Revisting the Cover

The intent of the Kindle edition is to reproduce the original printed copy, as much as possible.  The same will hold for an upcoming print-on-demand version.

For a Kindle version, there really isn't a cover -- it's a bag of bits that is transmitted electronically.  But there is an image of a cover that is used to identify the book.  We uploaded it separately from the actual HTML.  I didn't really have the cover of the real 1953 book -- I was more focused on the content.  But Brian Leary sent me a scan of his copy.

The scan that Brian Leary sent was a JPG file, and shows that the cover is a textured surface.

I edited this down to just the text and images as a pure black and white GIF image.

Brian mentioned that he had sent a black and white scan, but that the original was "actually grey with a light, light blue hue". I can modify the black and white image to

but I'm not sure that is (or is not) closer to the original book cover.

Why does this matter?  The only difference that I can see it might matter is in Marketing.  Now that we have our Kindle version of the book, we can just go to Amazon and act like someone interested in Oak Island, and search for "Oak Island" in the Amazon Search bar.  If we do that, we find lots of search results.  The covers of these books tend to be much more "dramatic".

These more dramatic covers might attract more attention (and readers).

Clicking the "Submit and Publish" Button

Once we have the HTML settled, and have uploaded a zip file of the HTML and the figures, we are pretty well done.

Another page to fill out to select the price.  My assumption is that, particularly in this case, we want to make it inexpensive to maximize it distribution, not to maximize income, so I set the price as low as possible to be in the Kindle Select marketing program -- $0.99.  Enable World-wide distribution. And submit it.

This moves the book from "In draft" to "In review" mode.  Apparently, there are actual people (?) who are looking at the book and determining if there are issues of some kind.

And there were.  But the time sequence of events is confusing.

Having submitted the book at about 8:00 PM, I took a break to work on other projects, but checked back late at night before going to bed.  When I refreshed the "Bookshelf" page that lists "all" my Kindle books -- which is just this one -- the status switched back to "Draft".  This seemed strange to me; there was nothing on the page to indicate an error.  Checking the pages which list "Book Details" and "Rights, Royalty and Pricing", I saw nothing out of place.  There was no e-mail message.

So I clicked "Submit and Publish" again.  Maybe there was some hiccup that meant it wasn't put in for review.  Clicking put it back "in review" status.

Then the next day, at 11:20 AM, I get an e-mail from Kindle Direct.  It says:

We're writing about the following book:

The Oak Island Enigma: A History and Inquiry into the Origin of the Money Pit by Leary, Thomas (AUTHOR) (ID:5821970)

During a review of your KDP submission, we found content in your book that is freely available on the web.  Before we can publish your book, you need to take one of the following actions within five days: ...

It appears that they (the Kindle Reviewers) went out to see if the content was exclusive to this Kindle, and decide it was not.  Exclusivity is required for the Kindle Select marketing program.

What did they find? 

There are two sites, that I know of, that are similar. 

• CRYPTOGRAPHIC SHAKESPEARE presents ideas of the author (Penn Leary) about how they contain the enciphered name of the real author, Francis Bacon.  It contains an HTML version of "Oak Island Enigma".
• There appears to be an eBook version available under Scribd.com.  Scribd.com is a subscription service that provides eBooks for $8.99 a month.  It was uploaded by "joavilher" in 2011, and can be read on the iPhone, iPad, and Android (according to the page that describes it).  I have tried to contact the "publisher" of this book (joavilher), but there is no clear way to do that on scribd.com, and there is no e-mail address on joavilher's profile page.

This is where it gets confusing.  Shortly after I got this e-mail, the book changed status again to "Live".



It appears that

1. The book went into review.
2. The reviewers questioned exclusivity, and put it back in draft.
3. But the e-mail describing this was batched and not generated for another 12 hours.
4. I saw it was in draft, and re-submitted it, which -- it turns out -- is the action that was called for in the (not yet issued) email to push ahead with publishing.
5. So, by the time I received the e-mail, it was already being processed for going live.

My response was to take it out of the Kindle Select program (which is what wants exclusivity), and the Kindle help web page say how to do this, but they made no sense. The web page says I have 3 days to un-enroll from Kindle Select by  "simply go to the book's "Enrollment Details" and uncheck "Keep this book enrolled in KDP Select" box".  But I can't find any "Enrollment Details" anywhere.

Which is probably because Kindle, itself, took me out of the Kindle Select program automatically, when they made the book "Live".

Now in theory, the web site that describes the status of the book says that it is available in the Amazon sites in the United States, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia and India. I assume this is just listing the English Language book; I doubt that it was automatically translated into Spanish, French, or Japanese.  (And it may still take time for the files to migrate there, since those links do not seem to work yet).

But in the U.S., the book is available as The Oak Island Enigma. (Kindle Edition), for $0.99.
 

Pricing the Book

We have everything ready to go.  Now Kindle wants to know the price for the book.

And to make it more difficult, there are options.

