Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

Pepcon 2012

2012-05-23T12:04:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this on the plane on my way home from Pepcon 2012. I'm tired and annoyed with the TSA, but even they cant take away my appreciation for having gone. As much as I love and value the connections and communication that happens online, there's something about meeting people in person that somehow makes it all real.

I wanted to write a little about what it was like so those who couldn't go could get a feel for it.

I didn't get to Pepcon until almost 3pm on Monday due to some prior commitments. But there were some sessions still going on when I got there, and I listened to part of Mike Rankin's top ten Long document tips and then a bit of Bob Levine and Keith Gilbert's presentation on DPS. One of the hardest parts of most conferences for me is wanting to listen to multiple presentations at once. My solution is to wander from one to the next, but it's imperfect at best.

Let me confess that I don't know a thing about DPS, but my first impressions aren't that great. It feels like a dead end to me, and I personally can't stand subscription programs; I don't want to be locked in month after month, I want to own. And it's all images, even the text?? No. I want standards so that my content doesn't get lost under proprietary formats. I don't want all my eggs in anyone else's basket.

After the sessions I took part in the first of two meetings with the senior InDesign engineers from Adobe. I've been on the InDesign beta team for a while so their names were familiar, but this was the first time I had met any of them in person. I was totally impressed. They asked us what we wanted (in terms of InDesign support for EPUB) and then carefully listened as we debated the merits of different solutions and the problems of various strategies. They didn't make any promises and they didn't make us sign any NDA forms, they mostly just listened and gave us feedback about our complaints.

One of my big complaints was that the CSS that InDesign generates has too many default values, and doesn't take advantage of CSS' power of inheritance (the cascade). It's tricky, because you can have an unending hierarchy of styles based on other styles in InDesign but the most obvious way to translate that to CSS involves using multiple classes, which are unfortunately not supported by all ereaders. There is limited cascade without multiple classes though there is the body, the p elements and then individual classes.

Throughout the course of the two meetings (almost four hours) we talked about a lot of issues. We didn't come to any firm conclusions and they made no promises but I think the important bit was helping them talk with people who actually use the tool to make EPUB files—probably Ron Bilodeau and Colleen Cunningham were more useful in this regard than I was.

And I don't mean that in a flippant way. In my own personal experience, it's a challenge to both write about how to create EPUB and actually create EPUB files. I imagine that it's even harder writing software that creates EPUB files and actually creating EPUB files. I'll come back to this point.

After the meeting with Adobe, I went to the Pepcon Ignite session. My favorites were the ones by MarisaKC and by Kelly Vaughn, whose presentation on creating crazy shapes with various weights and kinds of strokes reminded me a bit of my own exhaustive report on the possibilities of iPhoto.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned food yet. I went up to my room and ate some of the lovely fruit that Anne Marie and David had left for me. but I didn't go out to dinner because I still wasn't done with my presentation despite my promises to myself not to leave it to the last minute. Having to stand up in front of people and say something relevant is a really good way of proving the difference between having an idea and actually having a presentation. I knew what I wanted to say, I knew where I wanted to put the emphasis, but when I started to practice out loud, I realized (yet again) how much work it is to put those ideas into a shape that makes sense to other people. Easy is hard, and all that.

I didn't get to sleep until 11:30pm local time, which was 2:30am in my head, and I had been up since 3am the night before because I had left on an early flight. Note to self: really, really finish your presentation before you go to your next speaking engagement.

I woke up at 5am, thanks to a call from my non-time-zone-aware-daughter, but then took advantage of the time to really finish my talks, and practice them all the way through.

During the morning session, while hearing the brilliant ID scripter Kris Coppieters, admit that he “isn't an InDesign user”, and then watch several more presenters describe features I've never used and sometimes never heard of, the difference of using a program and creating the program (or teaching others how to use it) became even more clear. It's really hard to do both.

I think of the morning sessions, it was Gabriel Powell's that was the most helpful in terms of EPUB stuff: “Preparing Images for ePub/eBook”.

At lunch, I had a nice chat with Ron Bilodeau and Felipe Santos, the former from O'Reilly in Cambridge, and the latter from Brazil. These are the moments that make a conference special: catching up with people face to face that you might know online (like Ron), and learning different perspectives and needs from people you're meeting for the first time (like Felipe).

At 1:30, I gave my first talk, on Enhanced Ebooks. I started by talking about what sorts of books are encompassed by that term, and then talked about how to embed audio and video in an EPUB file with InDesign, using the techniques shown in the blog post that I published that same day. I was pretty jazzed to be able to explain to these InDesign-centric and perhaps code-cautious listeners that they could create enhanced ebooks without cracking their EPUB files and looking at the dreaded HTML.

Then Matthew Diener joined me to explain what EPUB 3 has in store, wisely showing some nice examples on both Azardi and Readium. Then I gave a more nuts and bolts look at exactly what EPUB3 code looks like. It's not that different from EPUB2, you'll be happy to hear. There were many fewer listeners in the EPUB3 talk than the Enhanced Ebooks presentation. I think people are wary of future technologies that are not yet implemented. But as I mentioned yesterday, EPUB3 is now supported by the iBookstore, and Apple is using it in standard ways to provide a better user experience. It's time to make the move.

After my talks, we had another two hour meeting with the InDesign crew, in which we discussed indexes at some length. One of the issues we argued about was how to label references to content. That is, if you go look up EPUB3 in the back of a print book, you might see something like:

EPUB3 12, 45-67, 78, 92

In an ebook, of course, there are no discrete pages, and so at first glance, you might be inclined to do away with those references altogether and use something like:

EPUB3 1, 2, 3, 4

But I argued that even though the page numbers themselves might be an artificial construct, they still give us information about what we might find there, that is lost in the replacement solution. In the example above, I might expect a short introductory mention on "page 12", a more thorough treatment on "pages 46-78", and less introductory, but still short mentions on "78" and "92". How do we convey that information without the actual page numbers? The short answer is, we don't know yet.

Finally, it was time for dinner. I was looking forward to meeting EPUB coder extraordinaire Rick Gordon for the first time, and had put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone wanted to join us. It was a really interesting bunch in the end (about 10 of us) who made it to the Jazz Bistro Les Joulins, just down the street from the hotel. The food was good, and the conversation interesting, and heavy into code :)

Not quite done, in the morning, I spent an hour at the Meet the Author's table with Steve Werner, InDesign expert. I'm not sure people really knew we were there, but I got to talk to a few people who wandered over.

The last thing on my agenda was to talk to Kris Coppieters and see some of his amazing scripts in action. He kindly came out to give ma demo and I was totally enthralled. While I had originally talked to him about a script that converts blogs to InDesign documents, I was most interested in his CSS Geometry which spits out the coordinates of the text blocks in an InDesign document and might be very useful in generating Fixed Layout ebooks from InDesign.

And I did get to see a cablecar!

Many thanks to Anne Marie Concepcion and David Blatner for inviting me, and in general for organizing the conference and getting so many interesting people together! (And thanks to Matthew, whose nicest tweet ever is still making my day.)

Creating pop-up footnotes in EPUB 3 (and thus in iBooks)

2012-05-22T20:09:00.000-04:00

Apple sent around an email today announcing that EPUB 3 is now supported by iBooks and the iBookstore. It also tantalizingly suggested that EPUB 3 supports pop-up footnotes and said you could find information in the EPUB 3 spec on the IDPF website. The first part is true, and the second part is sort of true, but if you like, read on and I'll explain just how to do it.

The IDPF website explains the proper syntax for marking up footnotes symantically, that is, by labeling them as footnotes:

<p>In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol for the British pound, a unit of currency.<a epub:type="noteref" href="#n1">1</a></p>

This snippet is from an EPUB 3 version of Moby Dick, coded by Dave Cramer.

And then the EPUB 3 spec goes on to say that a Reading System may associate specialized behaviors with that syntax, and it looks like Apple has associated the pop-up functionality to the combination of epub:type="noteref" and epub:type="footnote" attribute/value pairs.

So, to make a pop-up footnote in EPUB 3 (which works in iBooks), you just have to create your footnote marker link as shown above, paying special care to include the epub:type="noteref" attribute/value pair. I'll repeat it here for good measure:

<a epub:type="noteref" href="#n1">1</a></p>

Next, create an aside element that contains the text that should appear in a pop-up display when the link is pressed.

The aside element must also have the epub:type="footnote" attribute/value pair to mark it as the footnote content as well as an id attribute that matches the value of the href attribute in your link.

<aside epub:type="footnote" id="n1">

<p>These have been corrected in this EPUB3 edition.</p>

</aside>

Note that the aside element, which is new to HTML5, is automatically hidden by iBooks. If you put your footnotes in, say, a div element, it would still pop-up when the link was pressed, but it would always be visible as a regular part of the text as well.

Another thing that I noticed is that you can enclose your a element in sup elements so that your footnote markers are raised with respect to the surrounding text, but make sure it's outside the a element or else it will break your pop-up footnote.

And that's it. Look! It works!

Here it is in a horizontally-oriented iBooks:

And here it is vertically:

Note that I completely disabled the CSS on this document, to be sure that the pop-up had nothing to do with any CSS effect.

