I really like making eBooks. Actually, I like HAVING eBooks, MAKING them is - WAS - a real pain.
After shooting the photos, and picking and cropping...
Came the excruciating task of manually drag/dropping into InDesign or now Pages, one at a time... centering horiz & vert, fitting to the page... making the cover with title, making the inside cover with title, description, links to my other sites, making the back cover with title text... making the PDF, making the cover thumbnail... making the .epub, making the .mobi...
So I just spent 2 1/2 days writing two PHP scripts to automate 90% of the drudgery: I put the jpegs in order in a directory, and the script makes the cover, inside cover, back cover, assembles all onto one multi-page pdf (usually ~50 pages), makes the thumbnail, makes the .ePub, copies the thumbnail to the right web directory, copies the PDF for purchase.
I still have to make the .mobi on my Mac, using kindlegen for OSX (from the .ePub), which runs from the Terminal!! Can't get the kindlegen Linux version to run in my hosting account. But that only takes a minute.
I have 340 eBooks in www.NickBaerGallery.com, 337 that I made by hand, like a good 2 hours each. Now, the scripts do the same in 2 minutes.
Now I can concentrate on shooting!
Sorry I was busy the past couple of days.
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