WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...




Friday, January 09, 2015

eBOOKS


For some years we have been wrestling with the problem of e-books. Some people have been demanding them quite vociferously, and insinuating that we "can't be bothered" to produce them. This is just not true. The sad fact is that the format is just not suitable for most of our publications. Andrew May is currently working on transferring the books in our back catalogue that are mainly text, or which have very few illustrations, into e-books, and he is cracking on with them at a rate of knots.

Many of our books, however, have complex typesetting with footnotes, endnotes and references, as well as having a large number of illustrations. The technology to make e-books has moved on greatly over the past few years, and I am happy to say that by utilising Kindle software aimed at producing comic books and kid's books we can now produce static versions of our more complex titles.

However, let me warn you in advance. They do NOT have clickable links, or searchable text, but we hope to offset this by offering the books at a significantly lower price than the printed version. The font face and size are also not changeable except by expanding the page as a whole. When the technology moves on we shall move on with it. And in the meantime I still consider the hard copy titles to be the definitive editions.

At the moment we are issuing our e-books purely via Amazon's Kindle platform, because - as we understand it - there are free apps which one can download in order to read Kindle e-books on all other formats. However, we would welcome your feedback on the subject. If you buy our e-books please give us feedback. It helps us to improve what we do...

Jon Downes,
January 2015

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