with Catalonia?" with a friend, it's a way of spreading the word about my book, and perhaps they will also support the book.

Because I do ask for financial support for the book. That someone copies the book doesn't mean they can't or won't buy it. Please, buy it! The writers and I have worked hard to create it and the more copies we sell, the more resources we'll have for writing sequels. There's a lot of work to do.

And of course, I'm not the only one who does this. Look at Cory Doctorow, a novelist who has posted all of his novels online, several of which I've downloaded, and then subsequently bought multiple copies of in paper—as gifts, or to share with non e-reading friends. Or Amanda Palmer, who just released a totally inspiring Ted talk in which she describes her million dollar crowdfunding campaign as "We made an art out of asking people to help us, and join us."

I don't have to make people buy this book. I can simply ask.

Right now you can find the book in paper in a few Barcelona bookstores: Botiga Vilaweb (Ferlandina, 43), Llibreries Laie (Pau Clàris, 85, and at the Park Güell, Pedrera, and Picasso Museum stores), Llibreria Îndex in Vilassar de Mar, and soon, in the bookstores that belong to the Bestiari cooperative.

Online, you can find the book in paper and electronic formats at:

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon.es | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de | Amazon.it | Amazon Canada | Amazon Brazil | Amazon Japan

• Barnes & Noble

• Apple iBookstore

• or see Catalonia Press for an updated list.

I also created a Paypal button where I can accept donations in any amount, and I will dedicate that money to sending copies of the book to public libraries, politicians, business leaders, university professors, or anyone else who asks for a donation of the book, or to translating and editing new editions of this book or others about Catalonia.

I've been nervous about trying this up until now, I admit. But since a lot of the objective with this book is to share information about Catalonia, it seemed a perfect time to experiment. I'll be watching sales and comparing them and I'll let you know how it works.

Next article: Crowdfunding on two continents

We're not the media if we depend on Google (or Amazon)

2013-01-24T12:08:00.000-05:00

Update: 25 January 2013. This morning when I typed Catalonia into the Google Search box, and then clicked the News tab, all of the stories about the Declaration of Sovereignty were hidden behind an even smaller "+ Show more" link below the generic AP post carried by the Huffington Post. If I click on "All 88 news sources" I get this complete fail:

Maybe there is a conspiracy!

I've also changed the headline of this article from "We're not the media if we don't appear on Google (or Amazon)" to "We're not the media if we depend on Google (or Amazon)". We need an alternative.

Yesterday there was a news story I was particularly interested in. But searching for it on the internets made me rethink a lot of assumptions about the idea that "we are the media". I first heard that expression used by Amanda Palmer, a singer/songwriter/artist who ran an incredibly successful crowdsourcing campaign a few months ago—raising over $1 million—to fund a new record. One of her most intoxicating claims was that she didn't need to sign with a studio, and she didn't need to follow a studio's rules and directives. With the support of individual people—me included—she could put out her record and go on tour. In short, she and "we are the media".

I've been writing books for the last 20 or so years with the same idea in mind. My HTML books helped people realize that they could publish their ideas, their writings, their photographs, their lives without having to ask for anyone's permission. At first, I published a gallery of these brand new websites, and I loved going through them and seeing democracy in action: all these people sharing their thoughts with the world, with no gatekeepers to stand in the way.

The gallery quick grew to multiple pages of lists, and the web to billions, and so I left the job of cataloging these new creations to the brand new Google. I'll get to that in a moment.

A few years ago, when I discovered EPUB, I had the same feeling of democratic excitement: here was a technology that could help people publish and otherwise share their writings. We humans yearn to share our stories with others. EPUB, an open format, facilitates such an interchange.

But yesterday, it really hit home how far we are from complete democracy of content. And that's because though we may have the technology and even free tools for creating webpages and ebooks, there are massive economic and political powers that stand between us and our readers. We cannot ignore them. Let me show you yesterday's example.

First, let me admit that the word I typed into Google was "Catalonia". But the ramifications go way beyond this particular news item. So, please bear with me as I use my favorite example to illustrate something much larger.

When I type in "Catalonia", Google says there are 83 news items. When I ask Google to show me "all 83 news sources", it gives me a list of only 16. You can try this at home.

Down at the bottom of the page, Google has a little disclaimer that says it omits some entries that are "very similar to those already displayed". And this is probably not the right time to discuss wire services and the sad fact that a single mediocre story with no byline about a small, new far away country might be reproduced verbatim, with no fact chacking, in 80 or so American newspapers. But I digress. But if you click "repeat the search with omitted results included" Google still only displays 25 items. There is no way to see all 83.

I would very much like to know which other 58 news sources are reporting on my topic. Why won't Google show me? And how does it decide which 25 items to show? And isn't it a problem that I am necessarily limited by Google's criteria?

Do I think there's a conspiracy to keep the other 58 news sources from being revealed? Probably not, but regardless, it bothers me quite a bit that there's no way to get to them. Like it or not, we are not the media, if we cannot be Googled.

And it doesn't stop there. Amazon recently decided that authors of the same genre books cannot review other authors' books. Amazon became successful because of its review system. I am not the only person who used to look at Amazon reviews in order to decide which book to find from the library. Amazon's reviews were an amazing crowdsourcing adventure, now run amok by enterprising and back-stabbing authors on the one hand, and Amazon wanting to watch the gates, on the other.

And don't even get me started on Amazon search. How much publisher money is behind Amazon's search results? I have no idea, but I'm guessing it's not insignificant. We are not the media if we don't come up on Amazon.

The Amazon review issue brings up yet another aspect of this whole story, which I touched on in an essay titled "If you know it already, don't tell". The basic gist of that article is that we believe people more when we don't think they have an axe to grind, even if, ironically, as in the case I describe, the person isn't particularly knowledgeable at all about the topic.

This is the same conundrum that Amazon's new policy throws at us, and that Porter Anderson confronted in his recent post in On the Ether. Where is the line between enough knowledge about a subject in order to give a reasoned opinion and so much knowledge about the subject that your opinion is biased? In this day and age when every one's past opinions are documented publicly, can there even be unbiased opinions? I think not. I believe that the important thing is to know what the opinion is, so we can use that information to assess the validity of the opinion. Suppressing all the opinions that Amazon has decided fall into a particular category of user solves nothing.

In these heady times in which self-publishers, and the web designers that came before them, are gleeful with democratic information sharing, we must be absolutely aware that the gatekeepers have simply moved the gates. Whereas in earlier eras we couldn't even publish without their help, now we can publish, only to find our sites and books hidden in a sea of information. Even if your book or website is in there, if Google or Amazon or whatever search product of the moment won't bring it up, it's as if it weren't there.

All is not lost. Twitter, and to some degree Facebook as well, are still amazingly democratic, allowing us to connect directly with kindred spirits all over the world. While we can't forget that social media still generates only a fraction of web traffic (on the order of 5-6%), I think its influence goes far beyond those numbers, if only in its ability to connect people and movements. But will they last? And Kickstarter (and for example, the Catalan crowdsourcing site Verkami) are great at helping us harness the power of hundreds (or thousands if you're Amanda Palmer) to offer alternatives to these gatekeepers or, when need be, attract their attention. Technology-wise, the use of accurate metadata can also help make a book or website "findable".

