Poems on the iPhone, iPad, iPod

The Kindle version of Heres and Nows is now available at a bargain price of £3.45 including VAT. It is also available from Amazon.com and via direct download to your Kindle.

It looks as though there's already an app for the iPad, iPod and iPhone that allows you to read Kindle books, so it should be possible to download and read David Henschel's Heres and Nows on your iPad, iPod or iPhone already.

The formatting of the sample pages on the Kindle is very odd, and the authors are listed in the wrong order in the product description, but when you actually download it, all is well.

e-books should look beautiful, and I think this one is. It is as close as I could get it to the original paperback version.

Kindle edition of Heres and Nows ready!

Finally, after a steep learning curve, I have David Henschel's Heres and Nows in a format suitable for the Kindle Wireless Reading Device
and other e-readers using the Mobipocket format.

The reason it has taken as long as it has is that I wanted the look and feel to be as pleasant as possible, while at the same time using the features that make using an e-reader a different experience from reading a book. For example, there are no page numbers and instead there is a linked table of contents.

Because there are no physical pages, I wanted to make it clear where the end of a poem is, rather than have to turn the page to find out if that was the end or not. To this purpose I have put small printer's leaf ornaments at the foot of each poem.

The link above is still to the paperback version, but the Kindle version should be available by 1st March, and when it is I shall change the link if necessary.

I also have a version ready for the Sony Reader and iPad, iPhone and iPod, so my next thing to learn is how to make it available on those machines.

One publisher's struggle with Amazon 'Search Inside'

At last! The Search Inside feature on Amazon.co.uk for David Henschel's Heres and Nows actually works! (Click the link to go to the Amazon page, then click on the picture on that page to see inside the book.)

This means that you can go and browse the book on-line just as you would in a bookshop.

I believe that people want to see what they are buying, especially if it's a poet they've never heard of. You have to give something away so that people see the quality, then they'll want more and buy.

I originally asked Amazon to activate Search Inside back in August 2010. The whole process was immensely complicated. The link provided was simply wrong. Then they didn't tell me that my Amazon.co.uk password wouldn't work on Amazon.com. I had to set up a new account.

I finally uploaded the book's pdf file at the end of September.

By early December the Search Inside function worked on Amazon.com but still not on Amazon.co.uk, so again I clicked the link inviting publishers to activate this feature. Once again I was invited to sign up to Amazon.com. I emailed back explaining that I had done all this already and nothing had happened to the book's listing on Amazon.co.uk.

Amazon replied as follows:
We can use the same files on Amazon.com for Amazon.co.uk so you don’t need to resubmit. In future, just contact us if you wish your titles to be active in other Amazon territories.

to which I replied:

Yes please, please do this.

To which they replied:

Your title will be live on Amazon.co.uk within 24 hours.

My advice to other print-on-demand publishers: as soon as you hear from Amazon Search Inside, set up an account with Amazon Seller Central at once and upload the pdf file without delay. Then expect to wait two months before anything happens on Amazon.com. When it does, email them again and ask them to activate the feature on Amazon.co.uk as well.

Kindle edition coming soon!

It's been a struggle but I think I'm there. Watch this blog!

Making an e-book

My aim in publishing David Henschel's Heres and Nows was to let these poems live on.

I do this partly in memory of a dear friend, but I wouldn't have done it if I didn't believe in the the poems themselves.

My next step will be to format this book for eBook readers, such as Amazon Kindle Reading Device, the Sony Reader and others. I believe it is even possible to read books (with some limitations no doubt) on an iPhone, and few things could be more suitable for reading on an iPhone when stuck on a bus or a crowded train than a poem.

This is not the death of the traditional book but another way of reading. I have now got a Kindle device and it is going to be excellent to take as many books as I want on holiday without having to fill up my suitcase with them.

I am reading Steve Weber's eBook manual which is full of useful information about marketing eBooks, but the book itself appears to have been created by uploading the file to Amazon's Kindle converter with no subsequent proofing. For example, there is no contents page and there are still hyphens in the middle of lines where line breaks used to be.

When I uploaded a pdf of Heres and Nows to the Kindle converter the result, as I have mentioned before, was a horrible mess. Poetry needs much more care with formatting than plain text.

I see no reason why an eBook should not be as beautifully-presented as a paper book, and that will be my aim when preparing David Henschel's Heres and Nows in eBook format in the New Year.

So far I have converted my original word processing file into HTML and am patiently going through the code line by line, eliminating the bloated code that results from automated conversions, and putting in the simple tags that I hope Kindle will understand.

When I have succeeded, the link will be here.

Converting the book for Kindle

My main aim in publishing Heres and Nows is that David Henschel's poetry should persist in the world.

What is good should live on, and this theme recurs a number of times in the poems themselves.

To this end, I am working on making Heres and Nows available in an inexpensive edition for e-readers like Kindle, Sony Reader and iPad.

I have to start somewhere, so I am starting with the Amazon Kindle machine.

On uploading the electronic pdf file via the Amazon web site I found that all my beautiful formatting had gone and the poems were jammed together with their lines concatenated. The thing was an unreadable mess.

What I thought would be the work of a few minutes is going to take me many weeks of work, tinkering about with html tags, replacing accented characters with their ASCII-codes, and creating links (because Kindle books don't have page numbers). It's lucky I have some web knowledge or this would be a non-starter!

When it's ready, you'll read about it first here.