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Tags: book epub
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Tags: book epub
Complete Friday Q&A Now Available
After months of hard work by an incredibly gracious group of reviewers, The Complete Friday Q&A: Volume I is now available through iBooks and Amazon!
It's available on iBooks here.
If you're a Kindle sort of person, it's also available at Amazon.
If you don't care either way, go for the iBooks version. The book was built for iBooks and the formatting is slightly nicer there.
Update: it's now also available in ePub and PDF as a direct sale, for those of you in countries where the above options aren't available, and also print-on-demand for those of you who like paper. Details here.
(It will supposedly be available for Nook and Sony Reader as well, but isn't yet, and I'm not sure any of my readers have the requisite equipment anyway.)
I am considering making the ePub available for direct sale, for those who can't or don't want to buy from one of the above. If you're interested in that, please let me know, as I don't want to do it unless there's at least some demand.
For those wondering about the content, it is somewhat revised and cleaned up from my blog posts, but it's still the same basic content as what you'll find here. It contains every Friday Q&A post through August 2010. Buy it to have an offline reference, or to support the blog, or to show it to your friends, or any other reason like that. Just don't buy it to get more than what you can get on this site.
I'll be making a post sometime in the next few days about the whole process of self-publishing this ePub. Until then, enjoy, and thanks for reading!
Did you enjoy this article? I'm selling whole books full of them! Volumes II and III are now out! They're available as ePub, PDF, print, and on iBooks and Kindle. Click here for more information.
Comments:
Thanks! The self-publishing experience was the diametric opposite of my experience with the traditional publishing world. Making dead-tree books was painful in pretty much every respect, whereas making this has just been enjoyable and fun. I hope that this book, and the dissection of the process I'll be posting soon, will convince some more authors to go this route as well.
Sampled the book on iBooks, it's great. Is it DRM free on iBooks? If not would you consider directly selling it DRM free? Thanks!
I checked the box to sell DRM-free at BookBaby. I'm not 100% sure that this translates across to iBooks, although I think it should. If it hasn't, I would definitely consider selling it directly without DRM. If you like, you can buy it on iBooks, and if it's DRM'd then contact me by e-mail and I will send you one without.
Thanks for the offer Mike, but I won't need it -- I purchased it on iBooks and it doesn't have any DRM. Thanks for making it DRM free!
Congrats! Even though what you write in those Q & A are harder to chew through than many other blogs, I find that learning about all these subtle differences about how things are implemented underneath to be good for my understanding of things.
Congrats on the new book!
Congrats on the new book!
Shazron Abdullah: Thanks very much for confirming that. I'm glad it worked the way it was supposed to.
Kelvin Kao: I figure, there are a lot of people doing great posts on easier topics, and there's not much need for another one. I'd rather do the hard stuff.
Kelvin Kao: I figure, there are a lot of people doing great posts on easier topics, and there's not much need for another one. I'd rather do the hard stuff.
Congratulations Mike.
Your blog is a great source for learning about new topics. In addition to that, it has also served me well as reference material. When I encounter an issue I'm not familiar with, your blog has been one of my top places to search for a solution. I know that your articles will delve deep and help me understand the topic better. As a reference source, this new electronic book form is ideal. Thank you for your hard work.
Your blog is a great source for learning about new topics. In addition to that, it has also served me well as reference material. When I encounter an issue I'm not familiar with, your blog has been one of my top places to search for a solution. I know that your articles will delve deep and help me understand the topic better. As a reference source, this new electronic book form is ideal. Thank you for your hard work.
Hi Mike, since iBookstore is not available for us poor swedes, would you consider selling me a epub in another way? paypal perhaps?
Not available at all? How lame! I am going to look into generic digital file sales services so that I can get around that. If you're in a hurry, I'd be happy to send you the ePub in exchange for a PayPal payment.
Regarding Swedish iBookstore, followed your link and it gives me a popup with "Your request could not be completed.", with my Swedish iTS account. Do not know if that is a communication error though (never know here in China).
I am also interested in buying the book, but not in a hurry though.
I am also interested in buying the book, but not in a hurry though.
Fantastic - a must have!
FYI - I can read the iBooks ePub file in the Adobe Digital Editions reader on my Mac fine (why you can't buy & read iBooks in iTunes is beyond me).
FYI #2 - searching for "Mike Ash" inthe iBooks store yields no results. Might be worth putting that in some keywords somewhere since I wouldn't have thought to search "Michael Ash" without seeing that was the author in Amazon. Call me stupid :) Except that there is no publisher involved I would guess it's a US publisher thing. A guy I know publishes here (Australia) as Matt, but in the US the publishers insist that the binding says Matthew!
FYI - I can read the iBooks ePub file in the Adobe Digital Editions reader on my Mac fine (why you can't buy & read iBooks in iTunes is beyond me).
FYI #2 - searching for "Mike Ash" inthe iBooks store yields no results. Might be worth putting that in some keywords somewhere since I wouldn't have thought to search "Michael Ash" without seeing that was the author in Amazon. Call me stupid :) Except that there is no publisher involved I would guess it's a US publisher thing. A guy I know publishes here (Australia) as Matt, but in the US the publishers insist that the binding says Matthew!