Ironically, it is the very birth of Google that gives me hope. Way back then, Altavista was the most popular search engine, and I remember being increasingly frustrated with its ads, its promoted links, and the seemingly deliberate obstacles that it placed between me and what I was looking for. This clean, lithe little ad-free Google came along and all of a sudden we could find things again. It felt like the whole world changed over to this little search engine that actually worked in a matter of weeks. Perhaps it's time for some new disruption.

And while we wait (or develop) the tools to maintain our democratic web, we must be careful to be aware that right now there is no unbiased opinion, and no unbiased search.

Smashwords asks for EPUB files for testing

2012-12-29T22:56:00.002-05:00

At the end of 2011, Mark Coker, Smashwords' founder, CEO, and Chief Author Advocate, promised that they would be accepting EPUB files by year's end. Yesterday, in the Site Updates section of the Smashwords' website (you have to be signed in to see it), there was an announcement:

December 28, 2012 - Smashwords Direct alpha testing underway. We're preparing to launch Smashwords Direct, our direct .epub upload option. One year ago in my 2011 annual year-in-review over at the Smashwords Blog, we made a commitment to launch SWD in the second half of 2012. We're working to fulfill that commitment. We're nearing completion of a beta version of SWD. The first iteration will enable those of you with professionally designed .epub files to replace your current Smashwords-generated .epub with another .epub. It'll also allow authors to upload .epub files instead of Word .doc files. We're inviting people with custom epubs to email them to us...

This is huge news. Although Smashwords is a major ebook vendor, especially for self-published books, many authors and publishers have been reluctant or unwilling to either create their books in Word, or submit them to the “Meatgrinder”, Smashwords' terrifyingly-named and woefully-limited EPUB conversion program. The new Smashwords Direct program will allow authors to upload professionally-designed EPUB files and thus give us absolute control over what the EPUB looks like.

So, let's email them some books and help them get this up and running!

Thanks, Smashwords!

Troubleshooting PNG vs JPEG in EPUB

2012-11-28T11:57:00.001-05:00

So, I wrote two articles on versioning in iBooks (here and here), but I didn't tell you my main reason for wanting to update the book.

The truth is that in the first version of my Monarch Butterfly book, my favorite page didn't work on the iPad 1. That page has 10 images, each of which measures 1600 x 1100 px. As I was exploring the possibilities of interactivity, it was one of the first pages that I created in the book. And because I had a vague (erroneous) idea that Apple preferred PNG, I decided to experiment with them.

PNG affords some advantages, including allowing transparency, at least in the 24bit version. In the later pages of the book, I used this to advantage for the arrows, so that I didn't have to position them perfectly on top of the images. In addition, PNG doesn't suffer from the licensing issues that JPEG has. On the downside, its compression is not as good, so images are larger.

Here's what the page looks like. It's set up so that if you click the images across the bottom, they are expanded into the center area, so that the reader can view and control a stop-motion movie of the caterpillar emerging from its egg, and then having its first meal. If you click the center image, the animation goes backwards.

Unfortunately, when you open the original version of this page on the iPad 1, it crashes. And like I do so often when I'm troubleshooting—and this is the real lesson of this post—I assumed that the problem was that the iPad 1 was slow and didn't have enough memory, and that I had just pushed it too far by adding too many images. I decided to upload the book as is, and warn people that it simply didn't work well on the iPad 1.

The other day, someone asked me about PNG and the NOOK and I remembered an issue I had come across a year or so ago. I was helping some folks with a book with lots of images. Not particularly big images (it was a flowing book), but lots of them. The NOOK would refuse to let you navigate to the next chapter by turning pages, even though you could choose the chapter from the TOC and it displayed just fine. Very strange. One workaround was to change the images to PNG format.

And even though the problem was the JPEG in that problem, it made me think I should try to switch from PNG to JPEG. And the crazy thing is that it worked. I'm not sure if it's because the images are smaller (233Kb instead of 950Kb), or because of the format itself, but now the page works on iPad 1 beautifully and doesn't crash.

So, the moral of the story is first, don't assume you know what the problem is, and second, let those bits of information percolate in your head and spark new theories that might help—even if they're not directly related, and third, use JPEG images in EPUB for iBooks unless you need PNG's transparency!

P.S. I've just sent an email to everyone who bought the first version of the book so that they can download the new version for free. If you don't receive the email, let me know. If you bought the book through Apple, you'll be able to update the book through the iBookstore: go to Purchased Books, and then click Update next to The Monarch Butterfly Book.

And if you haven't bought the book yet, you can find the latest version on the iBookstore or on my own website.

Versioning in iBooks (part 2)

2012-11-27T11:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, after confirming that the new version of The Monarch Butterfly Book had not yet gone live, I called Apple's iBookstore support line—(877) 206-2092 in the US, see end of post for other countries' numbers—and asked what was going on. The guy was very helpful, told me that everyone had been on vacation between November 16 and November 25th, due to the Thanksgiving holiday (about which he and I both decided we were envious), but that they were back yesterday and should get to it shortly.

He also checked that I had the "What's New" material already included, which I guessed indicated that was a sticking point in many updated versions. (Remember to use the latest version of iTunes Producer to include the What's New information.)

And finally, he said he'd escalate my issue so that it would get solved as soon as possible. I almost, in the interest of science, told him not to escalate it, so that I could see and report on the real process, but sorry, dear reader, in the end, I did not.

About 12 hours later, I got the email from Apple confirming that the new version had gone live.

And this morning, I opened iBooks on my iPad and iPhone to see how those changes would be announced. What I saw was that iBooks adds a number to the Store button to indicate how many updates a reader has available, but doesn't indicate which book is affected:

When the reader presses the Store link in iBooks on the iPad, they will see Update buttons next to the corresponding books:

On iBooks on the iPhone, going to the Store will display an Updates link:

And when your reader follows the Update link, they'll see which books can be updated:

At that point, and only on the iPhone as far as I could tell, the reader can click the What's New arrow to see what has changed in the new version:

Once they click the Update button, the new version downloads to their device, and initially will be displayed with the blue "New" banner:

Once the reader has looked at the book, they won't be able to tell which version they have. I couldn't figure out any way to get information about a book's version from within iBooks on the iPad at all, or on any device once the update was downloaded. This is a serious shortfalling for what I believe is a very valuable feature.

The only way for the reader to see the versioning information of an existing book, including what has changed from version to version, is to go to the iBookstore, look up the book, scroll down to the bottom of the Book Description or Details area, and check the What's New section.

The reader can also get a full rundown on the differences from one version to the next by clicking Version History. I think it's rather confusing to use a header like "Version 3.0" when what they mean is that the changes listed are for the EPUB3 version of the book. It is only below that you see the version number that I gave the book: 1.1.

Therefore, you might want to add version info to one of the pages of your book (the copyright page perhaps?) if you want readers to be able to tell which version they have. (I'll do this next time.)

So, still some wrinkles to be ironed out, but I continue to think that versioning is a brilliant idea. Now I have to update some of my other books so I can see what happens with notes and bookmarks (which aren't allowed in a Fixed Layout book like this one.

There were two major errors that were fixed in this version of The Monarch Butterfly book: some arrows that were in the wrong place on page 24, and something much more important, which I'll discuss in my next post, about JPEGs and PNGs.

