Light a Fire! Circlet books for "Kindle"
By Cecilia Tan. Filed in News & Notes |
The first two titles for Amazon.com’s “Kindle” e-reader by Circlet Press are now available!
Best Fantastic Erotica, our most recent print publication featuring the winners of the first round of the “best fantastic erotica” contest, and Erotic Fantastic: The Best of Circlet Press 1992 – 2002 are both up for download. They are each carrying a price tag of $9.99, but are $7.99 if bought via the Kindle network. (The print editions of both books are $19.99.)
By the end of next week we hope to have ebook versions available of these titles in many other formats, too. Watch www.circlet.com for announcements!
This is our first formal foray into the world of ebooks and we’re still learning the tricks of formatting them correctly. Please do let us know if you buy the books if you find problems or corrections that need to be made! (Since it’s an ebook, they can be fixed easily for future downloads!)
Sunday, March 16th 2008 at 1:37 pm |
Hi,
I have been to panels Cecilia Tan participated in at local Boston Cons and had purchase paper editions of Circlet Press books. When I saw that Circlet Press had books in the Kindle books store, I bought the first two titles. Unfortunately, Erotic Fantastic: The Best of Circlet Press 1992-2002 (Kindle Edition) does not have hyperlinks. I enjoyed the first story but after a few paragraphs, I realized the second story was not for me. I found there was no easy way to skip head or to select stories from the table of contents which a big drawback for an anthology.
Unfortunately, I did not find this soon enough to ask for a refund so it looks I might be stuck with a book I will not read because such a basic feature was overlooked.
It is too bad I could not have downloaded a sample from the book. If I could have, I would have seen the problem immediately and not have made the purchase.
You should try to fix the problem. I noticed that folks are tagging this book as “defective by design”, “kindle swindle” etc. I have not tagged the book in the hopes that the format will be fixed and I will be allowed to download the improved version.
Monday, March 17th 2008 at 6:49 pm |
Kate, thanks for coming to leave feedback. Does Amazon not allow you to upload a title again?
They have been very bad at Amazon about telling publishers what to do to convert to Kindle format. I went through the same process by hand of tagging everything in both books so that their converter software should handle it, but are you saying the hyperlinks in Best Fantastic Erotica worked and the ones in Erotic Fantastic didn’t?
Unfortunately, since I don’t own a Kindle, the only way to truly check how the automated Amazon conversion worked is to communicate with a customer like you. They have provided NO decent way to really proof the conversion (it’s a sort of HTML facsimile… but apparently it isn’t really WYSIWYG).
I’m going to poke at it and try to re-upload it. It takes 72 hours from new upload before the automated converted thingie at Amazon puts up the new version (and no, they won’t explain what takes so long if it’s an automated software thing and no human being is checking for whether things actually work…)
In short, they’ve kind of left us publishers in the dark to figure it all out for ourselves, have given us no way to get feedback or tech support, and all we can do is keep trying.
If they won’t let you download the book again, I’d be happy to send you a paper copy of it.
Tuesday, March 18th 2008 at 10:18 am |
No problem. I am always happy to help small presses. I figured folks would keep on tagging negatively and do nothing constructive.
Amazon let me return the title, so I don’t know what would happen if you revised the file and I downloaded it a second time. I plan on buying it from Amazon or Fictionwise when the improved version becomes available.
If you want to contact me offline, maybe we can work something out to help you test files on the Kindle. One thing that may be possible would be for you to email the test files to me and I can transfer them to my Kindle. I will delete the files once I get a chance to check basic functionality. Otherwise, I am local and we could try to hook up so you can transfer files from a laptop to view them yourself.
Thanks for the info!
Tuesday, March 18th 2008 at 3:05 pm |
Hmm, I’d love it if we could work something out like that, but here’s where I think the problem is. What Amazon requires publishers do is prep their files into either specially marked HTML or RTF files, and then upload them to the Amazon DTP site. From there the file goes through some kind of automated conversion, and there is a “preview” button you can click which shows you what the pages would LOOK like on a Kindle, but not how a Kindle reader would actually work with it. It doesn’t replicate the Kindle’s controls or anything, all it allows is page forward and page back. So they don’t actually give the publisher an actual test file to use, just a web browser window that will show you things like if you screwed up your paragraph breaks.
Fictionwise’s system is similar, but as they’ve been doing it longer, and they take a less adulterated file to start with and convert it to all the many ebook formats, I suspect that their system may have fewer bugs and result in better coded books. But I don’t know for sure… that might be wishful thinking on my part!
I’ve still got to figure out what I did differently between the two books, too, if BFE’s table of contents worked well for you but EF’s didn’t.
Email us at “circletintern” (at Gmail) so we can follow up?
Tuesday, March 18th 2008 at 9:15 pm |
UPDATE: Amazon lets you download an HTML facsimile of what has already gone through their converter. The HTML that comes out is NOT true to the Kindle format, but at least I didn’t have to completely start from scratch–I snarfed that and built a new Table of Contents by hand, and have re-uploaded in.
It’ll take 12 – 72 hours for the new version to go live, or so that say. Every update or upload I’ve done so far has taken pretty much the full 72 hours, so I expect that again this time.