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Saturday, February 02, 2013

New On My iBookshelf

I really should cut down on reading all those history-and-literature-based blogs. :-) I keep coming across interesting comments and stopping to go to Project Gutenberg or the iBook store to download yet more stuff.

In the last few days I have downloaded some classics. I do have Pride And Prejudice and Wuthering Heights somewhere on my print shelves, but where? So I downloaded both from PG, because I felt like a reread. I probably have a copy of Culpeper's Herbal somewhere in my overcrowded study too, but it's handy to have it available at my elbow when I'm working on my latest piece of fiction. So that was downloaded as well, though not from Project Gutenberg, because for some reason that one wasn't there. It was in iBooks for about $4, though, so I bought it. There's an introduction by Dr Johnson and the author himself has a letter to hs wife, which must have been written shortly before his death in 1654.

I discovered Escape Publishing, an ebook small press which seems to be entirely a romance themed list - fantasy, SF, YA, thrillers - any genre as long as it has romance in it. I bought Rayessa And The Space Pirates by my friend Donna Hanson, which cost me the massive sum of 99c and a thriller, which cost more, but looks like fun, though I am already noticing that the youthful university academic is called "Professor" though it's set here in Australia and in this country that term is only used for the head of department. She might conceivably have gained her PhD by her mid-twenties, if she'd had accelerated education, but Professor? Highly unlikely - and the murder victim is also a Professor in the same department! Never mind. It's a list worth checking out. I'm looking into it as a potential market.

I believe they have a pile of books for 99c right now, but if nothing else, get Rayessa.

And I've been having a ball with my ebook apps! One is good for even novel-length books, though there are limits - I can't work out a way to do italics, for example. Even if you have them in the original MS they disappear when you paste them. And while you can insert video, audio, pictures, you can't do it on the same page. This limits its use for school, where we ave kids with reading difficulties, including one bright, articulate dyslexic who deserves better than a picture book aimed at younger kids. There's another app which does allow picture and  text on the same page, even voice, which makes it good for an all-in-one talking book, but the amount of text on the page is very limited.

Still, I've used both. With the first-mentioned I have turned my WIP into an ebook I can just read, while keeping the MS in my Pages folder for later. With the second I have been showing other teachers some possible options for our kids with reading difficulties. And the art teacher can prepare her booklets as ebooks for the younger students, who will hopefully have ther iPads soonish. Saves photocopying and can be changed easily.

I have all these things sitting on my virtual shelf - nice!

2 comments:

Tsana Dolichva said...

Have you been using iBooks Author or something else? I've also had a go at turning an MS into an ebook for easier re-reading but I just used the epub template in Pages (which I had to download from Apple somewhere).

Sue Bursztynski said...

I didn't know there was an ePub option in Pages, will check it out. The app I used to make my WIP into an ebook, easier to use, was Creative Book Builder. The other one, which let me put my voice in, was Book Creator.