Daniel Lundqvist: There have been enough requests at this point that I will certainly be making an ePub available directly through some channel or another. Haven't worked out the details yet, but it shouldn't take too long, I hope.
Mark Aufflick: I didn't even know that Digital Editions reader existed, good to know. Regarding iTunes, if you share a link to a book from within iBooks, the URL it gives you actually tries to open iTunes on the Mac, which then falsely says that the item in question isn't available in the store! It's bizarre. I had to lightly modify the URL above to make it stop doing that.
Regarding the name, for some reason when it asked for the author name, I went all official-like and put in my full name. I'm not sure if I can change or add anything at this point, but I will check into it.
Mark Aufflick: I didn't even know that Digital Editions reader existed, good to know. Regarding iTunes, if you share a link to a book from within iBooks, the URL it gives you actually tries to open iTunes on the Mac, which then falsely says that the item in question isn't available in the store! It's bizarre. I had to lightly modify the URL above to make it stop doing that.
Regarding the name, for some reason when it asked for the author name, I went all official-like and put in my full name. I'm not sure if I can change or add anything at this point, but I will check into it.
Have you considered posting it to an on-demand printing site like http://www.lulu.com? My company is interested in buying a copy or two in dead tree format for our engineering library. E-Books are hard to share with a group...
Thanks!
Thanks!
I have considered it, but the idea of a company wanting it for an engineering library is extremely cool, so I'm considering it even harder now!
Hi Mike,
Congrats for this release!
The ePub isn't available in the Belgian Store neither but I'll definitely buy it when it's available as a directly downloadable/buyable ePub.
Cheers,
Thomas.
Congrats for this release!
The ePub isn't available in the Belgian Store neither but I'll definitely buy it when it's available as a directly downloadable/buyable ePub.
Cheers,
Thomas.
Hi Mike,
I'm really looking forward to your book.
I'd be interested in the direct-sale ePub. :)
Greets from Germany,
Arne
I'm really looking forward to your book.
I'd be interested in the direct-sale ePub. :)
Greets from Germany,
Arne
There is definitely enough demand now to justify another, more international-friendly ePub venue. I have an inquiry in with kobobooks.com about their terms, as they look like they may be the best choice. One way or another, I hope to have something available sometime next week, and I'll make a post once I do. In the meantime, if anyone is in a hurry, I'll be happy to take payment through PayPal and send you the ePub directly.
Hi, I purchased the Kindle book from Amazon, but it doesn't have a table of contents. The iBooks sample has one, though; is this an error?
And if you update the Kindle version with a TOC, will the update be pushed by Amazon?
And if you update the Kindle version with a TOC, will the update be pushed by Amazon?
That's the first I've heard of the Kindle version not having a TOC. I haven't seen the full version, but the Kindle sample certainly does have one, so I'd expect the full one does as well. Can you double-check, and maybe try loading the book onto a different device to see if it shows up there? Please let me know what you find, and feel free to e-mail me directly (mike@mikeash.com) if you prefer.
Sure, I will check it and let you know by email.
The content is great, of course. I just ran across is blog the other night, and was sold on the usefulness of the sample book chapters right away.
The content is great, of course. I just ran across is blog the other night, and was sold on the usefulness of the sample book chapters right away.
To clarify, the kindle edition has table of contents pages, but not a menu link to the table of contents. The menu says, "Not available for this title." where the TOC link should be. However: in this books case, navigating to the cover and then advancing 1 page will bring you to the table of contents pages.
Following up in this comment thread because I didn't want anyone to get the impression that the kindle version didn't have a TOC at all. It does, just not a kindle menu link to it. (although I did think it was missing at first, based on the kindle menu text I quote above.)
Following up in this comment thread because I didn't want anyone to get the impression that the kindle version didn't have a TOC at all. It does, just not a kindle menu link to it. (although I did think it was missing at first, based on the kindle menu text I quote above.)
Thanks for clarifying.
The table of contents that you see when advancing past the cover is not a "real" table of contents as far as the book format knows. It's just additional book text that has hyperlinks to the various chapters. It serves the same function, but as far as the reader software knows, it's just more regular text.
The table of contents in the menu is special metadata included with the book. The iBooks version has this, but it must have been lost during the Kindle conversion. I will write to BookBaby to see if it can be fixed, as it really should have both. However, the TOC at the beginning should be a reasonable substitute, at least.
The table of contents that you see when advancing past the cover is not a "real" table of contents as far as the book format knows. It's just additional book text that has hyperlinks to the various chapters. It serves the same function, but as far as the reader software knows, it's just more regular text.
The table of contents in the menu is special metadata included with the book. The iBooks version has this, but it must have been lost during the Kindle conversion. I will write to BookBaby to see if it can be fixed, as it really should have both. However, the TOC at the beginning should be a reasonable substitute, at least.
John: My inquiry with BookBaby came back as, essentially, "cannot reproduce". Could you follow up with me by e-mail?
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I know being an author has been a long, not entirely happy road for you, but this is going to be an awesome resource for Mac and iOS developers and I'm really glad you found a way to publish it that worked for you.