You can buy The Monarch Butterfly Book on the iBookstore (and thus be notified as described above about new versions), or directly from me (via Kagi) (in which case I'll notify you personally about new versions to this book as well as any new books via email).

Here are the iBookstore support telephone numbers:

Australia: 1300 307 504 (Note that this is a low tariff number.)
France: 0805 540 117
Germany: 0800 664 5307
Italy: 800 915 902
Netherlands: 0800 0201 578
Spain: 900 812 687
U.K.: 0800 975 0615
U.S.: +1 (877) 206-2092
Toll-free from U.S. and Canada.

Links to Maps from iBooks

2012-11-26T12:31:00.000-05:00

A reader asks what happens with the Map links in the Barcelona Beyond Gaudí book now that iOS no longer has the Google Maps app. It's a good question, so I thought I'd answer it here.

In the Barcelona Beyond Gaudí book, I targeted the map request to Google:

<a href="#left" id="caption">A spiral decoration on the gates to Sant Pau Hospital. </a><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps/?q=loc:41.411403,2.174297+(Spiral%20Decoration%20on%20Gate)" ><img src="images/map.gif" alt="map button" id="mapbutton" /></a>

And it looks like this:

When your reader clicks the Map link in iOS5, iBooks passes them to the Google Maps app. In iOS6, iBooks passes such links to the Google Maps page, in Safari:

And the reader can still click on the Directions or Street View buttons at the bottom. Here is Street View:

Then a quick four finger flick, and the reader can jump back to iBooks.

To send the reader to the Apple maps app instead of the Google Maps page, you just have to target the link to the Apple maps server:

<a href="#left" id="caption">A spiral decoration on the gates to Sant Pau Hospital. </a><a href="http://maps.apple.com/maps/?ll=41.411403,2.174297" ><img src="images/map.gif" alt="map button" id="mapbutton" /></a>

Then when your reader clicks the Map link, iBooks sends them to the Apple Maps app (without asking if they want to leave the iBooks app, one should note).

Note that the Apple Maps app doesn't mark where the location is on the map:

And there doesn't seem to be a street view, though you can click the page curl in the bottom-right corner to view Satellite view and then zoom in.

You can get more information about creating links to the Apple Maps app in the iOS Developer Library.

Versioning in iBooks 3 (part 1)

2012-11-16T14:07:00.000-05:00

Another promising new feature announced by Tim Cook about iBooks 3 is the ability to make updates to an ebook, and then make those updates available to readers who have already bought the book. There were a few minor errors in my Monarch Butterfly book so I decided I would use it as a guinea pig to test versioning.

The first thing to note is that versioning only exists for EPUB 3 documents. They can be flowing or fixed layout, but they have to be EPUB 3.

So, my first task was to update the Monarch Butterfly fixed layout book to EPUB 3.

Changes to the OPF file

I began with the OPF file, adding version="3.0" to the initial package element and adding the namespaces that Apple recommends.

I updated the title of my book to indicate the version number, though I'm not sure this is necessary (or desired).

I added the required modification date and time:

<meta property="dcterms:modified">2012-11-06T12:00:00Z</meta>

Pay special attention to the time format: CCYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ. I tried putting just the year, and EpubCheck gave me an error. Note that both the T and the Z are required.

Apple then requires some iBooks-specific bits of metadata:

    <meta property="ibooks:version">3.0</meta>

<meta property="ibooks:specified-fonts">true</meta>

And note that the com.apple.ibooks.metadata.plist file is no longer necessary!

And then comes the part where Apple lets you specify the version of your book. You are allowed two dots and three components (so 1.2.1) and up to four numbers per component (which seems excessive, frankly). And these aren't decimal numbers: trailing 0's count to keep them ordered; 1.10 is later than 1.9.

<meta property="ibooks:version">1.1</meta>

Then, since my book is fixed layout, I had to add the EPUB 3 specific metadata:

<meta property="rendition:layout">pre-paginated</meta>

<meta property="rendition:spread">auto</meta>

<meta property="rendition:orientation">auto</meta>

Because my books' pages include Javascript, I had to add properties="scripted" to each of the pages which links to a Javascript file, even if it didn't use Javascript in that particular page.

<item id="milkweed" href="milkweed.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml" properties="scripted" />

And then I removed the guide section, which is no longer required by Apple (and was already deprecated in the EPUB 3 spec).

</spine>

<!--new to 1.1 guide is removed -->

</package>

New TOC file

EPUB 3 requires a new XHTML-based TOC file, which is a lot easier to write than the old toc.ncx format, since it's just formed by an ol list with links to the various TOC entries. For a Fixed Layout book, for which you want iBooks to create its graphic TOC (made of the covers of the books), just create a single entry to the first page, or cover in my case:

<nav id="toc" epub:type="toc">

<h1 class="chapter">Table of Contents</h1>

<ol>

<li><a href="title.xhtml">The Monarch Butterfly Book</a></li>

</ol>

</nav>

Then, as a replacement to the guide section, add a landmarks section, which works very similarly:

<nav epub:type="landmarks">

<h1>Guide</h1>

<ol>

<li><a epub:type="ibooks:reader-start-page" href="title.xhtml">The Monarch Butterfly Book</a></li>

<li><a epub:type="cover" href="title.xhtml">Cover</a></li>

<li><a epub:type="bodymatter" href="milkweed.xhtml">First page</a></li>

</ol>

</nav>

Finally, declare the new toc.xhtml file in the OPF file, paying special attention to the properties attribute:

<item id="toc" href="toc.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml" properties="nav"/>

That's it for the OPF file.

Changes to the XHTML files

In each of the XHTML files, I had to change the meta tag where I declared the character set. It was:

<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

and it should be:

<meta charset="UTF-8"/>

I also had a few documents that somehow still had extraneous DOCTYPE elements. I got rid of those and made sure that each XHTML document started like this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<html xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

There were also a few places I had erroneously used character entities, things like © to show the © symbol. Now that I had the proper character set declaration, that was no longer necessary (or allowed). So I simply removed the character entities and replaced them with the characters themselves, typed in directly.

Copyright ©2012 by Elizabeth Castro...

As far as content, I also fixed the error on page 24, which had the blinking arrows in the wrong place:

And put them where they go:

I also changed the Javascript so that the arrows would blink more slowly. People seem to have had difficulty finding the captions. It's actually a tricky problem. I want the photos to be displayed without distractions, but I want to offer clues. I haven't quite found the perfect solution yet.

Validating

Once of all of the changes were made, I used EpubCheck to make sure I had done it all correctly. I used the latest version: EpubCheck3RC.

Uploading the new file to the iBookstore

Finally, I uploaded it to Apple's iBookstore with iTunes Producer. When you make changes to a book that already exists, you only have to change the parts in iBooks Producer that are different, and it will only update those pieces of your package. So, I updated the description and then on the Assets page, I clicked the Choose button under Publication, and selected the new updated EPUB file. This screenshot is actually after I've done that. iTunes Producer doesn't give a lot of feedback.

And then I got the error I was suspecting:

I was expecting it because Apple says that you have to say what changed in a "Version_whats_new" XML file. I hadn't been able to find where that was.

It turns out I had downloaded the latest version of iTunes Producer, but I hadn't installed it. Once I did that, I was able to add the What's new information on the Book page:

Then I delivered the package again (no need to upload the book files again), and it went through without a hitch.

