Thursday, July 18, 2013

Creation of Ebook version + Renamed first story

Having used my Kindle 4 for half a year already, I enjoyed reading on it. Well, apart from not being able to read in some dark places due to the absence of built-in light, but being able to read under room light without hurting my eyes, or bright sunlight outdoors, which are primary advantages over an LCD screen, are big advantages.

Well, the problem with reading my stories on my blog is that it requires a constant internet connection if you were to read more than one part of it. On top of that, neither the desktop nor "mobile versions" (iOS and Android versions actually) offer a comfortable experience of reading because the text is just too small, and zooming in doesn't re-flow the text and requiring to pan around, only to start over when heading to the next page.

So, I am proud to announce that I will be making an e-book version of all of my stories (except the 5th story). To make this accessible, I will also include a QR code so that you can use your smartphone to scan and download it to your e-reader app, along with a direct link beneath it to the same file if you want to side load it to your reading device. It's on the "Stories" tab on my blog. It is also added to the dropdown menu widget (visible only on PC version) for your convenience. The end of the file name has a date in YYYYMMDD format that, if you have previously downloaded a copy before, would tell you if the version I'm hosting is the same as what you have or a newer edition.

As of the time of writing, only the 1st and 2nd story has been put up. Due to the massive size of it, only parts 1 to 37 are currently only included in the e-book version. Also, since the software I used to create it could only support and edit .EPUB formats, Kindle users would find that they would be unable to open it as the format is not supported and would require software on the PC like Calibre to convert into a format the Kindle could read and let you adjust the text like .MOBI or .AZW. (Yes, I know how inconvenient this is since I use the Kindle myself.) You could convert into .PDF with this software, but I wouldn't recommend doing that.

Well, I could create a Kindle-friendly version, though it could take me a while to have it in sync with the .EPUB version. For obvious reasons, there will not be a QR code for the Kindle version.



While creating the e-book version of the 1st story, it came to me that I would need to rename it. I had thoughts of doing so before, but I'm not the kind of person who could come up with names without difficulty.

"An Original Story By Me" was just a tentative name in use since the first part was published 5 years ago and clearly not suitable to be a final name. I named it as such because all of my other posts at that time were about my ramblings or anime-related stuff and make it obvious that what I wrote in it was fictional and not real, if they never saw the tags that is. The name "Losing Identity" came about

Nowadays, it mostly story-only and I would have to indicate with things like "666th post: (title)"to say that it's not a story post. The numbers correspond to the order I started writing it, not in the order I publish it. The running numbers included the (separately numbered) story posts.