After week(s) of research and nearly as much real time hacking together a conversion, Didn’t Die Young Yet by Jacob Cholak is available for $3 on Amazon as an eBook.

eBook formatting is much more akin to website development than anything approaching or resembling design. I happen to know quite a bit about web development, and I was also horrified to see what any of the “pdf to ePub” or even “html to ePub” converters did to my beautiful little book, so I had to start from just about scratch and format that damn thing properly by hand. This involved a lot of mindless and blinding precision copy and pasting, liberal use of search and replace and the delete button. I had to write a number of scripts (shell and javascript) to expedite the tedium. I will probably write some set of tools that will make the translation of our other book, White Horses much smoother.

The interesting thing I found in my research into eBooks is that no-one really cares about them yet. The designers haven’t latched onto them because they’re still a fairly “ugly” format that lacks most of the control you get with the much more standardized and documented web. And on the other side, the programmers haven’t jumped in to flesh out those controls and standards, because it’s still books, which everyone knows is for the grandparents of extinct dinosaurs. This means that the whole format is in an exciting state where it’s still unpolished and developing. Commercially the medium is growing by leaps and bounds (we’ve all seen the charts), but, strangely for the internet, the technology is lagging behind just a touch. This is exciting news for someone both obsessed with books and internet technology. A fertile but unplowed ground to combine two fetishes.

So the (e)Book is up and there’s another one coming. Also if you’re a sucker for paper, the real thing is still on sale too: Didn’t Die Young Yet and NaDA has the fundraiser going on for the rest of the month. Please support our thankless labors.