And notice that the font in the pop-up changes to match the font chosen in the Font menu (here I've chosen Seravek):

Again, you can download this and other EPUB 3 examples from the EPUB 3 Samples site and view it in iBooks 2.1.1 (from April!). You can view this particular pop-up footnote on the third page of the Moby Dick book, called "Original Transcriber's Notes" in the table of contents (preface_001.xhtml). Thanks to Dave Cramer who coded the example (in January). And thanks to Apple for adding this functionality... and hinting that it existed so I could figure it out! I love, love, love that Apple totally followed the standard on this one: supporting symantically marked footnotes, and then "associating specialized behaviors" as the spec directs. No extra CSS or Javascript required. Well played, Apple.

OK, there are now two desktop EPUB 3 readers, and iBooks and the iBookstore have officially announced support as well. And there are pop-up footnotes. What are you waiting for to start creating EPUB 3 ebooks?

Customizing InDesign's EPUB files without cracking them open!

2012-05-15T17:00:00.000-04:00

I'm working on my presentation about Enhanced EPUB for PePcon on Tuesday afternoon and I was playing with the newly released InDesign CS 6 to make sure that everything works as expected. But it didn't. For some reason, when you place an audio file, iBooks displays the controls so small that the only thing you can do is choose Airplay, but not the actual Play button (if you're on an Airplay network). It's pretty frustrating and would completely ruin InDesign's much improved multimedia function if not for one thing.

You can fix it without cracking the EPUB file open. One of InDesign CS 6's other new features is that you can choose additional CSS files to apply to your exported EPUB. All you have to do is create a CSS file that fixes the code that InDesign supplies, and voilà, the audio controls reappear. You don't have to unzip, or worse, rezip.

The key lies in the letter "C" of "CSS". It stands for Cascade. The Cascade means that when there are multiple sets of style rules for a given bit of text, there is a defined hierarchy for which rules will win out. I actually see it as a sort of waterfall in my head with the more “important” rules flowing over and covering the lesser ones.

To make the cascade work, you have to understand the slightly complicated topic of CSS inheritance: given two competing rules, which one wins? I talk about this in some detail in my HTML book. The very abbreviated answer is that you have to take into account specificity (that is #id overrules .class overrules p) and location (that is, inline overrides local overrides earlier, overrides imported), as well as taking into account the !important tag.

In our example, InDesign creates this code for audio elements. Note that this is the default size if you don't change the poster image for the audio element.

audio.frame-5 {

height:60px;

width:60px;

}

But when I open that document in iBooks on the iPad, this is what I see:

And when I click it, all I can select is which Airplay device I want. I can't actually play the audio.

So, I open a new text document. InDesign 6 lets me add additional CSS documents and will automatically load them after the CSS that it creates itself. That means that since my styles are later, as long as the specificity is the same, my styles will override InDesign's.

But if you look at the code above, notice that the selector that InDesign uses, audio.frame-5 has a class, and thus is more specific than a plain audio.

The answer lies in the HTML that InDesign creates. By default it generates an id element for each audio (and video) element that it creates, set to the filename. So, you can use that filename in the CSS to make your selector more specific, and thus override InDesign's CSS.

My audio file is called "bondia.mp3", and if you know CSS, you know there's a problem already. That period in the filename has special meaning in CSS (it means that what follows is a class name). Since we don't want that special meaning, we have to escape the period with a backslash:

audio#bondia\.mp3 {

height:26px;

width: 150px;

}

These values will now override the height and width values that InDesign generated. Save this text file as "extras.css"

How do I get them into my EPUB file? Go to Export in ID6, choose EPUB, click the Advanced panel, and then choose Add Style Sheet, then find your extras.css file. Export as usual.

If you looked inside your EPUB file (though you don't have to), you'll see this:

That's it! When you open your book in iBooks, you'll see that the audio controls are as you specified (and not as InDesign specified), even though you never had to deal with Terminal, never had to unzip or rezip or anything.

The best part about this is that you can use this technique to override any of the CSS that InDesign either creates in a way that you don't like or that it doesn't yet support. For example, suppose you want to add a border around a video. You can do that with an extras.css file. (Indeed, you can add borders to all of your videos just by using video as a selector instead of targeting just a single video.) Suppose you want to add media-queries so that your document will work as best as it can in different ereaders. Just put the media-queries in your extras.css file. The possibilities are really enormous.

Thanks to Adobe for incorporating this amazing new feature!!

Announcing and Denouncing Spanish Hate Speech towards Catalans

2012-05-09T12:29:00.002-04:00

I came across a new Catalan website that has been documenting a very disturbing trend of Spanish hate speech towards Catalans. The site, Apuntem.cat (which means, We take note), retweets and records the hate speech so that people understand what Catalans have to deal with on a daily basis (and perhaps some of the reasons behind Catalonia's independence movement).

Honestly, I find Apuntem's Twitter stream really difficult to read. The people they retweet are really vile. But I agree with Apuntem's basic premise, that it's important to shine the light on them. Indeed, it seems that many of the posters have deleted their Tweets after Apuntem outed them, for shame or embarrassment, who can say.

Here's a sampling of commentaries from back in March about some kids in a school in a little town called Ripoll who sung the Portuguese song "Ai se eu te pego" in Catalan. You can find the original Spanish versions collected here.

"Infinite contempt upon hearing the kids singing Michel Teló's song... IN CATALAN #CastillianWhereAreYou"

"Disgusting kids... "renew, renew" over and over again, and on top of it all, in Catalan."

"Shameful those 6 year olds who were on channel 4, that at that young age, they're already speaking Catalan."

"They bring out some disgusting kids singing in Catalan... this is Spain for God's sake!"

"Catalans make me sick, children, parents, old people... all of them, hope they die."

"Those kids who came out to sing to Guardiola in Catalan should have been drowned upon birth. There would be less garbage."

"It's like a kick in the mouth hearing those kids sing in Catalan. That's what you get on sports channel 4."

"What a shame that they teach those kids to speak Catalan at such a young age. We're in Spain!"

That was about little kids. When they're talking about Pep Guardiola, FC Barcelona's coach for the last four years who just retired and who gave his farewell speech in Catalan, it gets worse. (Original Spanish hate tweets.)

"Pep, hope you get it in the ass, don't speak Catalan, you son of a bitch."

"What a fucking obsession with speaking Catalan, god damnit."

"Go ahead, speak in Catalan, but I'll shit and stomp on your ancestors Guardiola, die.

"Guardiola speaking in Catalan, he should be ashamed!!!! CLOWN! YOU'RE A CLOWN"

"Jail for Guardiola for speaking Catalan in stadium full of Spaniards."

"What a shithead disgusting Catalan!!! Speak in Spanish you fucker. #disgustingcatalans"

"Pep, speak in Spanish, you Catalan shithead."

"Son of a bitch Pep speaking in Catalan... Speak Spanish you asshole"

"What a lack of respect! Speaking in Catalan? And what about the people who don't understand it? That's his humbleness. Fucking Catalonia."

And it goes on and on. And I didn't even translate the ones that suggest bombing the Catalan football stadium. They should be ashamed. And everyone who lets such hate speech go by without reproach shares the blame.

Indeed, it seems that some are ashamed, and take down their tweets. They should never post them to begin with.

Readium displays Fixed Layout EPUB on desktop (compatible with iBooks too)

2012-05-09T09:46:00.000-04:00

We have been waiting to view Fixed Layout on a desktop screen for a long time and the IDPF with its Fixed Layout spec and support for Readium has now made it possible. Just look at this!

First, I adapted my Fixed Layout example (from my original miniguide on the subject, which desperately needs updating now) so that it conformed with the new IDPF spec. This required:

In the content.opf file:

• Add version="3.0" to the package element.
• Add prefix="rendition: http://www.idpf.org/vocab/rendition/# to the package element as well.
• Add <meta property="dcterms:modified">2012-05-08</meta> to the package element. This is a great, new required element that hopefully will help with caching problems, among other things, as it's supposed to contain the last date the content was modified.

Still in the content.opf file, we get to the stuff that determines how the fixed layout book is displayed, the so-called "rendition" options. (Thankfully, the CIA is not involved.)

There are three principal rendition variables: layout (with values of pre-paginated or reflowable, that is whether you want it fixed or flowing), orientation (with values of landscape, portrait, auto, that is, whether a certain orientation should be forced), and spread (with values of none, landscape, portrait, both, auto, that is, whether the ereader should use facing pages—aka a synthetic spread—in given orientations).

I promise to explain these in more detail in the upcoming new edition of the Fixed Layout miniguide!

Here I've chosen the most basic fixed layout options: that it be fixed layout, that it can be viewed in either a horizontal or vertical orientation, and that it always be displayed with facing pages.

In the content itself (the XHTML):

The code is not very different. As with all EPUB3 documents, I've eliminated the DOCTYPE, made sure the xml declaration is present, and used a simpler character set declaration:

Last but not least, add the meta tag for the viewport, as usual:

The new TOC

Finally, you have to create on extra file, the new HTML TOC, or nav element. It's not much more than an ordered list, with each of the TOC items in its own list item, along with the all important nav element:

<nav xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:type="toc" id="toc">

Here's what my toc.xhtml file looks like:

And, of course, don't forget to declare the toc.xhtml file in the content.opf file:

<manifest>

...

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

And you're done!

Now, zip it up as usual, and run it by EpubCheck3.0b5 to make sure you did it all right.

Then, in Google Chrome (it won't work in other browsers), download the very latest version of Readium (released this morning!), it's 0.2.4, kindly fixed and uploaded by Matthew Robertson, and add your book to the library.

