CFZ PRESS: Ebooks

"COME ON JONATHAN DOWNES GET YOUR FINGER OUT WE WANT CFZ BOOKS FOR THE KINDLE"

We regularly receive requests from people for electronic versions of our books. The new predictive text options on Facebook make some of these requests seem more terse and curt than they actually are. Some are just terse and unpleasant, and I have a horrible feeling that there are people throughout the Crypto and Fortean communities who think that we are just sitting swanning about the place and refusing to produce electronic versions of the 100 odd titles that we have published, just because we cannot be bothered.

We can be bothered and we have been trying very hard, but there is a big stumbling block. When we release titles we want them to be available on the three main platforms - Kindle, iPad/iPhone, and Android. All three systems are basically text readers, and unfortunately for this, the vast majority of our titles are heavily image intensive, and this means that they need to be something called 'Fixed Layout', which means that the pictures remain in the same part of the text as the authors and designers intended, and to have these professionally converted is proving to be prohibitively expensive.

Our flagship titles like the Haunted Skies series, and Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo would be rendered into nonsense if all the pictures were out of synch with the text in the book.


David Braund-Phillips, my dear nephew and the CFZ techie is struggling with this, and hopes eventually to be able to produce electronic versions of these books in epub fixed layout, Apple fixed layout, and KF8 fixed layout (Kindle) formats, but we are having the devil's own job with it.


If there is anyone out there who can suggest a way of doing this that will not cost over $1,000 a title, or even better anyone with the expertise to teach us how to do it in-house, please get in touch with him (dave@cfz.org.uk) or me (jon@cfz.org.uk). Remember that we are a non profit organisation and most of our books do not make any significant profit, so we cannot afford to pay out very much money, and would much prefer to be able to do them in-house.


Jon