Amazon Kindle Poetry

Blarg said:

On a kindle, everything runs together

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I just want to re-emphasize that it is not the Kindle that is ruining the experience, but whoever has built the book--just as it is with web browsers and HTML.

I forgot to mention (way back when) that I finished upgrading all of my titles so they are decent reading on any other device (that has the Kindle reader application), too. I use my iPhone now to proof the final because it's the smallest possible frame I need to please.

Finally, I wanted to tell the world (/Blarg, lol) that I've just finished another fun volume of Carroll for the kids. It's another one where I couldn't find a decent version of The Hunting of the Snark anywhere in Amazon's library.

Moving on to more Ezra (which I will need to consolidate at some point into one eBook, but the dude's more prolific than Williams!).

Thanks, Blarg. How's the Kindle?

Hook, line, and sinker, eh? Glad to hear it.

Blarg said:

now that you have formatted works for Kindle, do you want to reformat them for the Nook? Or any other readers? Surely with a proven seller, you have proof that a market is waiting ...

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BTW - I still don't know the answer to this, and so have decided to do more snooping to figure it out.

You know, there are chunks (ounces?) of Ezra Pound's poetry I find hard to understand, but there is something oh-so-marvelous about the way he fits words together. A Quinzaine For This Yule is one of his shortest books I've compiled, but kept getting lost in it. I like to think of it as his valentine to Venice. An excerpt:


Beddoesque.

————————and going heavenward leaves
An opal spray to wake, a track that gleams
With new-old runes and magic of past time
Caught from the sea deep of the whole man-soul,
The "mantra" of our craft, that to the sun,
New brought and broken by the fearless keel,
That were but part of all the sun-smit sea,
Have for a space their individual being,
And do seem as things apart from all Time’s hoard,
The great whole liquid jewel of God’s truth.

That kind of wishful thinking has crossed my mind. By themselves, though, no--I don't forsee paying the rent with them. I'm not sure everyone's scrambling to download poetry on their new wireless toys, either. Although my bestseller (Cummings) has consistently sold over 100 copies over the past 6 months (which equates to a top 20 rank among nearly 23,000 eBooks in the "Poetry" category), I think its popularity has a lot to with his style/form and the combination of several sources. A complete shot in the dark.

Obviously, not every idea is a hit (right now I'm looking at a first edition Sara Teasdale--not sure I like her yet), but I'd much rather these public domain "projects" (which should, er, really be free) lead to some other form of editorial employment for a publisher or author in need of proper eBooking.

That's also wishful thinking, if the code stands up to the countless device upgrades and demand stays with the Kindle. I'm optimistic that it's simple enough to survive a little while longer. It's already paid me back many times over for my time, so I can't complain.

Blarg said:

it will be worth it to reformat as necessary

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I think so, too. I noticed Kindle is already trending toward what B&N does: creating graphically-based eBooks with fancier building tools (similar to you Flash freaks out there--ha ha, kidding!). I think the text-based eBook is still going to survive, though. People don't want to have to keep resizing their frame to scanned images. The clarity of text on a device has a neon quality that impresses me more, somehow. I find I read much faster on my Kindle and iPhone than I do a regular book. I still love books, but they're becoming more like disabled old friends (with innumerable protuding post-its).

One not-so-obvious source on the Cummings eBook was UCLA's library. When I started out I noticed a page and poem was missing from the Internet-archived .PDF version of Eight Harvard Poets. Easy to detect if you ask me because, besides noticing page numbers, it was also in the TOC. This scanned version had seeped out (beginning at the University of Michigan, I think) to every other electric avenue…

…and then I took it higher.

(Sorry…sometimes you gotta laugh at yourself.)

So, I bought something from Amazon (for $12!) that looked like a print-on-demand of a transcribed Eight Harvard Poets. It turns out the type-set was horrible (again, like it was a text-dump of an OCR scan), and even IT was missing the same page/poem--telling me the editor had just copied and pasted the text from the scanned PDF from Adobe--and then decided to sell it for $12 a pop! I've never felt so gypped.

So, having the fortune of working at UCLA during my secretarial tenure, I knew librarians offered copy services to the public for their special collections. I found a phone number, made the call, found out they had the original book, and paid $15 to have the single missing page scanned and emailed to me. Easy peasy. Needless to say, both the $12 and $15 turned out to be good investments. Both made me think about the reliability of sources.

Incidentally, the poem that is missing from the Internet sources is The Lover Speaks, one of my favorites:


YOUR little voice
__________Over the wires came leaping.
and I felt suddenly
dizzy
_______With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
_______________or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
____________stars and the Humourous
_________________________moon
dear girl
How I was crazy how I cried when I heard
_____________________over_____time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
_____your voice.

Blarg said:

Unless, of course, we wind up pursuing the google model -- advertising-supported ebooks

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And there you have it. The Internet reborn. I loathe having advertising (or any sort of motion-propelled graphics, as I have hinted to some here with animated avatars) on the perimeter of what I read. I'm keenly sensitive to such things and am not going to change my prissy ways about it. If you're going to be totally Zen about when you read you can't have ANY distractions. This is the same reason I loathe mainstream television (but I am getting distracted, now). Would you look at the Mona Lisa the same way if it were surrounded by a flurry of banners for the latest Parisian hot-spot?