And voilà, you can see a fixed layout book on your desktop!!!

What, you say, you don't see facing pages? Click the facing pages button in the Readium pop-up menu that appears when you hover over the bottom-right corner of the screen.

And where are the embedded fonts? I'm not sure yet if that's a problem with this very new software, or if I haven't embedded them properly. It's definitely true that only OTF and WOFF fonts are supported in EPUB3, but I use WOFF in my example, so they *should* be showing.

Ah, but I hear a bigger worry... why should you go to all this trouble to create a format that only works with a fledgling ereader that no-one uses yet? And I could try to convince you about the importance of standards, but hopefully the following screenshot is more powerful: because the IDPF's EPUB 3 Fixed Layout spec works in iBooks!!! Apple and Barnes & Noble (and others) were involved with the IDPF in creating the Fixed Layout standard and Apple already supports it as you can see the same file showed here in iBooks:

This is a great development, and the IDPF should be commended. Hopefully there will soon be a time when we can create a single fixed layout EPUB file and it will work properly in all ereaders—Barnes & Noble also worked closely with the IDPF to develop this spec—and on the desktop. Even in Kindle.

The best way to help make this happen is to start using the new EPUB3 Fixed Layout format right now: create lots of examples, view them in Readium and help contribute to making Readium a more powerful ereader.

You can download my new EPUB3 FXL example here. Feel free to open it up and play with it. I'd love to see any examples you create!

Don't forget: subscribers receive all my blog posts via email, as well as other perks, and help to keep me writing. Thanks to all of you!

Double tap zoom transforms fixed layout ebooks in iBooks

2012-05-02T12:19:00.000-04:00

I'm supposed to be working on my presentations for PepCon, but I've been distracted with something that Rick Gordon brought to my attention last week: "Remember you can double-tap a text frame to zoom to screen size in iBooks FL".

As happens so often on Twitter, that message went into my brain and didn't come out until a few days later when Rick offered me a sneak preview of an amazing fixed layout ebook he's working on, Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, by Lloyd Kahn.

Before I go any further, I have to tell you (if you haven't already heard my rants on the subject), that I generally hate it when publishers just replicate a print design as a fixed layout for the iPad (or whatever reader). One of the first examples I saw was a gorgeous collection of Ansel Adams prints with what I thought was the tiniest text you could never read. It was so frustrating. And although I understand the usefulness of Fixed Layout, and have written a fair bit of information about how to create FL ebooks, I've always shied away from recreating a text-heavy fixed layout ebook.

So, I was intrigued when, in the introductory note about Tiny Homes, Rick said that I could double-tap any of the text blocks or images to magnify them. I didn't remember being able to do that in other FL books, and wondered if Rick, an EPUB expert, had discovered or developed some new tricks. And while he has, and I'll get to that in a later post, what is almost more important is that he made me realize that we've had this capability all along.

At first, I couldn't believe we had. So I went back and looked. And though there are a few examples of what I'm calling double-tap-zoom (DTZ), I'm not surprised I didn't notice.

iBooks has always let you double-tap a book page to fill the screen with just that page along with a sliver of the facing page. This works in all fixed layout ebooks on iBooks.

What I didn't realize is that you can double-tap some text blocks and images to automatically zoom them as well. This makes reading a text-heavy (or text-and-image-heavy, as in Tiny Homes) a much more pleasant—and even feasible—project. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that double-tap works great in the Ansel Adams book that I've used to use as an example of what not to do with fixed layout. No more.

But it's not consistent. Sometimes when you double-click an image, it zooms the page and sometimes it zooms the image. Sometimes the text zooms and sometimes it doesn't:

And the more I looked, the more I wondered what distinguished the text and images that zoom from those that remained static.

One of the most important characteristics of text and images that can be double-tap zoomed is so obvious, you might not have thought of it: they must start out smaller than the page itself. Otherwise, there's nothing to zoom to!

That means that if you have a text block that you want to have zoomed, the text has to be somewhat narrower than the page on which it is placed. (I have found that a width of 85% will zoom, while 86% won't. Actually, 86% zooms in landscape but not portrait.) The width property is very useful here:

div.text {width:85%}

What I found rather remarkable is that it doesn't matter if you position the text absolutely or some other way, it doesn't matter if the text has offsets or if it doesn't. And you don't have to invoke any crazy incantations. It just matters how wide the text block is with respect to the page width.

Of course, sometimes when you position an image, you change its width. For example, if you give a text block a left offset of 200 pixels on a page 1200 pixels wide, that leaves only 83% of the page (1000/1200) for the text block. It will zoom even though you haven't explicitly specified the width.

The same rule applies to images: as long as they're at least 85% smaller than the page width, they will zoom when double-tapped.

Why didn't we notice this before? Why didn't I notice this before (you probably did!)

There are three main reasons I've found. First, if you're using full bleed images and just placing text on top, there's no way to zoom the images. They're already as big as they can get. (The text on top should still zoom.)

Second, early fixed layout examples (mine included) often used an overly complicated system of displaying half of a layout on the left page and half on the right, hiding the bits that didn't fit. This required some strange sizing of even smaller images, rendering them unzoomable. What a shame. I feel a little guilty that I espoused that method of creating fixed layouts, and hope to remedy that more thoroughly soon. For now, I'll say that I recommend creating each page in a layout independently, dividing images into two pieces as necessary and keeping the sizing as simple as possible.

Third, if an image is beneath a transparent text block, particularly one that doesn't zoom, you won't be able to reach it with a double-tap. It's beyond your touch, and it won't zoom. Be careful with z-index!

If you're creating fixed layout ebooks with a lot of text and/or images, make sure they double tap zoom by following these caveats. It'll make you books a lot more pleasant to read.

You can download my example file shown in this last video. Feel free to unzip it and look at the code. The CSS is right in the XHTML just so you can see what is affecting what. I wouldn't create a real book this way. And I think the z-index is what is keeping the large 1200 x 1700 image (with the castle in the lower right corner) from zooming.

Oh, and sorry about all the reflection in the videos. I've got a ways to go before I can create videos as nice as my screenshots :)

Many thanks to EPUB coder extraordinaire Rick Gordon for getting me thinking about this and for sharing his lovely book with me. He also pointed me to a few interesting articles, one on double-tap zoom, another from the Safari HTML reference that describes the user-scalable variable and how it is on by default, and a third on a new zoom property. Rick's book, Tiny Homes, uses a few more double-tap to zoom tricks that I hope to talk about in a future post.

Using GREP to eliminate warnings—and reveal errors—in BBEdit

2012-05-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

If you're making changes directly to your XHTML documents, it's a good idea to check their syntax before compiling and finishing your EPUB files. This helps weed out the most common and difficult-to-find errors: typos.

In BBEdit, choose Markup > Check > Document Syntax to see if your XHTML file is valid. BBEdit will quickly sift through and alert you to any problems.

If you export EPUB from InDesign, you may get a lot of warnings about spaces being recommended before trailing spaces.

They're quite right: if you have a all-in-one element like the img element or link element, you are allowed to write this:

<img src="image.jpg" alt="image description"/>

But it's recommended that you add a space before that trailing slash (after the last attribute and value):

The problem, and it's minor but annoying, is that all those warnings hide the real problems. (The errors are there, but you have to scroll down to find them. And you don't get that satisfying "No errors were found" message.) One temporary solution is to uncheck the Warnings box as shown in the above screenshot.

The other, more permanent, solution is to add the missing space so you don't get any warnings. I use GREP for this:

Search for (\S)/> (that is, any instance of a closing slash and closing bracket without a preceding space. Another way to interpret that GREP would be that you're finding anything that's NOT a space followed by a closing slash and closing bracket.)

And replace it with \1 /> (whatever came before the closing slash and bracket, a space, and the closing slash and bracket)

Now when you check syntax, you'll only see the real errors (here, a classic one for me: mismatched p's and div's):

I know this is a tiny and minor thing, but I hope it will be helpful to a few, and maybe even get folks who are interested in but scared of GREP to start with something small.

Word for Mac can't generate linked TOCs for Kindle

2012-04-27T13:13:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to document the simplest way to create an ebook with a tool that most folks already own. The tool I've chosen, Microsoft Word, is a bloated, impossibly complicated piece of software that for some inexplicable reason, is used by a huge proportion of the populace. Feel free to enlighten me about its virtues in the comments.

Anyways, I want to call your attention to one particularly important failing of Microsoft Word for Macintosh: it will only create linked or active TOCs if the TOC contains page numbers. It's really important to include linked TOCS in ebooks, and particularly in Kindle books since most of Kindle devices don't have device-generated or navigational tables of contents, but it doesn't make sense to include page numbers (since they don't make any sense in a digital landscape).

Note that Microsoft Word for Windows is happy to automatically generate a useful TOC, sans page numbers, for an ebook.

Simply uncheck Show page numbers and then check Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers.

Now look at the corresponding dialog box in the latest version of Word for Macintosh:

You can hide the page numbers, but you can't convert them to hyperlinks, and I assure you, after much testing (and confirmation from @ljndawson), that without page numbers, no page links will be created. The TOC is there, but will take you nowhere in the converted ebook.

It makes Word for Mac a much less powerful tool for creating ebooks. Of course, there are solutions (like manually creating bookmarks for each TOC entry), but it's nothing like a one-button solution (!).