What I am most interested to see now is how it notifies me (and all of you who have purchased the book through the iBookstore) about the new changes. The new description went live almost immediately, but when I go to iTunes Connect, it tells me that the EPUB 3 version is under review.

And indeed, I don't see that little update icon that Tim Cook promised. Though I'm left with questions: When does iBooks check? Does versioning only work in iBooks 3? Do I have to open and close the app to force a check?

When I go to the Purchased section of the iBookstore, I also see that it shows that the book was already downloaded and I have no opportunity to update it. I assume that when the changes go live, this button will change.

If you haven't bought the book yet, you'll be able to tell if you have the new version by checking page 24 and clicking the info arrow to see where those arrows show up.

And I'll keep you posted about how long it takes to go live. It seems like a really important feature to me. I would have liked to add a note or bookmark to see if those are maintained, but fixed layout format doesn't allow them. I'll have to update one of my other books...

Zen* and the Art of the Modular Ebook - #BiB12

2012-11-10T11:04:00.002-05:00

I spoke at the amazing Books and Browsers 2012 conference, organized by Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, at the end of last month in San Francisco. They've just made the video of my talk available so I wanted to share it.

In the video, I share the experiences with print publishing, Barcelona, and HTML that led me to where I am today—a bestselling computer book writer, turned publisher and Catalanist!

I should note that my blog is misspelled in the titles. If you're here, you know it's Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis.

And I'm particularly embarrassed that I misspoke about Matthew Tree. He is not "London-based" but rather he is originally from London, but has lived in Barcelona for the past 25 years or so. His book, Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside, has been described as “A must-read to understand Barcelona and Catalonia”.

And La Biblia del Macintosh, Tercera Edición, which was one of the first ever books about the Macintosh to be translated into Spanish actually had 1000 pages, not 500. It sold for 5000 pesetas, which was about $50, a monstrous sum at the time. I think we did an initial print run of about 3000 copies, which we financed by localizing the first ever translation of Adobe Photoshop into Spanish (version 3). We eventually sold all 3000 copies, taking advantage of the social marketing tools of the time: email, newsletters, and expensive advertisements in the Spanish edition of MacUser. I can only imagine where we could have gotten to if we had had Twitter.

They say you get less nervous the more that you speak in public. I'm still waiting!

OverDrive is terrible and discriminatory

2012-11-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

So I've got a sick kid, and he wanted to listen to Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. I pop over to the Boston Public Library which has an extensive collection of audio books, and ho! I'm in luck. They have it and it's available. I check it out, click the Download button, it downloads, and then I get this:

Yeah, I had seen that the file was a WMA file but since it said iPod as well, I thought I might be able to do it, oh my gosh, FROM MY MAC. But no. Turns out Overdrive discriminates against you if you have a Mac. I love libraries, but BPL: this is terrible.

Frustrated, but as yet undaunted, I fire up Parallels, so I can run Windows, download a brand new version of the Overdrive Media Console for Windows, which presumably supports said file type. Sign into BPL again, and download the book again. I struggle for a bit because it wants to open it up in the Mac version of the console, even though we have already seen that that won't work.

Finally, I get it to open up in the Windows version of the Overdrive Media Console, and I get this:

Yeah, I couldn't read it either. All I can think is, boy, it's a good thing I have a kind of wide screen monitor. Can you believe that?

With some trepidation, I click OK. I go back to the Overdrive Media Console on Windows and, as instructed, click Tools > Windows > Windows Media Player Security Upgrade. I get another big, wide error:

I say OK again, even though it's practically impossible to read.

Yet another window pops up and tells me that more DRM security files are going to be sent to who knows where to keep track of this audio file. For pity's sake.

I say OK again. In for an inch, in for a mile. And get this for my troubles:

Now, if you believe there's a server somewhere handling this that has ever been available, I've got a bridge to sell you. It's ridiculous. Ridiculous that Overdrive and the BPL treat me like a thief, ridiculous that I can't borrow books from the library as a Mac user, ridiculous that Overdrive makes me update a program I downloaded today, makes me jump through various incomprehensible hoops to do so, wastes an hour of my time, and at the very end says, "Oh, too bad, we don't care enough to make the process actually work."

Overdrive, you do a terrible disservice to libraries and book lovers. BPL, I love you, and I have continually advocated paying more taxes that should go to support what you do, but Overdrive does not serve me and it makes you look terrible.

And iBooks needs iOS6 for sharing, too

2012-11-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

One of the new features added to iBooks 3 that I wanted to try was sharing bits of a book via Twitter. But when I tried it, it didn't work. I thought maybe it only worked with purchased books, or DRM'd books, or some other kind of book I didn't have. Nope, the problem once again, as with MathML, hinted at by Baldur Bjarnason, was that I was still resisting upgrading to iOS6.

Now that I've got iBooks 3 and iOS6, sharing bits of books via Twitter (and Facebook, Mail, or Message) works swimmingly. Start by selecting the text you want to share.

Once the text is selected you can either highlight it or share it without highlighting (by clicking Share at the far right). I want to highlight first, so I click Highlight.

Once the text is highlighted, iBooks offers me additional options. I can change the color of the highlight, remove the highlight, add a note, or share—with the Away arrow—which I now click.

Once you click the Away button, iBooks offers you a choice of sharing methods. I'm going to use Twitter.

Then iBooks will show you the selection (or a piece of it if it doesn't fit within Twitter's 140 character limit), along with the iTunes link to the book, if it's a purchased book. You can share from sideloaded (e.g., non-purchased books) but iBooks won't be able to link to them in the iBookstore.

You can add your own comments (as long as they fit). And, of course, you could edit or remove the shared bit or the link as well.

Finally, click the Send button.

If you've highlighted before sharing, that's what you'll be left with.

The tweet becomes part of your regular Twitter stream, as if you had used your regular Twitter client. This was just an example, and I didn't expect a response, but Twitter is like that, and someone was listening:

Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of tweeting interesting parts of books that I'm reading. I imagine I'd do it less with fiction than with non-fiction, but I'll let you know.

Twitter is limited to 140 characters, but I was curious how much iBooks would let me email. I made the text as small as I could, and then selected two full pages of text, and emailed it to myself.

Apple automatically clips the selection to 199 words, and then adds the cover, author, title, publisher, publication date, and copyright notice, along with a link to the book in the iBookstore.

Also notice that the excerpt is centered, and images and all formatting instructions (including bulleted lists) are stripped. For example, if I select a section of my Read Aloud EPUB book as shown here:

The resulting email looks pretty dreadful:

I also tried copying text and pasting it into the Notes app, but that excerpt, too, was clipped to 199 words, and the formatting and images were removed.

I was able to copy successive paragraphs out of books and thus cumulatively copy out more than 199 words. Given that they feel compelled to limit copying, this at least is a sort of reasonable compromise: Keep readers from simply copying the entire book out, but let them share as much as they want in bits and pieces. Note that iBooks limits how much can be copied whether the book is DRM protected or not.

Finally, I also noticed that no highlighting or sharing is allowed in fixed layout books. I don't know why not. Seems like a recipe book, which might well be in fixed layout, would be just the place you want to add notes and perhaps comment on what you're making on Twitter.

iBooks3 needs iOS6 to support MathML

2012-11-01T13:45:00.000-04:00

One of the promises that Tim Cook made in his quick demonstration of iBooks3 last Tuesday was support for MathML. The example he showed was created with iBooks Author, and since I'm still not a convert, I tried a Math textbook not created with iBA as soon as I could after downloading iBooks3.

