Tag: publishing

Making ePub files, the easy way

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: Kindle Direct Publishing – Many file types can be uploaded and converted by by Amazon. This only makes Kindle books, which go directly to the Amazon bookshelf.

Sample Chapter of My Ruby Book

(This is a sample chapter I put together to see how I felt about writing a programming book.) The Simple Script 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. Lesson setup In your working directory create a new branch for this chapter.

Thinking about a book...

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.

KDP Select Dips Its Hands In Author’s Pockets

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. Yes, I may be a little biased in my opinion, and I am open to being proved wrong, but I really do think that KDP Select is becoming less about selling ebooks, and more about taking money from self published authors’ already lean pockets.