Maijstral At Last!
by wjw on June 21, 2011
Okay, kiddies, the ebook versions of the Maijstral books are online!
(For some reason the middle book, House of Shards, is held up “for review” at Amazon, and has been for days now. Which to me indicates some kind of problem with the machinery, and I’m trying to find an actual human being to find out what’s wrong.)
All my Nook editions— which does include House of Shards— may be found on one page.
Smashwords has The Crown Jewels, and will have the others shortly. All will migrate to other platforms like the Sony Reader and iBooks in the next week, assuming the automated machinery at Smashwords knows what it’s talking about.
The Crown Jewels, the first book in the series, is on sale at a Special Introductory Offer of $0.99. That’s ninety-nine cents! The others are priced at a modest $4.99.
The books are also available on Amazon.UK and Amazon.de.
If you’re going to read in .epub format (used collectively by Nook, iBooks, the Sony Reader, and others), I’d recommend getting your copy at the Nook store. I labored over that particular file in order to correct mistakes and formatting errors. I couldn’t fix all of them, but it’s very clean, if I say so myself.
The .epub versions promulgated by Smashwords, while perfectly readable, were created by a machine, and pretty much look like it. For some reason they won’t let me upload the prettier version I worked on myself.
And, for what it’s worth, I found a buncha my books on the Android Market!
Enjoy! (While I go staggering off to work on the next book . . . )
Purchased!
Looking forward to seeing “Metropolitan” and “City On Fire”, even though I already kinda sorta have them. and I have pbook versions, too, although they were both bought used. It’ll be nice to finally be able to give you money for writing those books! (And maybe it’ll encourage a sequel…?)
Will have to wait for tonight to get back to my vpn, as amazon does not allow me to purchase from the Middle East.
But hey, I can travel to the US at the speed of light, so no issues 😉
Thanks for making these available
Walter, are the ones from Barnes & Noble the prettier ePubs you worked on yourself or are they the Smashwords version too?
To what extent have these books been revised from the print editions? Did you just clean up the scans, or are there significant textual differences between these and the original editions?
I just wanted to check and see if you were going to roll these titles out onto the Google Books site. Where possible I try to go through them rather than B&N so my local independent store gets a cut. It’s one of my favorite places to hang out and read since I stopped buying dead-tree editions, I want to support them when I can.
I always love seeing your new books on the shelves and cannot wait to grab some of the past ones I missed. However, this morning, it looks like the B&N site is returning 404 errors for every author search. I’m going to blame you for this.
Purchased all three.
Regarding the Barnes and Noble versions, it looks like Rock of Ages is DRM’d while the first two aren’t. I was pleased to see that The Crown Jewels wasn’t DRM’d, especially since it has all the chapters in two huge HTML documents and I might have to split them in order to appease my ePub reading software. I bought the next two on the assumption that they would be equally amenable to end-user tweaking (and could, potentially, outlive Barnes and Noble should the company go out of business and stop providing the tools to decrypt their books). Is there a flag you missed setting when publishing #3?
Thanks for converting over to digital; my physical library is overflowing.
Done, done and done! And I just finished re-reading Brian Daley’s Floytt & Fizthugh books, so these go to the head of the fiction queue!
Done. Which is convenient as I recently sold my copies of all three of the Maijstral paperbacks. Sadly room needed to be made. One enemy of America is the stuff we accumulate. The cool thing with e-books is that large bookshelves are no longer necessary.
And, you got me to buy them again. Cha-ching!
Brian R.
Mastadge, there are some minor changes and edits here and there, but as for “significant textual differences,” no.
Max, if you have any problems with the files, let me know, I’ll just send you one.
Andrew, the Nook books from B&N are the prettier ones I did myself.
So four new books arrived in my household yesterday – a physical copy of CV Wedgewood’s The Thirty Year’s War, and the three Maijstral books on my Nook. Succumbing to temptation, I started in on The Crown Jewels. After all, the 17th century isn’t going anywhere…
My first reaction? You’ve had the idea for the Shaa around for a long, long time… 😉
Sir – what’s the best way to pass along what appear to be typos (or OCR glitches, I assume)? For example, in the Nook version of The Crown Jewels, I’m finding a number of instances where “th” has been replaced with an “m” – transforming “the” into “me” seems to be the most common occurrence.
John>> well, all ideology-driven alien conquerors resemble one another to some extent.
Oh, just email me the typos. I even did a find-and-replace on “me” and “the.” Apparently it didn’t work well enough.
The typo gives the text an interesting Jamaican flavor, though. “I’m going to get in me car and go to me house.”