And was disappointed.

Here's a screenshot that I took with iBooks3 on iOS5:

Notice that the alignment is off, and several characters cannot be properly displayed and so are shown with empty boxes instead. Icks.

So I wondered if there was something magic (or tricky) about the way iBooks Author creates the MathML. But everything I heard said that wasn't the case.

I figured out the answer yesterday. iBooks 3 needs iOS6 to support MathML.

Here is the same section of the book (though now slightly repaginated), after upgrading to iOS6 (but with the exact same version of iBooks3):

Of course, the beauty of MathML is that the equations are just text, and thus can be made bigger or smaller to suit the reader. When I bump up the text size, the equation maintains its beautiful formatting:

MathML, like Asian language support, is one of the key features that make EPUB3 such an important standard. Without MathML, there are no math or science textbooks.

I hear there are other new features in iBooks3 dependent on iOS6. I will continue to highlight them here. If you subscribe to this blog, I'll send my new updates right to your mailbox.

New Contract needed for new iBookstores

2012-10-31T12:05:00.000-04:00

I got an email from Aaron Shepard, POD expert, this morning, letting me know that it's not enough to add your books to the new 18 iBookstores (Latin America and New Zealand) that Apple made available last week. You also have to download and accept the new contract addendums! Argh. So glad he told me.

Quick overview:

First, add the new territories to your books. Start by going into iTunes Connect and clicking Manage Your Books.

Next, click the cover of the book to which you wish to add territories.

Notice that the book on the right just says "32 stores", but there are currently 50 total possible. That means I need to add the remaining 18 new territories.

You can also see, under the Read Aloud EPUB book on the left, that I had already added the new territories to this book, but the book has still not been accepted into the new territories.

Next, you'll see the summary page for the chosen book. click the Rights and Pricing button in the upper-right corner.

iTunes Connect will show you the current list of territories where your book has been added, along with the Sales Start Date, DRM, Price, and other data. Click the Add New Territories button in upper-left corner.

Choose a DRM option, Sales Start Date, Base Currency (sales in most Latin American countries in their own currencies is not available, with notable exception of Mexico), Publication Type, List Price (of print edition), and Suggested iBookstore Price (which must be less than List Price). Then check the boxes next to the territories you wish to add. Or click Select All. Then click Continue.

iTunes Connect now shows you a list of the new territories and the price for each one. You are not limited to this price. Go through the list and adjust as necessary. (The book shown here is free, so the price is 0 in each case.)

Click Confirm when you're ready. Now you'll be back at the Rights and Pricing list, with the new territories added. But notice that they're still Not On Store. (Aaron tells me that if you click on the Not On Store label, you can see what the problem is.)

Click Done three times (always at bottom right of window) to get back to the iTunes Connect main window.

Now click Contracts, Tax, and Banking on the left side of the main iTunes Connect window.

Click Request next to the new Contract amendment. I recommend downloading and reading the document. If you agree, click the appropriate box and then click Submit.

Two more Done buttons and you're, well, done.

Now when you go to Manage Your Books, you'll see that your books are available on all 50 stores.

And if you visit one of the new territories in iTunes (by clicking the flag button in the lower-right hand corner and then choosing the desired country), you'll see your books listed. It might take some time for the new iBookstores to properly index your book's search terms. At first, I was unable to find my books, even by searching on my name. Searching on ISBN does seem to work, and I'm hoping that that will get updated quickly.

Note that my book that sells for $5 in the US sells for 65 Mexican pesos which, according to Google, is indeed the going rate.

One more thing I learned last week: reviews are posted only in the iBookstore that belongs to the country of the person who wrote the review. So, there is a lovely review of the Monarch Butterfly book by Laura Brady which I can only see if I connect to the Canada iBookstore:

and folks who connect from countries besides the US cannot see the five five-star ratings that the book has in the US iBookstore.

I think it would be nice if Apple made those out-of-country reviews available (perhaps after reviews from one's own country?) If it's the same book, this is information that would be useful to all.

At any rate, keep in mind that if you want to see reviews of your books in other iBookstores, you'll have to go to each store individually. And if you've reviewed my book on a non-US iBookstore, please let me know. I'd love to see it. (And thanks!)

Apple opens iBookstores across Latin America (and New Zealand)

2012-10-23T07:33:00.000-04:00

Updated: 9:32am

Thanks to a tip from Miquel Hudin, I noticed that Apple has already made it possible for publishers to add books to iBookstore in Latin America: specifically, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. And it has also opened the iBookstore in New Zealand.

Simply go to iTunes Connect, Manage your books, and then choose Add Territories in the upper-left part of the window.

I assume that there will be a new version of iTunes Publisher today as well.

Note that I added a few of my books this morning, but they still say "Not on iBookstore" in the new countries. I suspect that will change during the day.

There are books in Spanish for sale already on some of the new iBookstores. To see a different country's iBookstore, in iTunes, choose iTunes Store, and then go to the very bottom of the window and click the flag in the bottom-right corner.

Then choose the desired country from the list. Note that not all of the listed countries have the iBookstore (some only have the App store).

Here's a screenshot I took after switching to the Argentina iBookstore. Actual books for sale, in Spanish. Note the currency, however, all in USD.

As of 9:23, my books are still not available in the new countries, even though one is in Spanish. I'll let you know.

It is interesting to note that "Libros" now appears as a category on Apple's LinkMaker page for the new Latin American Market (and Books for New Zealand):

This is very exciting and is definitely an auspicious start to this day of new announcements by Apple. Can't wait for the rest.

Presenting “The Monarch Butterfly: An Interactive Picture Book”

2012-10-22T12:50:00.001-04:00

Over the weekend, I finally finished my first serious attempt at an interactive picture ebook. I've been working on it off and on for several years, first as I tried to take photographs that were worthy of being published, and second as I taught myself enough Javascript to create the effects that I thought were necessary to show the photographs and information in a fun and beautiful way.

Here's a short sampling of the book:

You can download a sample, or buy the whole book on the iBookstore. It works great on both iPad 2 and 3, as well as newer iPhones. I haven't tested it in other readers besides iBooks (yet).

I am writing a new miniguide that explains how to create interactive ebooks with Javascript and CSS and will announce that as soon as it's available.

If you would like a review copy, please contact me.

Everything I know I learned from my farm

2012-10-16T15:26:00.000-04:00

The sheep got out again this morning, and I was in a rush so I banished them back to the barn and the small paddock that they had already picked pretty clean last week when they got out three separate times and had me running around the neighborhood pleading them to come home to a little grain. So late this afternoon, I decided it was time to change the fence to its final pre-snowfall location. I have temporary mesh wire fencing that's designed to be mobile. All you have to do is pull the polls out and then carry the fence to a new position and put the polls back in again. Except that the wiring between the polls is better at getting tangled up than angora yarn and the polls themselves are just the other side of a pleasant weight. Still, I was tired of chasing the sheep, so off I went.