Why should anyone care about how Word creates TOCs? Because Word (.doc or .docx) is the one styled format that can be read and converted automatically into Kindle format (using KDP, Send to Kindle, and by emailing the document to a Kindle device). More on that soon.

Using Amazon's Send to Kindle to transfer ebooks and documents to Kindle

2012-04-25T18:51:00.000-04:00

Amazon has just released the Send to Kindle app for Macintosh. It already exists for PCs. This is an app that facilitates getting documents in various formats—Word (.doc and .docx), text (.txt), RTF (.rtf), images (.jpeg, .gif, .png, .bmp) and PDF (.pdf)—to your Kindle.

Once you've downloaded and installed Send to Kindle, you can activate the app in several different ways. First, you can right-click a document in the Finder and choose the Send to Kindle option near the bottom of the menu.

You can choose Send to Kindle from the Printer menu in any program that has one (here's Word):

Finally, you can click the Send to Kindle icon on the dock or drag a document to the Send to Kindle icon directly.

Whichever method you choose, you'll see the Send to Kindle's window in which you can specify a new title for the document and choose which Kindle you want to send the document to. You will also specify whether you want to use free Wifi or incur extra charges by using Amazon's Whispernet service.

If you check "Archive document in your Kindle Library" (which is on by default), your document will be available in the Kindle cloud, and thus to all of your Kindle devices. You can even deselect a device and send your document only to the cloud.

Format

Notice at the bottom of the window that you'll be advised about which format your document will be converted to. If you right-click or drag and drop, Send to Kindle will convert Word, text, and RTF to Kindle format, and preliminary testing seems to indicate that it uses the same KindleGen algorithms that are used by Kindle Previewer and KDP. If you right-click or drag and drop a PDF file, you'll have the option (in the aptly named Options panel) to convert the PDF to Kindle format. I tested some simple documents, and it seemed to work quite well.

If you use the print option, it will always send the document as a PDF, and the PDF cannot be converted to Kindle format. Note that the PDF document will be much larger than the Kindle version.

All in all, the Send to Kindle app looks like a useful tool for getting documents into your Kindle. The Send to Kindle documentation has a few more details.

Unpacking a Kindle/Mobi file

2012-04-09T15:00:00.000-04:00

Converting an ebook of whatever format to a Kindle/mobi file adds a level of abstraction that always leaves me with this gnawing uncertainty: did anything change under there? Is this what I really want? This may be due to general OCD, but I think it started with Microsoft Word's early attempts to guess what I wanted and automatically change my text for me, causing all manner of consternation and mistrust, as its guesses were often incorrect. Course it doesn't help that Kindle devices don't all display an ebook the same way.

As you might've guessed, I don't trust Kindle Previewer (or the KindleGen that it invokes) either... who knows what it does during conversion!? Indeed, when a feature in an ebook I'm creating doesn't come out right, knowing exactly what KindleGen is doing with my files can be very helpful for cross-platform development.

Thankfully, there are a bunch of folks over at MobileRead who have developed an open source tool for unpacking Mobi files and looking at their innards. It's called Mobi Unpack and the latest version (047) can be found there.

But what do you do with it once you've found it? Double-clicking didn't work at first for me:

And I had no idea what application I should associate it with. I used a rather convoluted system starting with Terminal, navigating to the MU folder, then typing python Mobi_Unpack_v047.pyw, which works, but it seemed like there should be a better way.

One of the Mobi Unpack developers told me I needed a thing called Python Launcher. You can find it in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/versions/2.5/Resources. It comes with your Mac. Who knew? :)

I dragged Mobi_Unpack_v047.pyw on top of the Python Launcher, and now it's permanently associated: when I double-click, it opens right up.

Once Mobi Unpack is open, use the top field and Browse button to choose the Mobi file that you want to unpack. Use the second field and Browse button to choose the folder you want to unpack the Mobi file into.

I don't check any of the other options.

Then click Start to unpack your Mobi file.

Mobi Unpack creates a mobi8 folder, which presumably is the KF8 version as well as a mobi7 folder which presumably is what old Kindles get. You can explore the files inside (XHTML, CSS, content.opf, etc.) to see how KindleGen (via Kindle Previewer or whatever) is creating your Mobi file.

The mobi8 folder even contains an EPUB file. I thought this might be useful if you were starting with a Mobi file and wanted to convert to EPUB, but unfortunately, at least in my testing (in which I did not generate the Mobi file from an EPUB file), the EPUB did not validate.

Sideloading ebooks with Dropbox

2012-04-04T16:03:00.000-04:00

Whether you create ebooks for a living or just read them, getting books onto your reading device—or devices!—of choice is not always as easy as it should be. Sure, Amazon has its Whispersync that shuttles files straight to your Kindle apps and iBooks will get books to your iPhone/iPad or iPod touch, but what if you buy a book from an independent author (like me :), or download one of Cory Doctorow's books, or create your own and want to see what they look like? The answer is sideloading, the term for getting ebooks to your reader without a store's help.

The most basic way to sideload is to hook your ereader up to your computer via the USB cable. Most ereaders (but not iOS ones) will appear on your desktop just like any other external drive.

Just drag your ebook file (in the appropriate format, of course) to the Documents folder on the ereader (actually NOOK is not very picky about where you place it), then eject your disk, and you can find the new ebook installed. (Nook and Kindle Fire put your sideloaded books in the My Files/Docs area, respectively.)

On iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch), the process is a fair bit more laborious. You're supposed to use iTunes, as I describe in EPUB Straight to the Point, either syncing manually or automatically. But it takes longer than it should. Apple offers a little app called Book Proofer to folks through its iTunes Connect program that lets you edit a book on your computer as you simultaneously preview it on your iPad or iPhone, but it's not public, and it's not foolproof.

It turns out DropBox is a brilliant alternative to all of this. Dropbox lets you create a folder on your computer that is automatically copied to the "cloud". That means that you can access it from any other computer or even reading device.

(If you don't already have a Dropbox account, you can follow this link to get one and you and I will both get 500Mb additional free disk space.)

To sideload a ebook with Dropbox, first copy the ebook to your Dropbox folder. (If you don't know where the folder is, you can use the Dropbox menu at the top of your screen to open it: , or just find it yourself, generally right in your home folder.

Then, on your iOS device, download the Dropbox app, launch it, and sign in.

Select the ebook that you want to sideload from the Dropbox menu. It will start to load.

Dropbox can view some file formats right in the app itself, but not EPUB or mobi. So when it gets done copying the file, it will tell you it doesn't know what to do with it. Thankfully, all you have to do is click the "Away" icon in the upper right corner of the screen, and Dropbox will offer to transfer the file to an app that can view it, like iBooks in this case. Bravo, just what we wanted.

Once you choose iBooks in the menu, iBooks will open automatically and show you your book. It's really lovely:

Dropbox will work on iOS for both EPUB and Kindle/mobi:

This is pretty interesting, considering that before Dropbox ~~there was no way to test a Kindle book on an iOS device before selling it through Amazon.~~ you had to use iTunes to copy mobi files to the Kindle app on iOS. (Connect device, choose Apps, go down to the bottom of the screen, click Kindle, click Add…, choose your mobi file, then sync. Thanks, Dan Rodney—see comments—though I still think iTunes is a slow solution.) ~~The closest~~Another alternative was using the Kindle Previewer app.

I thought Dropbox might even be the answer to the conundrum that you can create a Kindle book with audio and video, but there is no way to test it, because there is no way to get the AV book to Kindle app for iOS which (ironically) is the only Kindle app that supports audio and video! — you can only see it *after* it is published to Amazon, which, sadly, still does not allow independent authors and publishers to sell books with audio and video.

Alas, I have not been able to get this to work. I can get the audio/video Kindle books to the Kindle app on iOS, but the audio and video do not play. I haven't finished poking at it yet, though. I'll keep you posted.

Note that some ebookstores make changes to books as they deliver them. That is, a sideloaded book is not always identical to its purchased cousin, though in my mind, it sure should be. In particular, I've heard complaints about NOOK and Kobo, and I'm wondering if Amazon doesn't bake something special into its AV books for iOS as well. More on that another day.

Free Foreign Language Versions of my books

2012-04-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

My books have been translated into a lot of languages, and often times (though unfortunately not always), they send me copies. I like to keep at least one of each, but I have a few extras around if anyone's interested. All you have to do is send me (via Paypal, for example) the shipping costs. First dibs for subscribers :)

Here's what I have:

Japanese
Perl & CGI for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition

Italian:
XML for the World Wide Web, 1st edition
Crea una pagina Web con HTML
Pubblica un blog con Blogger, 1st edition

Spanish
HTML, XHTML, y CSS, Fifth edition

French
HTML4 avec XHTML & CSS
Creer un blog avec Blogger

Chinese
HTML, XHTML and CSS, 6th edition

Dutch
HTML XHTML CSS, 6th edition

Swedish
Blogg med Blogger, 1st edition

Seravek Font bug in iBooks

2012-03-29T12:00:00.001-04:00

I wanted to set my latest book in a sans-serif font so I chose one of iBooks' default fonts: Seravek. This morning, doing a last minute check, Seravek had mostly disappeared. I immediately suspected nefarious setting adjustments by iPad-stealing family members, but it turns out iBooks was the culprit.

Look at this:

If you don't know what Seravek is, I'll tell you, it's not that.

