DICK POUNTAIN
After finishing a 1,093-page tome online and converting his own ebook into print, Dick ponders on the true nature of a modern book
After finishing a 1,093page tome online and converting his own ebook into print, Dick ponders on the true nature of a modern book.
One of my lockdown activities has been extending my reading of the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, including his If
On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, a serio-comic, postmodern novel about books. The narrator begins a novel that ends abruptly because it’s been wrongly bound with duplicated sections; returning it to the shop, he meets a girl with a similarly defective copy and together they set out to finish the story, which becomes ever more complicated. The bewildering sequence of partial novels by different (or not) authors about sex, war and spies is gripping, with none ever proceeding to an ending. It’s not another book about the dreaded abstraction “narrative”, but about the material existence of books, which had been on my mind for two reasons.
Back in 2013 ( see issue 227, p24), I recounted my adventure of trying to publish my book Sampling Reality
– about the intersection of philosophy, information theory and neuroscience – as a Kindle ebook, using a then stateof-the-art conversion tool called Calibre. I was beset by problems such as missing special characters, and suffered agonies trying to get the table of contents to work, employing every conceivable input format: think DOCX, PDF, RTF, ODF and more. I eventually got it accepted and it’s failed to disturb the bestsellers list, but at least it’s there.
Reflecting on this a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to give the book away as a PDF. However, I then received an email from Kindle Direct Publishing announcing that it had just launched a paperback book printing service. This was too good to ignore, so I downloaded the new version of its production tool Kindle Create. It’s only available for PC and Mac so I installed it onto my Windows laptop, which has lain unused except as a print server for several years, and has a developed a sporadic problem involving a locust-like system process called Runtime Broker that gobbles CPU and memory until I squash it in Task Manager.
I’d much rather have done the conversion on my Chromebook, but I soldiered on in semi-crippled Windows and it went better than Calibre, give or take fixing the odd missing contents item. I uploaded the resulting KCB file to Kindle Direct Publishing – only to be curtly told it wouldn’t fit into the default 6 x 9in page size. I’d never even considered page size with my ebook, of course. Having seen enough of Task Manager, I went downstairs to my Chromebook and reformatted the original DOCX file in Google Docs, emailed it to myself and went back upstairs to redo the Kindle Create, which was now accepted. I made a new cover using the Kindle Cover Creator tool, which went well, and then submitted it all. 72 hours later, I received a PDF proof and was told that my paperback, which is now 191 pages rather than 155, had been published. Result.
The second bookish adventure involved reviewing Thomas Piketty’s 1,093-page Capital
And Ideology for The Political
Quarterly. The review copy is the size of two bricks, and, at 1.7kg, almost as heavy. My normal mode of reading, flat on my back on the sofa, has therefore been entirely out of the question, and even propping it up on the table proved problematic – laid flat, it wouldn’t stay open at my page, and it slid downwards when propped up. So I purchased a little lectern made from bamboo and chromed wire. The book’s spine width and weight were too much for it until I bent the wires into a different shape, and constructed an ingenious – if I say so myself – system of rubber bands and grommets to hold the pages open.
After a week or so of this, I contacted Belknap Press and asked whether there was a Kindle edition. There wasn’t, but the charming UK PR sent me a PDF instead. This is also big at 25MB, making it unusably slow in Adobe Reader, but fortunately I have a better PDF viewer: the marvellous Chrome extension PDF.js. This is a community-driven GitHub project, built with HTML5 and available for free from the Web Store. It’s maintained by Rob Wu, who describes it thus: “Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standardsbased platform for parsing and rendering PDFs.”
And oh boy does it parse: it searches the huge book quickly enough to be my principal means of navigation, and its page zoom is a lot smoother than Adobe’s too. Over the months my review took, I barely touched the printed book again. So what exactly is the postmodern moral of this story? Are ebooks finished, are they still the future – or are they just yet another tool that has its place when applied to the right problems?
I suffered agonies trying to get my ebook’s table of contents to work, employing every conceivable input format
I constructed an ingenious – if I say so myself – system of rubber bands and grommets to hold the pages open