It's a blustery, bright, downright gorgeous fall day. Although it's been a lackluster fall color display, today was one of the better days: crisp blue sky with orange and yellow leaves blowing around the bright green grass. I started pulling out the fence and thinking about where I would move it, when I realized that the sheep had barely gotten going on the grass inside this particular area. Could I figure out what was going wrong with the fence? I had already tried this game three times last week. And then my very first rule of troubleshooting came to me: try the easy stuff first. I put the half-removed fencing down on the ground and went to check the connections. And sure enough, the wire leading from the charger to the fence had somehow gotten disconnected, and no electricity was getting to the fence. It's like finding a minor typo in your Javascript. You can't believe you didn't see it. So, I put the fence back where it was, plugged in the fence, and let the sheep back out. They were thrilled, and have yet to find a new way out.

Of course, once you're out on such a nice day, it's hard to go back in no matter how many books, projects, and presentations you've got half done. Plus, I had walked back and forth under the apple tree while I was fixing the fence and had noticed that the apples had gotten really big and really red. I don't know how I got so lucky with this tree. It's gorgeous all seasons, and every two years, it gives us more apples than we can possibly handle. This year, we made 16 gallons of sweet cider, 8 of hard cider, bags and bags of dried apples, and sheets and sheets of fruit leather.

I got a bucket and picked up the apples and noticed that a fair number had been chewed on. I'm pretty sure it's the same wascally rabbit that ran into the garden the last time I tried to shoo it away. But we got a hard freeze the other night, and the lush, endless gourd and pumpkin leaves that gave it cover have evaporated leaving behind a carpet of eggs and snakes.

Gourds that is. I planted them, together with some sunflowers, the morning that we left for Barcelona in the middle of June with a haphazard hope that they would survive our six weeks away. And when we got home, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had begun their assault on the whole garden. I kept turning them away from the peppers and peas and tomatoes, gently turning their tendrils back on themselves, and they kept reaching out until they had overrun the fence, the trellises, the onions, and a good bit of the yard to boot. I turned a blind and indulgent eye.

I'm not sure why, but gourds speak to me. I love their knobby texture, they're crazy shapes, they're outrageous size. Sometimes I dye them and carve them and otherwise play with them. But mostly I just admire them. I think part of their charm is that they're one of those rare things that well, are still rare. You can't buy them at the store, some people have never heard of them, there's no good word for them in Catalan. They're special.

Lessons: Check the easy stuff first. Sometimes, just wing it. Appreciate bounty. Share, even with rabbits. Notice beauty. Get outside once in a while.

Google Alerts ≠ Google

2012-10-04T12:36:00.000-04:00

For many years, the only news that ever made it into English-language papers about Catalonia had to do with food, travel, or on a lucky day, Catalan superstar architect Antoni Gaudí. I even started a blog, and got permission from a number of online news sites so that I could take matters into my own hands and translate the articles that I thought deserved wider attention in the non-Catalans speaking world. I remember being particularly outraged that Spain's Minister of Transportation had decided to build a high-speed rail line directly under (and I mean directly under), Barcelona's famed Sagrada Família, and it was barely covered in international papers (though today I did find this one article in the New York Times, Murphy's Law).

Part of the problem is that foreign correspondents have, until very recently, concentrated themselves in Madrid, thinking (erroneously in my opinion) that that was a reasonable vantage point for covering Barcelona. But, it's pretty obvious if you've read any of their articles that the city you live in makes a difference on the information and the opinions you collect and then relate. Imagine covering the US election from Moscow, or Havana. You just don't get the same story.

But in the last three weeks, since Catalonia's massive demonstration of a million and a half people, and President Mas' subsequent call for a referendum on a new sovereign state for Catalonia, I haven't been able to keep up. There have been hundreds, even thousands of articles in English-language newspapers.

And while trying to keep up with it all, I've learned a few things about Google and Google Alerts that you might find useful even if you're not so interested in my adopted country.

You don't need me to tell you what Google is. Google Alerts is less well known: it's a Google-based service that offers to "email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries" and at the intervals "daily, weekly, when it happens" that you specify.

The problem, however, is that Google Alerts does not produce the same results as Google, and in particular its results aren't nearly as good or complete. Since September 11, my Google Alert for "Catalonia, Catalunya and/or Catalans" has resulted in all of 15 results. 15. Part of the issue is that Google Alerts (like Google) groups articles into categories, and just shows the first of many. For example, here is the Google Alert that I received on September 12, the day after one and a half million people marched in Barcelona for independence:

There are three news entries, and each one has a "See all stories on this topic" link. And there's a bizarre rant from some website. But I thought Google Alerts was supposed to show me all the stories? It clearly does not.

If I go to Google and search for Catalonia (by itself), even today on October 1, I can travel back to the entry on September 11, and see that there were actually 240 articles, and Google itself shows me the summaries of seven or eight:

How are Google and Google Alerts grouping articles into categories? It seems a bit random. Syndicalization might be one criteria; when the exact same article appears in various news sources. I recognize that there's a lot of that. AP articles are obviously picked up by multiple newspapers, but a lot of other papers share articles as well. I found the same exact article in The Telegraph (in the UK) and in the Sydney Herald (in Australia).

But that's not the only criteria that Google Alerts uses, at least in my recent experience. It also seems to lump together articles that are completely different.

So, my question is if you're asking Google Alerts to give you all of the pages about a given topic, what good does it do for it to send you an email with a link to just one of them, saying you should search for the others? Isn't that what Google is for?

The second issue is that Google Alerts doesn't get them all by a long stretch. For example, I am writing this at 12:09pm on October 4th. At 10pm on October 2, a full 36 hours ago, Google showed me that the New York Times had just published a hugely influential, detailed op-ed about Catalonia, called Spanish Prisoners. I have yet to receive any word about it from Google Alerts. Today, there is a new article about Catalonia in Bloomberg Business Week. There has been nary a peep from Google Alerts, even though it promised to send me links to a news story "when it happens".

In short, Google Alerts doesn't do what it promises. It sends what it considers a few representative articles and a link to additional ones, and often misses the most important stories. If you want to find all the important articles on a topic, you're much better off going to Google yourself.

And if you're interested in Catalonia, I've got the best news roundup around, thanks to Google, but not Google Alerts :)

Retina images in iBooks on iPad

2012-10-02T11:44:00.000-04:00

I've been promising this post for several weeks and I think I finally have a definitive recommendation. But let me start at the beginning. The goal is to include beautiful high-res images in ebooks that take advantage of the Retina display, making sure to follow Apple's rules and not completely bloat the book, especially on lower-res displays.

So, I went to James Duncan Davidson who has done some pioneering work serving Retina images on websites. First, he found an issue with WebKit and Retina images. Then he showed it was possible, and what a difference it makes. Then, he speculated about need for progressive JPEG. And recently he figured out how to serve Retina images to Retina displays without bogging down slower screens. All very helpful.

At least for websites. Of course ebooks have different issues. First and foremost, since they are self-contained, it doesn't make sense to serve different images in different situations, unless you're creating completely different EPUB files, which is a hassle of its own.

Second, on the iPad 3, which has a resolution of 2048 x 1536, we have the added problem that iBooks doesn't allow images larger than 2 megapixels, and 2048 x 1536 is 3,145,728, precisely 1,145,728 pixels too many.

So how do we get Retina quality images in an ebook in iBooks?