I recompiled my book a bunch of times, looked at it on my old iPad and everywhere, the font had disappeared. I wondered if iBooks had somehow changed between yesterday and today. If Kindle Previewer was going to update itself without my involvement, maybe iBooks too?

Then I changed the font size:

And the Seravek came back. Weird. It turns out that Seravek works fine in all font sizes except 5. And in font size 3, it doesn't work in the subhead, but I wonder if that has to do with caching, since I had that set as a serif font for a while (though not in this example!)

Since there's no other sans-serif default font for iBooks, and I didn't want to use Optima, in the end, I decided on Muli, one of Google Web Fonts offerings:

Remember that readers can always select a default font if they so choose.

Kindle ignores everything when ID gives it multiple classes

2012-03-28T14:41:00.001-04:00

I'm about to publish an anthology of stories based in Barcelona (more news soon!) and keep bumping into an annoying issue with (old) Kindle: if your InDesign document contains a styled paragraph with local formatting, InDesign will export the resulting EPUB with multiple classes, one for the base style and one "override" class with the extra bits. Unfortunately, Kindle throws up its hands at multiple classes and not only ignores the extra classes but actually ignores the base class as well, leaving the paragraph with no formatting at all. Ugh.

Here's an example from my new book.

The paragraph that begins "Moving between the shadows" has no styling. It should be in italics with no indent, as shown in iBooks:

I go look at the code, and find that InDesign has added an "override" style:

Why? Because I had added some local formatting in the original InDesign file. Oops. (You can tell by putting your cursor in a paragraph and looking at the Paragraph Styles panel... if there's a plus sign next to the style name, there's local formatting.)

Really, InDesign is completely within its rights by exporting multiple classes, they are perfectly standard. It is Kindle that is at fault here.

The easiest solutions is to avoid local formatting. This is a good idea in general, although I'll admit that when I just need to nudge something in my print version, I am not always strictly orthodox.

If you forget, and/or don't want to go back and change the print version, the second solution is to create a new style that contains the characteristics from the two applied styles, and apply it both to the HTML and to the CSS. Kindle can't say no to that.

In general, I recommend doing a search through your XHTML files in an InDesign-generated EPUB document to find all of the override classes. Then, substitute them with better-labeled and less troublesome individual styles.

Also note that it is "old" Kindle that can't handle multiple classes, Kindle Fire supports them just fine.

Centering in ebooks across ereaders

2012-03-23T12:04:00.000-04:00

A long time ago, I realized that the most basic parts of childrearing—eating, sleeping, and peeing and pooping—were by far the hardest to figure out. So it is with ebooks. It seems almost ridiculous to have to write a big, long complicated post about centering—something so essential and so fundamental—but I keep bumping up against it, so write I will. I hope I'll save you some sleepless nights.

Centering in ebooks involves CSS, the box model, inheritance, and ereader inconsistencies. The main problem with centering lies in not understanding how these aspects relate to each other.

The text-align property

I'll start with the simple. There is a CSS property called text-align whose possible values are left, right, justify, and center. But there is one very important caveat: text-align only affects inline-level objects within the block-level objects to which text-align has been applied. Let's look at that closely, since it is the source of many misunderstandings and thus errors.

Here is a simple p element that contains text.

<body>

<p class="center">Here is some text that should be centered</p>

</body>

And here is the CSS:

.center {text-align:center}

And here is what it looks like:

You may think that it is the p element that has been centered, but you'd be wrong. It's actually the inline contents of the p element, an anonymous inline block, if you can stand the CSS parlance, or simply the text itself (if you can't), that is being centered. The p element itself is not centered.

How can you tell? We'll set the width of the p element to 60%, and then set the background color to yellow, so you can actually see it.

.center {text-align:center; width: 60%; background: yellow}

You can now clearly see that the p element is still aligned left (which is the default in most browsers and ereaders) even while the inline text that it contains is aligned center within the p element.

Centering block-level elements

So how do you center a block-level element? The canonical way is to set the right and left margins to auto. According to the CSS spec, when both left and right margins are auto, they should be equal, and thus the item will be centered. And don't forget that unless your block element has a width that is smaller than the window size, you won't be able to tell if it's centered or not.

So, to center our p element, we'd have this:

.center {text-align:center; width: 60%; background: yellow; margin-right: auto; margin-left:auto}

And we would get this:

This works on most major browsers and ereaders:

And is converted properly for Kindle Fire:

(Regular Kindle doesn't support width and thus can't center a block-level element at all.)

CSS bug in ADE, NOOK, etc.

Unfortunately, ADE, and the ereaders based on it (like NOOK, NOOK Color, and presumably Sony Reader though I didn't test this last one), don't properly interpret the auto value for left and right margins, and the result is that the blocks are not centered:

Independence of alignment of contents and of the block that contains them

Before we get to the solution, I just want to underline how the text-align properties and centering of the block level elements using automatic right and left margins are independent of each other.

That is, the alignment of the inline-level elements within a block-level element need not match the alignment of the block-level element. That is, we can center the p element within the window and then left-align the contents of the p element:

.mismatch {text-align: left; width: 40%; background: red;margin-right: auto; margin-left:auto }

And that should look like this:

Notice how the image and the text are aligned to the left within a box that is centered on the page.

Again, ADE, NOOK, and presumably Sony Reader, don't properly interpret the right and left margins set to auto:

The Solution

The solution hinges on the fact that text-align only affects inline elements. (This is why simply enclosing an inner div in an outer div whose text-align property is set to center will not work.) We'll enclose the p elements in a wrapper div, whose text-align property we'll set to center, and then we'll set the display property for the p elements themselves to inline-block. The inline-block value is sort of a hybrid between inline and block, that for our purposes keeps the p elements starting their own paragraphs (like regular block-level elements) but allows them to be affected by text-align (like inline-level elements).

Here's the CSS with the new bits in bold:

.wrap {text-align:center}

.center {text-align:center; width: 60%; background: yellow; display:inline-block}

.mismatch {text-align: left; width: 40%; background: red;display:inline-block }

And here's our new HTML:

<div class="wrap">

<p class="center">Here is some text that should be centered</p>

<p class="mismatch"><img src="momo.jpg" alt="momo" width="200" height="150" /><br />This image and text will be aligned to the left within the centered block that contains them.</p>

</div>

Let's look first at iBooks on iPhone: (I've put it in landscape orientation just so it's easier to see, it looks the same in portrait.)

Everything is as it should be. Our boxes are centered, but the contents within them are centered and left-aligned respectively.

How about NOOK Color?

NOOK Color also likes this solution, even when Publisher Defaults are turned off (although then you have other margin issues).

And Kindle Previewer converts the file just fine for KF8 and the Kindle Fire ("old" Kindle can't center divs but maintains the text-alignment for the inline level elements):

But what happens when you view the ebook in iBooks on iPad?

The boxes are centered as desired. But the text and image that should be left aligned in the lower box are now justified! Look at those ugly spaces between the words. What happened?

Now we've bumped up against iPad's default overrides. Remember that by default, Full Justification is set to ON, hidden away in the iBooks area of the Settings panel. I don't think most people who use iBooks will ever know this setting exists so ebook designers have to plan for it. You used to be able to add a span tag around the text that you wish to have aligned to the left, but that hack no longer works.

Thankfully, there is still a workaround. If you add the com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file to the META-INF folder, with the <option name="specified-fonts">true</option>, the justification that you choose in your CSS will be maintained, regardless of the Full Justification setting chosen. The user can still override your choices by choosing a different font in the Fonts menu, but at least the book will start out the way you want it:

To resume:

The text-align property only applies to inline elements within the block-level element to which the property is applied. It is inherited by block level elements that may be enclosed in the outer block-level element and in turn applied to the inline elements that the inner block level elements contain. If you need more info on block level vs inline, see the CSS spec or my my HTML/CSS book.

The canonical way to center a block-level element is by setting both margin-right and margin-left to auto. The fact that this is not supported by ADE or NOOK (and presumably not by Sony Reader or other ereaders based on ADE) is a serious bug.

You can center block-level elements by wrapping them in another block level element (a div), setting the text-align to the outer div to center, and then setting the display property of the inner div (or p or whatever) to inline-block.

iBooks on iPad has a default setting of Full Justification for text, which you can override by adding the com file to the META-INF folder. This has ramifications with respect to font choice, of course, as well.

iBooks on iPhone has the Full Justification setting, but by default it is set to OFF (presumably because of the narrow screen).

This should be much simpler.

And yes, it's true that I have no AT&T coverage in my office!

Bad Headers in InDesign exported EPUB

2012-03-07T12:46:00.000-05:00

I've talked about this issue on Twitter, but I've gotten two emails about it this week, and because of installing a new language version of ID bumped up against it myself, so I'm going to write a quick post to make sure that everyone knows:

The first version of InDesign CS 5.5 had a serious bug that exported bad headers to EPUB. Specifically, it inserted an extra space in the DOCTYPE element of each XHTML document:

This error in the DOCTYPE causes all sorts of problems, particularly with special characters, non-breaking spaces (@nbsp;), discretional hyphens (@shy;), etc.

Luckily, Adobe fixed the error right away and has made a free update available for both Macintosh and Windows. If you're using InDesign CS 5.5, I strongly urge you to install the update.

