Mastodawn

Cees de Groot Feb 17

Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@cdegroot A great angle for telling the history of Lisp.

Is the ebook DRM-free?

David Gerard Feb 18

@amoroso @cdegroot says so on the page!

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@davidgerard Doh, my eyes probably saw it but my brain missed.

@amoroso @davidgerard @cdegroot it says so for shopify and kobo. does it apply to lulu (the recommended option) as well?

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@pesco I'm wondering about the ebook at Lulu too. According to Wikipedia Lulu phased out DRM long ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu.com#Digital_Rights_Management_(DRM)

@davidgerard @cdegroot

Lulu.com - Wikipedia

@amoroso @davidgerard @cdegroot yeah, might be a matter of course among those familiar. but i've been burned before. ;)

Paolo Amoroso Feb 18

@pesco Right, it would be better to know in advance.

@davidgerard @cdegroot

@amoroso @pesco @davidgerard @cdegroot I’ve just bought the Lulu epub edition. If there are any specific DRM checks you’d like me to try please let me know. (All I’ve done so far is use sendtokindle.)

Paolo Amoroso Feb 19

@OpinionatedGeek Can you open the ebook with a desktop reader on Linux or other operating systems?

@pesco @davidgerard @cdegroot

@amoroso @pesco @davidgerard @cdegroot Sure. On my fairly vanilla 'Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)' installation, I double-clicked and it opened in Atril (v1.26.2). It opened just fine and is quite readable - I've attached a screenshot for you showing some of the more complicated formulae.

I didn't make any edits to the epub - this is the same file as it was downloaded from Lulu. It seems just fine!

(There's a minor problem with the navigation on the left but it may not be specific to this epub.)

@OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard @cdegroot i have bought the lulu epub and can confirm it is drm-free as expected. :3

i did run into an issue with missing images. calibre said a bunch of png files were missing, and indeed running unzip -l on the epub file does not show them...

Cees de Groot Feb 21

@pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard I cannot begin to say how much I hate epub - as a format, certainly for technical books, the inconsistencies in standard implementations, and certainly the tooling around it.

I'll fix it tomorrow. Not sure what happened - this did happen on an early version of the epub build (using latex4ht and associated tools, if you want details), and i fixed it and did multiple checks before uploading. Somewhere an old version must have snuck into an upload. My apologies.

@cdegroot
thanks, please don't sweat it.

i guess though that epub is the only practical alternative as far as reflowable ebook formats go? purely OOI, do you have a preference for some other format, albeit not practical?

/cc @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard

@pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard My preference is PDF. Well, probably DVI but that's dead ;-). I bought a Boox color specifically to be able to read tech books, reflow is nice for pure prose, but it breaks down when you start caring about page layout.

(and yes, I know there are accessibility advantages, people with dyslexia can use their preferred fonts, etc; I'll do my darnest best to make the epub acceptable for those reasons, but I'll never call it "nice" ;-))

@cdegroot
i get where you're coming from. i have a thing or two for exacting layout and typography etc. ;)

a large-format reader might not be a bad idea to get, but for the moment i have a 2nd gen kindle oasis which matches "reading PDFs works" but not "PDF is a good format for it".

/cc @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard

Cees de Groot Feb 22

@pesco @OpinionatedGeek @amoroso @davidgerard I'm reasonably happy with my Boox. I mean, e-ink colors aren't there yet, but it is very readable and gives more of the battery life advantages of an e-reader (versus, say, a 10-11" tablet which is awesome for PDFs as long as you're close to a charging point :-))