First, following the guidelines in my last post on maximizing the iPad screen real estate, as well as providing lots of zoomability, I'm going to use a viewport that measures 2400 x 1860. And I'm going to create images at that size as well.

To get around the 2 megapixel limit, I worked out a technique based on an idea on Dan Amos' Book Creator website: “chop your 3.1 million pixel image into smaller images with each no larger than 2 million pixels. Then just line them up on the page.” First, I created an image that measured 2400 x 1860 (using the selection tool with a fixed ratio of 2400 x 1860 to select the desired area of my photo, then Save to Web at exactly 2400 x 1860).

I calculated that at 2400 pixels wide, a 2 megapixel image could have a maximum height of 833 pixels (2M÷2400). But that's an annoying number, so I opted for slices measuring 2400 x 800 pixels high. I set horizontal guides at 800px and 1600px and after activating the Slice tool (jumbled in with Crop), I clicked the Slides from Guides option in the toolbar. Then, I switched to the Slice Select Tool and double clicked each slice to name it. Finally, I chose Save for Web, Photoshop exported the three slices for me, with my chosen names (top, middle, and bottom).

In the HTML, I positioned each image right after the next with no spaces:

    <div><a id="image" href="#pag001"><img id="item1" class="item" src="molt/top.jpg" alt="image" style="width: 2400px; height: 800px; z-index:-1" /><img id="item2" class="item" src="molt/middle.jpg" alt="image" style="width: 2400px; height: 800px;z-index:-1 " /><img id="item3" class="item" src="molt/bottom.jpg" alt="image" style="width: 2400px; height: 260px;z-index:-1 " /></a></div>

And in the CSS, I set the images to display as if they were block elements (one on top of the next):

img {display: block}

And the images display fine, and everything looks beautiful

And if I place a 900 x 698 pixel image on the right side page, flipped so that the same bits are next to each other, you can really see the difference:

Especially if you zoom in:

But here's the thing. If I place a 1600 x 1240 px image on the right hand page (again, flipped so I can compare the caterpillar heads with each other), I can't tell the difference. Maybe you can. And perhaps that makes sense, I'm not sure. A 1600 x 1240 image (which is less than 2 megapixels) is only 206ppi and not officiall Retina quality, compared with the 264ppi permitted by the iPad 3, but it's pretty darn good.

Even if you zoom in:

So, given that

1) Slicing high-res images is a pain (and sometimes reveals white dividing lines on iPhone and old iPad)
2) My high-res caterpillar takes up 2Mb, compared to the 1Mb for the 1600 x 1240px image.
3) The difference in quality is minimal.
4) The difference is even less noticeable on iPhones and older iPads.

I don't think going for extra high-resolution images that take full advantage of the new iPad's Retina screen is worth the trouble.

But I'd love to hear if you've found differently.

Finally, this is a fixed layout example, but I would say this goes double for flowing books, in which it would be even harder to position three images together reliably.

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Maximizing zoom via the viewport in Fixed Layout ebooks in iBooks

2012-09-20T14:33:00.001-04:00

I got an email from one of my readers the other day saying I was giving him a headache. Well, watch out, because I'm not done yet :) Bet you didn't know I used to be a math major...

Let's forge ahead. Although, as we've seen here and here, when you specify a viewport, you're actually specifying the proportions of the viewport, it turns out that you're also specifying the amount of zoom possible. Basically, if you use small numbers for the viewport, you'll have less zoom than if you use large numbers. Let's look at an example.

First, let's suppose, giving the calculations from Friday, that we want a viewport whose proportions take advantage of the iPad's screen with as little letterboxing as possible. We also want individual pages for each image. That means the viewport's proportions will be 1900 x 1470px.

You might be alarmed that 1900 x 1470, when multiplied together is larger than 2,000,000, which, if you had images that size, would cause your book to be rejected by Apple's iBookstore. But, just because your viewport is a certain size, does not mean that your images have to be that size, even if you want them to fill the page. They simply have to be displayed at that size.

But again, what numbers should we use for the viewport, if the proportions are 1900 x 1470, or a ratio of 1.29:1 (which is just 1900/1470)? A simple option would be to set the viewport to 1290px x 1000px (which of course, also has a ratio of 1.29:1).

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1290,height=1000" />

Now, what is the largest image that we can put in that viewport that will display full size? To get this number, multiply the ratio by 2 million (in our example 1.29 x 2,000,000 = 2,580,000), and then take the square root of the answer (1606). That number is the biggest width a 2 megapixel image of these proportions could have. If you like, round it off to make it easier to remember and type (1600). Divide the width by 1.29 to get the height (1240). And if you like, multiply them together to make sure you did it right. You should get a number that is less than 2,000,000 (1,984,000).

Next, save your images at 1600 x 1240px.

Add the images to your pages, and preview in iBooks. Here's the page at full size.

But with a book like this, your readers will want to zoom in. Here's the same page, zoomed in as far as it will go:

But what happens if we use a larger viewport? Let's try the full 1900 x 1470, which, as you remember has the same 1.29:1 ratio as 1290 x 1000px.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1900,height=1470" />

I'm not going to change the images at all. It's the same 1600 x 1240 image I used in the previous example. (Though I did change the CSS to display the image at the same width as the viewport, 1900px wide.)

At full size, the page looks exactly the same. It's counterintuitive, but makes sense if you think about it. Just remember: the viewport determines the proportions, not the actual size.

But look what happens when you zoom in. Specifically, notice how much farther you can zoom in:

And what if we made it bigger still. Let's try. I'll pick 2400 pixels wide, just because it's relatively even number. If the width is 2400, I just have to divide by 1.29 to get the height (1860).

<meta name="viewport" content="width=2400,height=1860" />

At full size (it still fills the screen with no letterboxing), it still looks exactly the same as the other viewports with the same proportion. Note that I'm still using the same image that meaures 1600 x 1240px:

But now you can zoom in even further:

Now, I'm not sure what the limit is. Surely, it doesn't make any sense to be able to zoom in so far that the image is totally blurry or pixelated. However, in a book where zooming in is important, you want to make sure you don't use puny viewport numbers.

I also am not sure if there is an upper limit to the viewport that Apple or iBooks will allow. When I tried to create a viewport that measured 4800 x 3720px, it opened, but crashed when I zoomed in and out of a page. All of the sizes shown on this page work just fine.

Ah, and you might ask, what about the image size. How can we make the zoomed in images look their best. That's tomorrow :)

Note: This is a picture of a Monarch Butterfly egg. Notice the pin head in the upper-left corner of the picture for perspective on its size. This particular egg was just about to hatch (it's on the next page in the book!) They are truly amazing creatures.

Book Proofer, Caching, and iBooks

2012-09-19T17:09:00.000-04:00

I just posted an update to my blog post about choosing a proportion for the viewport in Fixed Layout EPUB ebooks. I got some figures wrong originally because even though I had changed the EPUB and thought I was looking at the latest version, iBooks was holding out on me and showing me an older version.

I often use Book Proofer, especially when I'm working on Fixed Layout ebooks for the iPad. Book Proofer is a free tool that you can get if you have a full iTunes Connect account. (There are two kinds of iTunes Connect accounts, one for making books available for free and one that lets you sell ebooks through the iBookstore. Apple makes some tools available to holders of free ebook iTunes Connect accounts, but unfortunately, they only give Book Proofer to those who have signed on to sell ebooks through their store. What do you need to get the full account? One ISBN, a US Tax id, and your bank information. In my opinion, it's totally worth it, and you get the ability to sell ebooks as well.)

