Tag: publishing

Any Ulysses user knows there’s an ePub export function. It’s right there in the export sheet. Sitting there, throwing shade with it’s little slanted “e.” Mocking me.

This afternoon I was thinking about turning my sample chapter into a eBook. There’s lots of ways to build an eBook. The most common seem to be:

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.)

Before starting to build a more complicated program, let’s start with something simple. We’re going to hack together a short script that works. It will upload a single cat picture to a S3 bucket. We’ll learn the basics of both a ruby script and how cloud storage works.

Lately, I’ve been dabbling in ruby programming. I’ve mentioned it a few times recently. I’ve also been thinking that what I’m doing would make for a decent beginners book. I’ve seen a few of the ones out there. The projects are much more involved and tend to focus on web applications. This would be more of a beginner-to-beginner style project.

I’m thinking there might be a place for a smaller, focused book. One that follows a project from beginning to end. Along the way it could touch the incidentals like git, text editors, the basic ruby gems, and such. The result would be a small app that interacted with a web service.

From Amazon’s point of view, I could see this as a “why wouldn’t we” situation. They can squeeze both ends of the pipeline (customers and authors) now that the ebook gold rush is mostly over.