Perscribo said:

I loathe having advertising...on the perimeter of what I read.

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Yes. I do realize this is a bash to AbsoluteWrite. I find, in this case, it is bearable due the content herein that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.

Blarg said:

I always have avatars turned off on the net

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Good idea.

BTW, here's what I'm using now instead of the tables-based code previously developed. It's a lot simpler. I've emboldened the areas that would be repeated for additional poems (and the PoemX variable edited):

<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>My Book Of Poetry</title>
</head>

<body><a name="Cover"></a>
<div align="center"><br><br>
<h1>My Book Of Poetry</h1><br><br>
By<br><br>
<h3>Poet Name</h3></div>

<mbpagebreak /><a name="TOC"></a>
<h3 align="center">CONTENTS</h3><br>

<p style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
<a href="#Poem1">Poem 1 Title</a></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
<a href="#Poem2">Poem 2 Title</a></p>

<mbpagebreak />

<p style="margin-top:0 ;margin-bottom:0; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
<a name="Poem1"></a><h3>Poem 1 Title</h3></p><br>

<p style="margin-top:0 ;margin-bottom:0; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
Poem 1 Line 1</p>
<p style="margin-top:0 ;margin-bottom:0; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
Poem 1 Line 2</p><br>

<mbpagebreak />

<p style="margin-top:0 ;margin-bottom:0; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
<a name="Poem2"></a><h3>Poem 2 Title</h3></p><br>

<p style="margin-top:0 ;margin-bottom:0; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
Poem 2 Line 1</p>
<p style="margin-top:0 ;margin-bottom:0; text-indent: -1em; padding-left: 2em;">
Poem 2 Line 2</p><br>

</body></html>

My research on Sara Teasdale yielded a rather nice anthology of children's poetry she put together in 1922: Rainbow Gold. I then noticed (in the download counts of actual archives and the Amazon Bestseller lists) that children's poetry seems to be more in demand. However, once again, the format for these "popular" items is predominantly poor. I was very giddy to dive into it. These familiar rhymes are fun dog-paddling for any age.

The compilation brought to light another area I didn't cover: graphics. Here is the code I use to incorporate each:

<div align="center">
<img src="Rainbow015_062_S-480x186.jpg" height="186" width="480">
</div>

The extended file name and centering is a matter of preference. When incorporating graphics, it is important to remember:

1. The eBook (.html) file that you upload to Amazon must now be a .zip file, comprised of the (.html) text file and all graphic (.jpg) files.

2. The file names in the .zip file must all be in lowercase letters. Don't ask why.

3. Your graphics must be no more than 64 KB in size (individually).

4. You must specify the dimensions of the graphic in pixels (height="X" width="Y") in the image tag. If you leave this out, KDP will not default to the actual size, but can (depending on it's HxW ratio) balloon it up to fit the entire frame. This is why I put the dimensions in my file name after editing them--I know I'm going to need it later when building the HTML.

Keep in mind, all that I share here is in the context of the "old" KDP. I'm not sure how things are different/better on the new DX development tool--I haven't had time to look at it. I'm running with the assumption that this old-fashioned way is still the easiest. It suits my own needs fine (so far), since the illustrations in my eBooks are, for the most part, black and white drawings; so resolution quality is a non-issue.

More to come!

Blarg said:

I find animation very distracting too, so I always have avatars turned off on the net,

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I guess I changed my mind. I saw Kelly's avatar today (which you can't suppress if you're not logged in) and decided I was also missing out on some great stuff, too. Frills are nice when their not too taxing on the eyes or your processing speed.

I can't help but feel a little unnerved at the persistence of Kindle titles that are directly competitive with mine staying on the Bestsellers list, despite their inferior quality. I have gone back and forth nearly four times now posting and deleting reviews for these products that point out their flaws. In these reviews I have stated clearly I am another publisher offering a better product (that's often cheaper). I keep deleting these reviews because I get the sense it feels mildly unethical to post them. I keep putting them back up because I notice my sales go up when they're there. Is it unethical? I mean, as I'm typing them up I think: It's like Coke and Pepsi, right? Amazon is a marketplace even for the public domain peons. I can't help it. It just really gets caught in my throat when I see others who take a single poem like The Road Not Taken, create a terrible eBook out of it, slap a price tag on it (moreover, a price that is above the minimum), and see it stick at the top because this (?) is the essence of 20th Century American poetry.

Maybe I can wrestle a Warhol(-ish) poem out of this.

I thought of that, too. Unless you're twittering and Facebooking like crazy no one's going to notice you. This is definitely not my strong point. I'm hyper-organized and have no time to wine and dine folks (virtually speaking). I'm only 20 pages into a marketing book that I know I need to read. Makes sense, doesn't it? All I want to do is put it down and write(/read/type) poetry. Go figure.