1. Apparently, "normal" is a 35% royalty rate, and we can price it between 0.99 and 9.99 per book.

2. But there is a 70% royalty rate option.

There is a web page "Kindle eBook Royalties: 70% vs. 35% and 6 Essential Things You Need to Know" to help with choosing between these two.  It suggests that for the 70% royalty rate, the price needs to be between $2.99 and $9.99, and we pay for file delivery.

And, it says, the book must not be in the public domain.  We haven't settled that issue, and I don't think we need to, but it may be more of an issue here.

3. And then there is something called Kindle Select. This is a program to allow Amazon to loan out books, and so on, to encourage people to get the Kindle. To be part of that, Amazon gets exclusive e-book rights.

I assume our intent is not money, but to get the book as widely distributed as possible.  Given the original 100-copy private printing, this seems to be more a labor of love than an attempt to maximize profit.  To get the maximum distribution, we could set a low price ($0.99) and join the Kindle Select program, trying to get Amazon to market it as much as possible.

So my approach would be to

(a) join Kindle Select,
(b) go for the 35% royalty rate, and
(c) set the price at $0.99.

Issues in HTML formatting

A number of questions have come up in trying to create an HTML version of the printed book.  This is just a list of some of them.

• On page 21, we have a footnote -- the only footnote in the whole book.  It is not clear how to do footnotes for the Kindle, or for HTML generally.  Wikipedia makes each footnote mark a link to the actual footnote at the end of the web page.  Randall Munroe in his What If web site does some as links and others as text which shows up in a tiny window on top of the reference number, when you click on the reference number -- sort of like "alt text" for images.  My interpretation of this footnote is that is is an aside -- extra information that you may already know, and can sort of skip.  I would think this is effectively a parenthetical expression (sort of like this), and figure it is easiest to re-format it as such.
• Where do we put the figures?  Most of the figures are roughly related to the text that it is near, but have no specific place where they need to be.  We will try to find the first paragraph break where the figure would help the reader, and put it there.
• Several of the full-page images, are sideways.  That makes sense in the printed book, where the pages are longer than they are wide.  In standard HTML, the display window width is under user control, so it probably makes more sense to have them be right-side up.  But the Kindle is more like a printed page -- fixed size display window that is longer than it is wide, so let's leave the images sideways.
• On page 27, the last two lines of the opening quote are partially indented, but I can see no reason for it.  Searching the web, this is Sonnet 81 by William Shakespeare. Of the copies I find on the web, some just center all the lines; some make them all left-justified.  But quite a few indent the last two lines.  So I guess we will do that too, to keep with the original document.
• One thing we want to do is to use italics correctly, matching what was in the printed book.  If we compare our HTML version with the scanned bit-map version, we find a couple of places, mainly on pages 33 to 35, where we have to decide if some characters are (or are not) italic.  Specifically, there are (apparently) italic dashes and an italic colon, not to mention the periods. (Are they italic or regular periods?)

Uploading the Book Contents

The biggest problem with the production of any book (once it has been written) is formatting it.  The most important part of a book is its content, but that content has to be presented so that the focus is on the content, not the presentation.

In this case, we have all the content -- it was written by Thomas Leary in 1953.  All we need to do is format it.

There are many ways to format things.  For the print-on-demand version of the book, I am working on page images that will look exactly like the original book (or as close as I can come). So these should be suitable for a 6 inch by 9 inch page with a 10-point font, as was the original book.

But for an eBook, like the Kindle edition, we want to match the properties of the Kindle device, which is a smaller screen  which is 600 by 800 pixels at 167 pixels per inch (or 3.6 by 4.8 inches).  The Kindle allows the user to choose both the font and the font size, so that the words can be bigger (or smaller), as the reader chooses.  When the reader chooses a different font, all the paging changes.  The book could be 30 pages or 50 pages, depending on the size of the font chosen by the reader.

HTML is almost perfect for that -- it defines what needs to be done (a header, centering, italic, start a paragraph), but does not specify the specifics of how that is presented.  But it is meant for computer screens, not for the printed page, so it has no concept of "start a new page".  The Kindle presents things as "pages", and you can go from one page to another on it's fixed size screen.  So the Kindle does have a concept of "start a new page", which is not part of HTML.  So it would seem that HTML is not sufficient to define the formatting for a Kindle.

The Kindle documentation seems to suggest that a text formatting program, like Microsoft Word, is the way to go.  Word (and similar programs) allow the text to be formatted for the printed page, and has that ability to "Insert page break".

I run a Linux computer and don't use Word, but have an open-source "equivalent" in  Libre Office.  Libre Office will read in Word documents (in .doc format) and write them back out.  So it seems that this is the way to go.  Create a Word document (.doc format) and upload that for Kindle.

After going thru all that, importing the text into Libre Office and formatting it, inserting the figures and photos, adjusting the point sizes for the titles, adjusting margins for quotes, and so on, then the Kindle documentation says to "convert this to HTML and upload the HTML"!  My guess is that they have some Microsoft specific extension to HTML to define page breaks, and looking for that, we find a Kindle Direct Publishing web page on "Custom HTML Tag", that says to use  <mbp:pagebreak /> for a page break, and <mbp:section> for a book section, as well as a list, on a different page, of "Supported HTML Tags in Book Content".