Here's what the proper DOCTYPE should look like:

Now, here's a weird bit of extra info that you'll probably never need. But I did, so you never know. I have both English and Spanish versions of InDesign CS 5.5. I originally installed and then updated the English version. When I installed the Spanish version, it overwrote the English. I updated it as well. Then, when I got sick of navigating in Spanish (and had finished De InDesign CS 5.5 a EPUB y Kindle), I renamed my Spanish ID folder, so as not to lose it, and installed the English version again.

I forgot to update it until yesterday, but when I did, suddenly the English version started coming out in Spanish—Spanish menus, Spanish dialog boxes. It was bizarre. And annoying. I still have no idea how that happened. I was definitely using the English version, and the menus and dialog boxes were definitely in Spanish. Anyways, I really didn't feel like reinstalling the English version again (and wasn't convinced it would help), so I rummaged around the internet (and complained on Twitter) until I found this very helpful post from David Blatner on InDesign Secrets, that explains how to change the interface of your version of ID—even if you don't own the other one. It did the trick and now my English ID is back to English. (I haven't dared open the Spanish ID :)

Thanks to Ester, who reminded me I really needed to write about this.

Asymmetry on Twitter

2012-03-01T02:00:00.000-05:00

I received an unpleasant email the other day from someone who had bought one of my books, followed me on Twitter, and then realized I wasn't following them back. They then unfollowed me, and when I sent word about my new subscription, they wrote me back to tell me that following readers of my books was just common courtesy, which I clearly lacked.

I've let it stew in my head for a few days, and though I'm sorry I made that person feel bad, the truth is I think asymmetry—the fact that you don't have to follow back those who follow you—is one of Twitter's most important features. Let me explain.

Twitter is my social media tool of choice, both for learning and for sharing. I consider the 140 character limit an absolutely brilliant and sublime innovation and I love how it trains us all to be editors, peeling away the layers of excess. I try to follow the tenets described in Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein's excellent and newly updated The Twitter Book, especially that of adding value to the conversation. Still, I consider myself a difficult person to follow on Twitter, since my tweets are divided between two very distinct topics: ebook production and Catalonia, which have a limited amount of overlap. My followers generally have to bear a fair number of tweets on the other topic, often in another language. And sometimes I tweet a lot.

In short, I'll understand if you don't follow me. I know how it is. Which leads me to the second half of my Twitter life: the 500 or so people that I currently follow. You are all amazing. I learn so much from you. And unfortunately, I can't read half of what you write. Of course, I can't read even the tiniest percentage of what's on the internet, so I figure I'm doing OK with half of your helpfully filtered stream. Thank you.

But still, I worry about the other gazillion people, my disgruntled reader among them, that I don't follow. Not because I may be hurting their feelings, but rather because I'm missing out on what they might share. I'm sure I should be following some of them, but how to know? Once in a while, I look at people's profiles, and if something catches my eye, I might check out their latest Twitter stream, but as the list of people who I follow (and my to-do list!) grow, I get more and more reluctant to add any more information to my already overflowing banks. More often, I follow people that I have conversations with, who ask interesting questions, offer interesting links or insights, or well, who can help Catalonia become independent.

So I like Twitter's asymmetry. I follow lots of people who don't follow me, and lots of people follow me that I don't follow. I am honored when someone decides I'm worth following, but rarely insulted when they don't. Being able to follow anyone without the obligation that they follow me back has allowed me to connect to a much wider group of people than any compulsory following ever would have. I can follow Roger Ebert, Elisenda Paluzie, Neil Gaiman, and Miquel Calçada without worry of imposing or being a fangirl. I believe asymmetry encourages authenticity and also allows a more gradual connection which may well end up in mutual following.

For the record, I do have a Google+ account or page, but clearly haven't been there enough to even know what it's called. I'm on LinkedIn only because I wanted to be able to access the ebook discussion groups, but honestly, I need Twitter's 140 character limit in all parts of my life, so I barely ever go there. Plus, LinkedIn always seems to know more about me than I told them and generally gives me the creeps. If I don't follow you there, or talk to you there, just talk to me on Twitter.

And though I am on Facebook, I mostly use it for personal stuff, though, truth be told, my Facebook friends get a fair bit of information about Catalonia too.

Metadata in iBooks, iBookstore, iTunes Producer, InDesign, and Amazon

2012-02-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

I got an email today asking how to set the subject keywords for an ebook in InDesign. That part is relatively easy. You choose File > File Info, and add the desired keywords to the Keywords field, separating each keyword from the next with a comma or semicolon:

But what happens when InDesign exports to EPUB? I'm happy to report that it does exactly what it should and converts those keywords into dc:subject elements in the OPF file:

Now, I'm no expert on metadata, so I have not made it a point to use standard BISAC book categories for describing the subject of my books in those fields. We'll come back to this.

When you upload your book to Apple's iBookstore, you have the option of entering BISAC data in iTunes Producer:

And that data entered in iTunes Producer overrides whatever you entered in the content.opf file (or InDesign for that matter). When someone downloads your book, they will only see the Main BISAC category (although the original keywords remain in the content.opf file inside the book):

And as far as I can tell with this single example (though I've heard other anecdotal evidence also in support), the iBookstore does not use the keyword metadata to help aid searches for your book. Notice for example a search for GREP, which I specified as one of the keywords for this book:

iBookstore fails to return my book when searching for "GREP", even though the book contains "GREP" as a subject keyword.

For the record, my book does appear when searching for "InDesign" and "EPUB", presumably since those words are also in the title.

Then I switched over to Amazon to check what happens there. I also had to enter the BISAC categories when uploading my book to Amazon. In addition, they let me enter up to 7 keywords.

Amazon doesn't list a category next to a book on the Kindle. When I search for InDesign and EPUB, my book appears (as it should, since those words are in the name). More importantly, when I search for "GREP" on Amazon, my book also appears:

Now, I am not at all sure whether Amazon is paying attention to my specified dc:subject elements or more probably to the keywords that I specified above. But either way, it gets points for finding the book.

Seems like you can't hurt anything by adding the metadata in InDesign and/or directly in the EPUB file, but it is far from conclusive whether or not it helps. I wonder if other ebook distributors pay attention to the dc:subject elements. Does anybody know?

Finally, Apple iBookstore clearly has a long way to go towards being a useful tool for discovering books you're interested in. That it completely ignores metadata categories and gives you no other method for specifying them is pretty lame, to say the least.

Returns in EPUB

2012-02-24T14:00:00.000-05:00

We have these crazy complicated tools that can do amazing things for us but they have gotten so complicated that it's sometimes hard to take advantage of even their most basic power. Case in point: returns.

So, here's the rule: At the end of a paragraph, use a single return. Then adjust the style for the paragraph so that it has the correct amount of spacing after it.

The most important advantage is that you gain flexibility. If you decide you want more or less space after each paragraph, all you have to do is adjust the style, not delete or add additional returns. And while a return will always give you a set amount of space, you may want to add half, twice, or three times that much space.

This is particularly important when exporting to EPUB. If you add extra space by adding returns in InDesign or Word, those returns will disappear in your ebook. This is because HTML (which EPUB is based on) treats white space in its own special way.

Let's look at an example. You're laying out The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and you've decided to start your paragraphs flush left, without indents. Therefore, you want space between each paragraph so that readers can see where one paragraph starts and the next one begins.

You add two returns after each paragraph to add this space in InDesign (or Word).

You export your book as usual, and notice that the code reflects the extra return:

But when you open your book in your ereader, the space disappears:

What happened? White space in HTML is collapsed. Three spaces are converted to one. Two paragraph returns are converted to one. And an empty paragraph, like the one shown in the code, is simply ignored. You could hack the code to make the ereader pay attention, but a much more sane solution is to adjust the spacing around the paragraph.

There are two strategies. The first, which I highly recommend, is to return to InDesign, remove all the extra returns, and then specify a value for Space After in the Paragraph Styles Option box:

The amount you put in the Space After determines the amount of space that will be added to every paragraph marked with this style. Don't like it? Change it once in this box, and all your paragraphs will be updated at once.

When you re-export to EPUB, the Space After is properly applied to the CSS of the affected paragraph(s):

And we no longer have the extra paragraph in the HTML code:

But best of all, now we have space where we wanted it in the ebook on the ereader:

And the second solution? I didn't forget. If you've already got your InDesign or Word document set up, you could theoretically ignore the extra p elements that will be generated and just adjust your CSS by hand, by adding a margin-bottom value to the paragraphs in question. It's not the best solution, but sometimes, you've only got so many hours in the day and the OCD well in check :)

Finally, I don't know why they spelled tranquility with so many l's!

Membership to Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

2012-02-23T09:19:00.000-05:00

Update: I just wanted to emphasize that becoming a member is completely voluntary, and I plan to keep posting information to this blog, and keeping it open to everyone, members and browsers alike. The member benefits described below are above and beyond the actual content offered here. (And the response has been totally gratifying and heartwarming. Thank you!)

Update #2: I priced the Level 4 subscription too low. It should be $1500, and not $1000. I was going for round numbers and should've thought it through more completely. And note that it will be much easier to schedule consulting sessions if you don't leave them all until the last month!

I spend a lot of time running very specific edge-case examples in EPUB and Kindle/mobi. Sometimes I think they're too close to the edge (even though they're really not) and I don't know if people find them that useful. But then I get a comment on a post that says, “Thank you so much for this, I was tearing my hair out until I found it.” Those comments make my day.

