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twoscoops / django-twoscoops-project

The sample project layout from the book, "Two Scoops of Django 1.5 and 1.6"
http://twoscoopspress.org
MIT License
873 stars 343 forks source link

provide an epub version #111

Closed mohanraj-r closed 8 years ago

mohanraj-r commented 8 years ago

Hi,

I have begun reading your book and enjoy it a lot. Thanks for the great content.

I use different devices with different screen sizes to read my ebooks and I find that epub format generally performs well where the content flows fluidly to fit the different screen sizes. I also tend to use very large fonts (16+). The rigid formatting and fixed font size in PDF is hurting me enjoying the great content of your book.

I tried converting the pdf to epub using calibre - but the output wasn't up to the mark with most of the formatting chewed up.

Can you consider offering an epub version as well please. It would greatly enhance my reading experience with this great book.

pydanny commented 8 years ago

Hi @mohanraj-r, I'm delighted you like our book. It was a labor of love. ❤️

The bad news: As for the epub version, for Two Scoops of Django 1.8. we decided against it because for the sales we get from epub/kindle it was too much work to narrow all code samples down to 39 characters (and make sure they still work), change tables to lists, and so on. It's easy to make mistakes at it too, as both formats are poorly documented. To do it right takes weeks of work on our part, weeks where we aren't getting paid to consult or teach. If we do a quick and dirty job of kindle formatting, we risk negative reviews on Amazon, which is frequent for tech books. And as an author of multiple books, I can assure you that each single negative review, even on formatting, dramatically decreases sales.

The good news: Since we made that decision back in 2015, we've come up with some tricks to make it easier for us to create nicely formatted epub and kindle books. Our hope is that with the next edition of Two Scoops of Django, due to be released in 2017 for Django 1.12, we'll have the pieces in place so we will be able to publish all four formats: Epub, kindle, PDF and print.

Should things change and we do an epub version sooner, you'll be the first to know.

mohanraj-r commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the explanation @pydanny Looking forward to the new book in 2017!

edrozenberg commented 7 years ago

An epub version would be great! PDF's are very hard to read on iPad and other readers. PDF's of printed books usually use fonts that are much too small to comfortably read on any ereader. It requires turning the ereader to landscape, zooming into each page, moving the page up and down while reading, then zooming out to be able to switch to the next page. It's terrible.

pydanny commented 7 years ago

@edrozenberg, We explain the problem of creating epub/kindle at https://www.twoscoopspress.com/pages/two-scoops-of-django-1-11-faq#kindle-epub-formats.

That said, if there were a service that could be hired to do the conversion to epub for a reasonable price, I'm interested. However, I've yet to see such a service exist that does a decent job.

diek commented 7 years ago

@edrozenberg I use GoodReader on my iPad, it is awesome

edrozenberg commented 7 years ago

@diek thanks for the suggestion - looks like a fine reader but since any pdf reader cannot let you use a larger font size it would have the same issues. GoodReader says it has a page at a time reflow feature but that would extract plain text only and remove any images and formatting. The only obvious solution is to use a large enough device (a 17" iPad say, if it existed) to have the text be large enough.

pydanny commented 7 years ago

We've released DRM-free Kindle and ePub formats for the 1.11 version on both Two Scoops Press and Amazon.

https://www.twoscoopspress.com/blogs/news/kindle-and-epub-now-available-for-two-scoops-of-django-1-11

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