I’ve just finished making the digital edition of Diets Suck.
It’s released in the ePUB format, which is an open standard that works on virtually every eBook reader out there, with the notable exception of Amazon’s Kindle. I can only assume that there was some strategic motivations for the omission from the popular eReader.
It took me about a week or so to put the book’s digital edition together using the excellent open-source Sigil and Calibre. The most time consuming part was redoing the formatting from scratch. While I could copy and paste text, all the special little things like how the paragraphs set on a page, how the tables look, how the images fit – all had to be defined anew. Fortunately, ePUB is essentially a zipped up website, so it wasn’t all that hard for me to get things to look the way I wanted. I’ve included some screenshots of what the editing process looked like below.
There were a few quirks I couldn’t get around. Centering tables, for instance. On some devices, the tables were centered. On others such as my last-generation Sony eReader, they were aligned to the left-hand side of the page. Searching online revealed that this was a sore point with many of these readers.
I’ve updated the website as to include links to both the paperback and digital versions. I’ve set the price point to $3.99. The paperback copy, by comparison, is sold for $9.99.