Another kind of note I get is, “You should charge more for your books.” (I like that kind too :)

I want to keep my books competitively priced and I have every intention of continuing to publish this blog and make its contents freely available. But that doesn't mean you can't help :)

So, I've decided to create a membership program for Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis. If you would like to support this blog and the testing I do around EPUB production (and occasional gourd crafting and animal raising), I invite you to become a member.

I have created a number of membership levels with different benefits:

Basic Membership - $20/year

When you become a member, you will get a 10% discount on all of my books sold through my website, and will have the option of automatically receiving blog posts via email when they are published. I will also acknowledge your support on my Membership page with your name and a link to your website, if you want. You will also know that you're helping support my EPUB testing and documentation efforts so that I can continue to write books on the subject.

Level 2 Membership - $75/year

You will receive all the benefits from Basic Membership plus a 1/2 hour consultation via Skype, iChat, or email (in English, Spanish, or Catalan). This might be an overview of how to get started in EPUB, a troubleshooting session for a book that's just not coming out right, or some help with an advanced feature in ebook production.

Level 3 Membership - $150/year

You will receive all the benefits from Basic Membership, plus a full hour consultation via Skype, iChat, or email (in English, Spanish, or Catalan). Again, this might be an overview of how to get started in EPUB, a troubleshooting session for a book that's just not coming out right, or some help with an advanced feature in ebook production.

Level 4 Membership - $1500/year

You will receive all the benefits from Basic Membership plus a full hour consultation each month over the course of the year. Any time not used in a given month can roll over to the following month, but not to other years.

Note that you do not need a Paypal account to use this subscription form, you can pay with practically any major credit card. Also, you can send me the URL to which I should link your Acknowledgement. I will send you a confirmation that asks for any changes as well.

Thank you

Thank you so much for your support. Other ways you can help are by talking about my books with your colleagues and by writing reviews on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Goodreads or any other site where my books are listed.

I am also available for EPUB troubleshooting, consultation, and training above and beyond the membership benefits. Please email me for details.

iBooks can open EPUB 3 files

2012-02-21T14:58:00.000-05:00

I almost used a much more provocative title: iBooks supports EPUB 3 but then we would have to have a complicated discussion about “What does ‘support’ mean?” and even, “What does ‘EPUB 3’ mean?”

Keep in mind, for example, that an EPUB 3 file is not required to include anything besides text and simple formatting, and might be nothing more than EPUB 2 content in an EPUB 3 shell. Such a file would be much less difficult to “support”.

And also remember that supporting some aspects of a file format does not necessarily imply support of the entire file format. The EPUB 3 format itself is pretty loose about requiring what conformant systems must support.

But, now with all those caveats out of the way, I'm happy to say that it's true that you can open the EPUB 3 sample files available from the IDPF with iBooks.

And those files aren't particularly complicated, or replete with EPUB 3 features, but I did notice some interesting things.

First, there are three EPUB 3 files to look at so far, Moby-Dick, Wasteland, and Creative Commons - A Shared Culture. Only Wasteland has a toc.ncx file. The Shared book has no table of contents at all. But Moby-Dick (created by Dave Cramer of Hachette) uses the new-fangled XHTML style TOC:

and iBooks displays it beautifully:

This is a big deal if you ask me, as I'm not relishing having to create two separate annoying TOC files, one for new systems and one for legacy ereaders.

The Shared book includes video and audio, and scripts to control them, but it seems like the only scripted enhancement that partially works is the play button (and it works much better in a non-scripted way).

The Moby-Dick book includes media overlays, ostensibly for narrating the text, but they don't seem to work yet.

We're not there yet, but the fact that iBooks supports EPUB 3 in some fashion is at least a beginning. Now we can begin testing what is possible, what is supported, and what we can create.

Note that Readium, the IDPF encouraged extension for Google Chrome, also supports EPUB 3. It's definitely worth downloading and playing with.

Amazon Algebra

2012-02-21T13:22:00.000-05:00

Amazon doesn't give sales figures for Kindle devices. I think they should.

When asked directly by Steven Levy in Wired magazine “How many Kindles have you sold?”, Jeff Bezos gave a "long, loud example of his famous laugh" before replying “I know you don't expect me to [give an answer]".

I do expect an answer. There are too many of us dependent on those numbers. Piqued, I went through Amazon's press releases for the past few years, and gathered up these tidbits of information. I'm not sure they reveal much, except facetiousness and a love of algebra. Why don't they tell us more? You'd think they have something to hide!

iOS = 316 million

For the record, Asymco recently reported that Apple said it had sold 55 million iPads to date, along with 261 million iPhones and iPod touches (all of which can run iBooks).

Note that S generally refers to sales of Kindle devices, B is number of Kindle books available. I've added subscripts when referring to smaller subsets of these groupings. O generally refers to other. Hover above any symbols you don't understand and tooltips with explanations should appear. Links go to original press release on Amazon with cited "data".

Can you discern anything useful in this data?

S_k > S_o

12/29/11: Holiday Bestsellers, Amazon.com only Electronics: Kindle Fire; Kindle Touch; and Kindle

S > 1,000,000 * 4

12/29/2011: Throughout December, customers purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week

S > 2,000,000 + 2,000,000

12/29/2011: customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers

S_kf > S_o

11/28/2011: the popular Kindle Fire remained the bestselling product across all of Amazon since its introduction 8 weeks ago...

S₂₀₁₁ = 4 * S₂₀₁₀

11/28/2011: customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday

S_ke = 2*S_pl

10/25/2011: In the three weeks since launch, orders for electronic ink Kindles are double the previous launch. And based on what we're seeing with Kindle Fire pre-orders, we're increasing capacity and building millions more than we'd already planned.

S_K3g > S_OK

P_3g = $139

7/26/2011: Kindle 3G with Special Offers has quickly become our bestselling Kindle at only $139...

S_gk2q > S_g1q

7/26/2011: Sales growth of Kindle devices accelerated in second quarter 2011 compared to first quarter 2011

B > 950,000

The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 950,000 books

B > 900,000

4/26/2011: The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 900,000 books

S > 2,000,000

1/27/2011:after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com...

S_b = 1.15*S_pb

1/27/2011:Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books

S_b = 3*S_ph

1/27/2011: Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books

S_k3 > S_HP

1/27/2011: the third-generation Kindle eclipsed "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" as the bestselling product in Amazon's history.

B > 810,000

1/27/2011: The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 810,000 books

S₁₂ > S_ol

10/21/2010: More new generation Kindle devices were ordered in the first twelve weeks of availability than in the same time frame following any other Kindle launch.

S > S_o

10/21/2010: In addition, in the twelve weeks following the introduction of the new generation of Kindles, customers ordered more Kindle devices on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk than any other product.

S_k4 > S_pl

8/25/2010: more new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch

S_b = 1.43*S_h

7/22/2010: Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, the Company has sold 143 Kindle books

S_b = 1.8*S_h

7/22/2010: Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, the Company has sold 180 Kindle books.

S_b2010/2 = 3*S_b2009/2

7/22/2010: Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.

GS_b > 207%

7/22/2010: The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

S_jp = 1,140,000

S_jpk = 867,881

7/22/2010: On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.

S_b > 2,500,000

7/22/2010: Five authors--Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts--have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

B > 500,000

4/22/2010: The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 500,000 books

S > 2,000,000

1/28/2010: Millions of people now own Kindles

S_b =0.6 * S_p

1/28/2010: When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books.

B > 410,000

1/28/2010: The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 410,000 books

S_n > S_o

10/30/2009: November is already the best sales month ever for Kindle, even before Cyber Monday

S > S_o

U > U_o

10/22/2009: Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars

B > 360,000

10/22/2009: The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 360,000 books

P = $299

7/23/2009: Amazon.com reduced the price of Kindle, the #1 bestseller in its consumer electronics store, to $299

B > 320,000

7/23/2009: The Kindle Store offers more than 320,000 books

B > 280,000

5/11/2009: the Kindle Store’s 280,000 books

B > 270,000

4/23/2009: The Kindle Store offers more than 270,000 books

B > 230,000

2/9/2009: More than 230,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store

P = $359

2/9/2009: Introducing Amazon Kindle 2: $359

D > 0

12/31/2008: We’re particularly grateful for the unusually strong demand for Kindle in the fourth quarter.”

S < S_o

12/26/2008: Top sellers in consumer electronics included Samsung's 52-inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV with RED Touch of Color, the Apple iPod touch 8 GB (2nd Generation) and the Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive, XP Home, 6 cell battery), sapphire blue.

B > 185,000

10/22/2008: Kindle selection continues to grow, with available book titles more than doubling since launch to over 185,000

S_b >0.1 * S_a

10/22/2008: Kindle titles already account for more than 10% of unit sales for books that are available in both digital and print formats

B > 115,000

4/23/2008: Kindle selection continues to grow - with more than 115,000 titles now available, up from 90,000 at launch

S_k > 1

B > 90,000

1/30/2008: The Company introduced Amazon Kindle, a revolutionary wireless portable reader that provides instant wireless downloads of more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines and newspapers

S_k < S_o

12/26/2007: Top sellers in consumer electronics included the Garmin GPS, Canon PowerShot digital Elph cameras and Samsung LCD HDTVs

P = $399

11/19/2007: Kindle is available starting today for $399...More than 90,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store

EPUB in the Wild at Tools of Change for Publishing

2012-02-20T17:34:00.001-05:00

I spent the early part of last week in New York City at the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. It was really great. There were lots of interesting presentations, from the theoretical to the more hands-on, and I was thrilled to meet folks in person who I had heretofore only chatted with via Twitter and Skype. I find it very compelling how much you can begin to know someone on Twitter, and then how important it is to make more solid connections face to face.