The documentation for Kindle says to have Word generate the HTML.  I can ask Libre Office to generate HTML, but if I then upload that to Kindle, and use the Kindle Previewer to see the result, I end up with a 3321 page book, with all but the first two pages being blank (I think).  The HTML produced by Libre Office, at the least, is not a good representation of the original file.

This gives us two possibilities.  (1) I can fire up a Windows machine, and move my oi.doc file to it, to use Microsoft Word to produce the HTML to feed to Kindle, or (2) I can modify my HTML by hand to match the list of tags supported by Kindle, according to this web page, and upload that.

Let's try the first possibility first. I can write the files out to a USB flash drive and take it to a Windows computer.  The Windows computer, running an older version of Word, has significant problems.  For example, it is not able to find some of the figures, and when I re-insert them, it goes into an infinite loop.  But still, creating an HTML file from what it has is much closer to what we want than we have seen from Libre Office. It looks like using the Windows HTML as a guide, I can hand-modify my current HTML to produce the desired result.

This works out pretty well.  Hand-produced HTML is very easy to produce and produces a quite reasonable image.

I use "zip" to create a package of both the HTML file (oik.html) and all of the image files that it references (in our case, all GIFs), and upload that zip file to the Kindle site.  Amazon then runs a spell check, which in our case shows up only proper names and the "mis-spellings" that result from the early English spellings of words that are quoted from original writings of Francis Bacon.  Amazon then allows the book to be previewed.

The presentation of the preview is very well done, with one apparent bug.  The page layout of the figures seems to vary depending on which direction (forward or backwards) you are paging.  For example, the caption of the first figure (on the first page) shows up, as desired at the bottom of the first figure when you start, but if you page forward one -- to the title page -- and then back one, you get a page with just the caption (at the top of the page). Paging back one more gives the first figure (with the caption underneath it).

The preview allows us to consider the book on multiple devices.  The main issue is the figures, which seem to change size, depending on the resolution and screen size of the device.

Corrections

We've found a (small) number of errors that can be corrected in the original printing.  These were detected in a number of different ways.  Checking the spelling of all the words found some problems.  Looking for two words in a row that are the same found one.

Some problems were detected when we had to "undo" the hyphenation in the original text.  The original text is right-justified.  To fill out lines neatly, it is sometimes necessary to hyphenate a word at the end of the line and continue it on the next line.  With a different line length, or font size, or font, the spacing may be at least subtly different, and the hyphenation will be unnecessary.  In general, I don't like hyphenation.  But the problem arises that if a line ends with a word with a final hyphen, it is not computable if the hyphen should or should not be deleted when the lines are re-done.  For example, if we use the word "hand-forged" and a line break is needed after the "hand" and before the "forged", we would not remove the hyphen when the text is OCR'ed and the (artificial) line breaks of the previous printing are removed.  But a word like "found-dation" would have the hyphen removed. (And then we see that the "d" was incorrectly doubled).

Many of the errors were only found when I tried to recognize the individual characters.  The recognition of individual characters revealed the use of ligatures (fi, ff, fl, ffi, ffl) in the typesetting of the printed book.

On Page 4 (the bottom line), is missing a closing period.

On Page 7 (11 lines from the top), is missing a closing period.

On page 15, "Sydny, N.S." should apparently be "Sydney, N.S.". This is in reference to Melvin Chappell, who is identified on page 35 as being from "Sydney". (Sydney is at the North end of Cape Breton Island).

On page 14, (17 lines down) "characteru" should be "characters".

On Page 17 (2nd line from the bottom), we have "base of the the triangle". Remove the duplicate "the".

On Page 25 (12th line from the bottom), we have "his era on thd island". "thd" should be "the".

On Page 35, (12 lines down), we have "Has the stone triangle any signifigance ..." where the word "signifigance" should be "significance".

On Page 36, (5 lines down), we have "found-dation" which should be the word "foundation".

On Page 15, there is a line-break hyphenation between "sedan-" and "chair". Not clear if this is "sedanchair" or "sedan-chair". Modern usage is "sedan chair", so we go with "sedan-chair".

On Page 34, a similar situation with "Watch-" and "Candles". Is this "WatchCandles" or "Watch-Candles"? "WatchCandles", with an upper case character in the middle of a word seems highly unlikely, so we go with "Watch-Candles". ("Watch-Candles" is correct, when we look at the actual text of Sylva Sylvarum).

On Page 17 (9 lines down), in the phrase "the pounding of the", the "f" is the wrong font. Compare with "of" two lines down.

On Page 13, last line, the "fi" in "artific-" should be a ligature, not two separate characters. Compare with "fi" as a ligature in "bored five inch holes" 14 lines above, and "square and filled" 2 lines above that.

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.