Israel, I’ve been avoiding Google Books ever since the Great Google Unauthorized Rights Grab. But I’ll check it out soon— I just want them to ask =permission,= y’know?
The way people talk about the Google thing you’d think that Google was some tiny little company that nobody ever heard of and this Google Books thing was their big play to get their name in the news. Like it was so goddamn hard to figure out where Google was and how to opt out of Google Books.
In chapter 1 of the Kindle version of The Crown Jewels there’s a scanning error, the 1 that should be an I. Also found the me’s that should be the’s.
(A caper terminated at the halfway point. “1 beg your pardon,)
Is the Kindle version based on the Nook epubs, as I found their formatting suboptimal?
A few more errors from The Crown Jewels (Kindle edition)
Chapter 4
Head of a political organization, a third degree black sash in pom boxing, an expert conversationalist, , . [should be three points at the end]
Chapter 6
The homely comforts arc always the best. [arc should be are]
Only too you do. [I’m not sure whether there’s an error here, but the sentence doesn’t make sense to me, as if a word is missing)
“1 think we should return to Mr. Quijano.” (1 should be I)
DD, of course Google didn’t =allow= the opt-out at first, so you couldn’t find it even if you wanted to.
Scotoma, thanks for the corrections. My conversions went from RTF to .epub to .mobi to .azw, and the problem with that was that I couldn’t correct the final conversion because Amazon did it themselves. You’d think they’d just take the .mobi file and stick .azw on it, but apparently they’re able to find some fucked-up code that no other program noticed and try to make sense of it.
And the problem with .epub is that how it looks depends on your reader. The same .epub file looks different if you read it in Sigil, as opposed to Adobe Digital Editions. In Sigil I could at least make (some) corrections, so that’s what I corrected for. I couldn’t correct everything because the software is, well, not very flexible.
“DD, of course Google didn’t =allow= the opt-out at first, so you couldn’t find it even if you wanted to.”
And then everyone shit themselves, as you would expect, and then the opt-out was presented. But apparently that wasn’t good enough and Google gets the bellyfeel hatethink now.
These books are FILLED TO THE BRIM with “m-for-th” errors.
I think I can safely say I saved you from 98% of the m/th errors. Two editors worked on each book, and I also used find/replace. (You want to know how many words end in “-me?” Approximately fifty billion. Trust me on this one.)
You find the me’s easier (in sigil), if you use the search term ” me “, this way you get only the me’s and not any *me’s or *me*’s. And so far I’ve seen only errors with the=me, not any were the=me was part of another word.
The book is a delight to reread, by the way.
I do have to say that “filled to the brim” was perhaps unduly hyperbolic. There are a fair number of them, though, along with “m-for-rn”.
Another thing I’ve noticed is apparent “period for comma” substitutions. I’ll have to find an example because I can’t recall one right at the moment.
Some info: I’m reading the Kindle version on an iPhone.
*****
And I’ve read through my personal edit of “Metropolitan” for the fourth time and I’m stillspotting typos I missed.
And I found one. “Don’t jump. Miss Jensen. This is Drake Maijstral.”
There are others. It appears to be the result of a capitalized proper name or honorific coming after a comma.
The commentor. DensityDuck, moved his finger to the “post” button.
Oh, the problems with punctuation were legion. Cleaning them up was not helped by the fact that they don’t register on screen all that clearly, either.
It is all maddening, this. But yet, if you look at the average mass-market paperback, it’s not much better.
This are the last errors I found in The Crown Jewels.
Chapter 6
[1 -> I] “1 said we would investigate the possibility, Mr. Quijano.
[t -> l] giving her a lofty elevation, allowing her to took at Nichole down her nose.
Chapter 7
[1 -> I] “1 think I found it,’’ he said.
Chapter 8
[t -> l] Sergeant Tvi was eating dinner atone in
Chapter 9
[mein -> ????] “I thought your mein seemed buoyed by success.
Chapter 11
[Surprise] Surprised boiled up in General Gerald’s sleepy mind.
Chapter 12
[. -> ,] After this is all over. we have our own plans.”
[a man] He was speaking to man in an Imperial-cut coat
[m -> in] and the audience tapped their feet m appreciation.
[1 -> I] he said. “1 have every confidence.”
Chapter 13
[1 -> I] “1 suppose you have! Tell me— was it the ending you intended?”
I also found a few places where a hyphen was followed by a space, you can easily find those by searching in Sigil with “- “
Scotoma, thanks for the corrections. I will produce revised e-copies as soon as I have a damn moment to do so.
(Moments are few and far between right now.)
I should point out, after having thrown a snit, that “Rock of Ages” and “House of Shards” were both much better on the typo front. I don’t even remember them having significant numbers of errors at all, in fact.
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