I gave a talk on Tuesday called “EPUB in the Wild”, which aimed to explain the difference between what is laid out in specifications and manufacturer guidelines and what really works in real life (the ‘wild’). I advocated for a workflow that concentrates on ebook features that work well cross-platform, with some minor adjustments automatically generated with media queries and that can thus take advantage of the creation (and subsequent updates) of a single EPUB file that is designed to also be easily ported to Kindle/mobi and KF8. And when that's not possible, because a platform simply does not support an essential feature (say, video), that's when you make informed choices about leaving that platform behind.

I call this method "one file to rule them all".

Here are my slides. I'm hoping that #TOCCON eventually posts the video from my talk as well. If they do, I'll let you know.

Epub in the wild

You can download the “one file” in EPUB format, or as converted to Kindle/mobi and KF8 with Kindle Previewer 3.

Cross-platform multiple indents in ebooks

2012-02-08T19:39:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I worry that I don't do enough real world work to know what the actual problems that ebook production people face. So when someone poses an interesting question on #eprdctn, I like to take a look.

Today, @ebookartisans was trying to get multiple indents to work on old Kindle, new Kindle, ADE, NOOK, and iBooks from a single EPUB file (obviously KindleGenned into a mobi for Kindles). She was using a combination of code from Joshua Tallent and myself. It turns out my code only works on first level indents on Kindle. Unfortunately, Rick Gordon (another #eprdctn regular) reports that the NOOK won't look at any code that comes after a media query, and so she was having trouble getting NOOK to do what she wanted.

Does this give you flashbacks of hacks for hiding CSS from IE? Well, it's the same show, so many years later. So, if you remember, you're getting old like me.

Thankfully, we have somewhat better tools this time around, in the form of media queries, which I started explaining a few weeks ago.

The problem with indents is that Kindle has some built-in funky behavior. So, if you were setting up the code just for old Kindle (e.g., not Fire) you might use the following:

<style type="text/css" media="amzn-mobi">

.level1 {text-align:left; text-indent: -30px; }

.level2 {text-align: left; text-indent: -60px; }

.level3 {text-align: left; text-indent: -90px; }

</style>

You'd also have to add extra spaces in front of each level2 and level3 (and successive levels) to give a left margin to the first line. This is Joshua Tallent's hack (actually he uses  , but @ebookartisans says that doesn't work on NOOK):

<p class="level3"><span class="spaces">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>•&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The mean aunt had her own traumatic childhood, deserving of treatment in a Roald Dahl novel.</p>

Though I salute Joshua's ingenuity, I admit I hate the spaces, and would only use such a hack in extreme need. Instead, I'd advise against using multiple indents. But in case the need arises, we'll forge on!

Since NOOK completely ignores the "not amzn-mobi" media query and any CSS that follows it, the trick is to put the NOOK (and other ereader code) in a stylesheet without a media query, and before the aforementioned old Kindle stylesheet. I'll also slip in some code that hides the extra spaces everywhere except in old Kindle.

<style type="text/css">

.level1 {margin:0 0 0 2em; text-indent: -2em;}

.level2 {margin:0 0 0 4em; text-indent: -2em;}

.level3 {margin:0 0 0 6em; text-indent: -2em;}

.spaces {display:none}



</style>

<style type="text/css" media="amzn-mobi">

.level1 {text-align:left; text-indent: -30px; }

.level2 {text-align: left; text-indent: -60px; }

.level3 {text-align: left; text-indent: -90px; }

.spaces {display:inline}

</style>

Here's where you have to keep track of CSS inheritance rules. Remember that later CSS overrides earlier CSS as long as it has equal importance. So, the text-indent in old Kindle will override the earlier CSS. That's what we want for text-indent but not for margin-left. So, just add in margin-left: 0; for each style in the Kindle stylesheet:

<style type="text/css">

.level1 {margin:0 0 0 2em; text-indent: -2em;}

.level2 {margin:0 0 0 4em; text-indent: -2em;}

.level3 {margin:0 0 0 6em; text-indent: -2em;}

.spaces {display:none}</style>

<style type="text/css" media="amzn-mobi">

.level1 {margin-left:0;text-align:left; text-indent: -30px; }

.level2 {margin-left:0;text-align: left; text-indent: -60px; }

.level3 {margin-left:0;text-align: left; text-indent: -90px; }

.spaces {display:inline}

</style>

That code works in old Kindle, Kindle Fire, NOOK, ADE, and iBooks:

It doesn't take a sharp eye to see that the words in the first line don't quite line up with the second and subsequent ones, AND differ from ereader to ereader. There is no tab in EPUB (or HTML), and each ereader seems to measure spaces its own way. If you want the lines perfectly aligned, you'll have to use a regular old list. It looks beautiful as long as you don't need to control what the bullet character looks like, as old Kindle will only give you a bullet:

Did someone say "EPUB in the Wild"?

Here are both the EPUB file as well as the Mobi file that I generated from it with Kindle Previewer 3.

Bookle, an EPUB reader for Mac

2012-02-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

TidBITS and Peter Lewis have teamed up to fill an aching void in ebookland: an EPUB reader for the Mac—not the iPad, but the Mac. It's called Bookle, and it's really nice. You drag your DRM-free EPUB files to the Dock icon to load them into Bookle, and then start reading. Navigation is particularly fine with a trackpad, where you can swipe from chapter to chapter, and then scroll up and down for the contents of each.

I think what I love so much about the swiping is that it is almost like leafing through a print book. It feels right.

I can see Bookle being particularly helpful for proofreading ebooks before they're published since it's based on the same WebKit that iBooks is. The only significant differences I found between Bookle's representation of my books and iBooks' was that Bookle doesn't shrink images to fit the viewport, like iBooks does. That said, I haven't done enough tests to illustrate that point conclusively, but I have noticed it with covers, for example.

It doesn't do Fixed Layout (at least not properly), and it doesn't have Search, and you can't write notes or add Bookmarks, but given the fact that Apple may release their own desktop ereader app at any moment, I was impressed that they did all they could. You can vote for your preferred additions on Bookle UserVoice Forum.

Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

Pepcon 2012

Creating pop-up footnotes in EPUB 3 (and thus in iBooks)

Customizing InDesign's EPUB files without cracking them open!

Announcing and Denouncing Spanish Hate Speech towards Catalans

Readium displays Fixed Layout EPUB on desktop (compatible with iBooks too)

In the content.opf file:

In the content itself (the XHTML):

The new TOC

And you're done!

Double tap zoom transforms fixed layout ebooks in iBooks

Using GREP to eliminate warnings—and reveal errors—in BBEdit

Word for Mac can't generate linked TOCs for Kindle

Using Amazon's Send to Kindle to transfer ebooks and documents to Kindle

Format

Unpacking a Kindle/Mobi file

Sideloading ebooks with Dropbox

Free Foreign Language Versions of my books

Seravek Font bug in iBooks

Kindle ignores everything when ID gives it multiple classes

Centering in ebooks across ereaders

The text-align property

Centering block-level elements

CSS bug in ADE, NOOK, etc.

Independence of alignment of contents and of the block that contains them

The Solution

To resume:

Bad Headers in InDesign exported EPUB

Asymmetry on Twitter

Metadata in iBooks, iBookstore, iTunes Producer, InDesign, and Amazon

Returns in EPUB

Membership to Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

Basic Membership - $20/year

Level 2 Membership - $75/year

Level 3 Membership - $150/year

Level 4 Membership - $1500/year

Thank you

iBooks can open EPUB 3 files

Amazon Algebra

iOS = 316 million

Sk > So

S > 1,000,000 * 4

S > 2,000,000 + 2,000,000

Skf > So

S2011 = 4 * S2010

Ske = 2*Spl

SK3g > SOK

P3g = $139

Sgk2q > Sg1q

B > 950,000

B > 900,000

S > 2,000,000

Sb = 1.15*Spb

Sb = 3*Sph

Sk3 > SHP

B > 810,000

S12 > Sol

S > So

Sk4 > Spl

Sb = 1.43*Sh

Sb = 1.8*Sh

Sb2010/2 = 3*Sb2009/2

GSb > 207%

Sjp = 1,140,000

Sjpk = 867,881

Sb > 2,500,000

B > 500,000

S > 2,000,000

Sb =0.6 * Sp

B > 410,000

Sn > So

S > So

U > Uo

B > 360,000

P = $299

B > 320,000

B > 280,000

B > 270,000

B > 230,000

P = $359

S_k > S_o

S_kf > S_o

S₂₀₁₁ = 4 * S₂₀₁₀

S_ke = 2*S_pl

S_K3g > S_OK

P_3g = $139

S_gk2q > S_g1q

S_b = 1.15*S_pb

S_b = 3*S_ph

S_k3 > S_HP

S₁₂ > S_ol

S > S_o

S_k4 > S_pl

S_b = 1.43*S_h

S_b = 1.8*S_h

S_b2010/2 = 3*S_b2009/2

GS_b > 207%

S_jp = 1,140,000

S_jpk = 867,881

S_b > 2,500,000

S_b =0.6 * S_p

S_n > S_o

S > S_o

U > U_o

S < S_o

S_b >0.1 * S_a

S_k > 1

S_k < S_o