So what does Book Proofer do? When you drag an EPUB folder (you can drag a zipped EPUB, but why bother?) on top of the Book Proofer window, the book automatically syncs to iBooks on any connected iOS device that has iBooks open. Almost instantly.

And then, you can make changes to the XHTML and the CSS files and see the changes updated in the iPad on the fly. Book Proofer is really an invaluable tool for creating Fixed Layout for iBooks.

I found out on Tuesday, however, that not all changes are updated right away. I was playing around with the viewport size, trying to see if I could find a perfect horizontal page size that would fit perfectly and take maximum advantage of the iPad's screen. It turns out that Book Proofer won't update changes to the viewport. Let's see:

Now, anybody who has been working with iBooks for the last two years is probably familiar with its peculiar caching issues. I first discovered that iBooks wouldn't show you the latest version of an ebook unless you both deleted the iTunesMetadata.plist file from the EPUB and also changed the value in the dc:title value in the OPF file.

But, on Tuesday, I couldn't make that work. I think part of my problem was the order in which I was making the changes. Since I wanted to change the OPF file, the three XHTML files and the CSS file, I made the changes in whatever order I found the files on my desktop.

Not only that, sometimes I made the changes with the ebook open in iBooks, and sometimes I went back to the list.

I have found that the order matters, and sometimes you have to go back to the list.

So, if you want to change the viewport, first make and save the changes in the XHTML and CSS. Then, change the value of the dc:title element. When you save, iBooks should automatically close your document and display your list of EPUB books. It will replace the older ebook with the newer titled one. When you open that new document, you should find that the viewport has been properly updated.

Changing the dc:identifier element also works, as long as you do so while the book is closed. It also has the added benefit of creating an additional book instead of replacing the previous one, which can be helpful if you're trying out a series of changes and want to be able to go back and revisit earlier ones.

You can also change the dc:date element to track when the changes were made.

The important thing to remember is to make the changes to the XHTML and CSS files first, and only then change the dc:title, dc:identifier, and/or dc:date.

Choosing a viewport's proportions in a Fixed Layout EPUB for iBooks

2012-09-14T17:13:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: September 19, 2012. Well, unfortunately, the numbers given for the individual horizontal pages were not quite right. Which is strange, because the screenshots sure make it look like it was right. I'm still trying to track the problem, though I think the issue is caching, which I hope to get into in more detail in a separate blog post. For now, know that the faux pages take up 120px (because of the higher resolution of the Retina display!) and so the actual optimal size of full screen individual pages is 1900 x 1470.

Yesterday, I showed you how the specified Viewport size affects the size of text and images in a fixed layout ebook in iBooks. Today I want to go over in more detail how you should choose the viewport's proportions.

The first thing to remember is that even though you specify the viewport size in pixels, it's not really a fixed size, but rather a proportion. For example, if you specify a viewport of 1000px wide by 1000px wide, you'll get a square page, but on an iPad3, it will be displayed at some other number of pixels, but not necessarily 1000.

When viewing a two page spread, it will look like this:

And when you zoom into a single page, you get this:

Note that even though the viewport was defined as 1000px square, its actual measurement in pixels depends on its zoom factor. When zoomed into a single page, for example, it measures about 1470px square. When viewed in a spread, an individual page measures 997px square. That's awfully close to 1000, but it's just a coincidince.

A page whose viewport is set to 2000 x 2000px would also be displayed in a spread at almost 997px square. Actually, it measures 1010px square, because the faux pages are smaller and take up less room.

(If you're wondering why the image shrunk, go back and read yesterday's post.)

More importantly, when you have a square page viewed in a spread, there is a lot of letterboxing. And when you zoom in, you'll see as much of the facing page as fits in the space left over from the square:

Now what happens if you turn the iPad sideways? Viewing a spread of square pages makes them pretty small.

And when you zoom in, there's a fair bit of letterboxing above and below, and not so much room for the facing page.

So, how do you take advantage of the real estate?

Of course, if your book is designed to be square, there's not much to do about it, but if you're designing a new book, or have some leeway for adjusting an existing design, you can choose a viewport that better takes advantage of an iPad's screen.

There are two options in this vein. You can either choose to have a spread of facing pages fit on the screen, or you can have a single horizontal or vertical page fit on the screen. Let's look first at the facing pages option.

Suppose you want to create a book whose spread fits into landscape orientation view on the iPad. If the iPad measures 2048 x 1536, and you leave out 64 pixels for top and bottom real estate and 56 pixels for faux pages on the ends, you get 1984 x 1480px. If you have 1984px for the entire width, that means you'll need to set the width of one of the pages to exactly half that, or 992px. The height of each page will still be 1480px.

In this particular example—more Monarchs!—I filled the left page with the left half of an image and the right page with the right half of an image. So the spread looks like one large image, with only the telltale faux spine in the middle giving it away.

Now, I will admit that if you double click the spread, it moves the tiniest bit. I don't know if there is a perfect size that eliminates that. If there is, I couldn't find it. (This is different from the weird flicker that you get sometimes when flipping to a new page. That is a different problem altogether.)

You can't zoom in on that page because it already fills the screen.

If you turn the iPad sideways, you get letterboxing above and below, as you might expect,

but when you zoom in on a single page, it fills up practically the entire screen with no letter boxing and a minimal overlap of the facing page.

It's pretty good.

What happens if you change the viewport to 1984x2960? Note that that is precisely double the size we were using.

Once you change the width of each image to 1984px, it looks exactly the same:

There is one important difference, however, which I'm going to save for another post.

Until then, let's look at other options for the viewport. While you could create facing pages that would fit in a vertical screen, they'd be really skinny. There might be a reason to do that, but I'll leave it for you to figure out.

Instead, let's look at how to maximize the real estate of individual pages. There are a couple of reasons why you might favor individual pages instead of a spread that combines two pages into one. First of all, it's simply a different look to turn an entire page rather than turn a half of a page.

But secondly and more importantly, you can only apply Javascript within a single page. So if you want to activate something on the right side by doing something on the left side, you'll have to have both sides in the same XHTML document, that is, in an individual page.

Individual pages that maximize screen real estate

We've actually already seen how to maximize portrait orientation pages. Just use the same measurements as we did for the spread, but fill the right and left pages with distinct material.

Let's look instead at horizontal pages. Again, if we're starting with 2048 x 1536, then we have to subtract 64 for vertical real estate, 28 for the faux pages at one end, and 120 pixels for the minimum overlap of the facing page. That leaves us with 1900 x 1472px, which I'll round off to 1900 x 1470px so it's easier to remember.

Since each page is going to be independent, each image must occupy the full terrain, 1900 x 1470px.

If you view the book zoomed out, the pages are rather small:

But if you zoom into a single page, it takes up the full space available in horizontal orientation:

Other sizes

Of course, you can make a book any proportions you wish. You simply have to keep in mind that, as with the square example, there will either be a fair bit of letterboxing when the reader is zoomed out, or a lot of overlap from the adjacent page if they're zoomed in.

What about zoom?

I know, I keep hinting about zoom, and it's really important. But it's going to have to wait until Monday, independence or no.