Creating This Specific Kindle eBook

The fastest way to get the book back in circulation would be to create an eBook.  With an eBook, we don't need to worry about physically printing and shipping the book, we can just transmit the bits across the Internet directly to the reader.

Amazon's Kindle seems to be the primary eBook reader, and Amazon has a full process for creating eBooks.  So a Kindle version would seem the easiest to do. They advertise that you can make a Kindle book in 5 minutes.  How hard can it be?

The first problem is to create a Kindle account.  Then start defining this book.  The title is easy, as is the author.

What Edition is this?  The original 1953 is clearly the first edition.  We have tried to keep the text (if not the presentation) exactly as it was for the first edition, subject to fixing typos.  We could call this the Kindle Edition, or we could just call it the Second Edition.  Let's go with Second Edition, at least for now.

They want a publisher.  Amazon is going to be the publisher, at least for the Kindle edition, but the help for this item says "If you are the book’s author or publisher, you may enter your name or the name of your publishing company here. KDP is not a publisher, ...".  I'm certainly not the author, but I could consider myself the publisher, at least for this edition, so let's try my name for the publisher.

Do we need an ISBN?  The original book did not have an ISBN, and the help for this says explicitly: "Do not use an ISBN from a print edition for your digital edition. If you want to include an ISBN for the digital version of your book, it must be a unique ISBN. ... [It] won't actually appear on the detail page of your eBook (only the ASIN will)."   The ASIN is the Amazon Standard Item Number, and is what Amazon uses to keep track of things.  We can buy an ISBN (for about $125 in units of 1), but let's wait and do that for the print-on-demand book.

Then Amazon wants to know if we have the right to publish this book -- is it in the public domain, or do "I hold the necessary publishing rights"?  The point of going to the family of the author was to get them to agree to let me republish it, so that there would be no issue over whether it is or is not in the public domain.  Given that I have a license from them to create an eBook, I'm going to just go with the "I hold the necessary publishing rights".

Amazon wants "Categories".  The main category would be Pirate  Treasure, but I can't find anything like that.  A secondary category would be the mystery of Shakespeare's manuscripts.  The closest I can come would be "History, Canada, General" and "Literary Criticism, Shakespeare".  You only get two.

It asks for an age range and U.S. Grade Range.  If I was interested as a boy of 8, then it seems we can at least go from 8 to adult (18+).  An 8-year-old would be in the 3rd grade, so we can go from 3rd grade to 12th grade.  Actually, I have some programs that look at the "readability" of text. They seem to suggest it is 8th grade level.

Keywords are easier to come up with: "Oak Island, Money Pit, Pirate Treasure, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Nova Scotia". (I can have one more).

Amazon wants a "cover" for the book.  I haven't really kept track of the cover -- I was more focused on the internal content.  But Brian Leary sent me a scan of the cover.  I then took a day to reduce it to black and white and clean it up to get a crisp cover image:

Brian mentioned that the cover is a "grey with a light, light blue hue", so possibly I should change the white background to a grey with a light, light blue hue.

Now we finally get down to uploading the book itself.  That is taking days.