Bukowski memoir now available as an ebook (2 Viewers)

Rekrab

Usually wrong.
Okay, so this post is sort of about Bukowski and I put it in the "All things *not* Bukowski" thread because it's a shameless self-promotion of a self-published ebook, and this seems like the right place to put it.

I've been experimenting with getting some of my texts into Kindle form and couldn't resist making an ebook edition of my short memoir about Charles Bukowski, who I met and interacted with (disastrously) as a college student. The title of this ill-considered effort of cheap sensationalism is "Charles Bukowski Spit In My Face." The cover looks like this (and the drawing in the Kindle version is much higher resolution than any of the print edition covers):
cover4.jpg

This Kindle "book" (well, digitized text in a downloadable file for reading on electronic devices) sells for a mere 99 cents.

My official description on Amazon:

David Barker's notorious memoir about his run-in with legendary Los Angeles underground poet, Charles Bukowski, in the early 1970s. Originally published as a chapbook in 1982, this Kindle edition includes the prefaces to the second and third editions.

You can buy it here:
http://amzn.com/B005TMN3W6

Surprising facts that I learned in the process:

Kindle ebooks have no back covers. Or spines.

Everything you download is viewable only in grayscale. The color cover images stay on Amazon. The cover in the book file is strictly B&W.

They have no page numbers.

The font size is something I can't control (apparently). It is whatever Amazon wants it to be.

I also have three horror short stories available as Kindle books and will be converting other texts into ebooks as long as my proofreading-weary eyes hold up.
 
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Well, every reader has a different format, so page numbers are kind of becoming a thing of the past.
 
I've seen a few Kindle readers refer to some number, maybe it's Kilobytes, such as "Billy drinks the varnish at location 5879." And I've heard some readers use a percentage, like "the dragon starts wearing a red tutu at about 39.8%" What I wonder is if these measurements of progress through the text are absolutes or relatives that will change from machine to machine? Will it be possible to give an absolute reference to a location in a text without page numbers (or maybe line numbers)?
 
you could give numbers to sequences yourself. Like sometimes chapters of books are numbered, only you do it in very short cuts like paragraphs. Or maybe like some books of aphorisms do it at every new subject.
 
What the fuck do they do for indexes? If ebooks take over, I guess indexes will be useless, especially as you can just search out a word without having to go to an index.

Also, how can I get my beloved "chose your own adventure" books if there are no pages to turn back and fro to?
Bill
 
From the little I've seen, many books have links when you can jump in the Table of Contents to the any chapter, just by clicking on the link. For my tastes, that is too Inter-webbish, and I would avoid such claptrap.
 
Well, every reader has a different format, so page numbers are kind of becoming a thing of the past.

I see! I did'nt know that. I have'nt seen a reader yet. I wonder how their index system works, but maybe the reader gives you a list of pages you can click on if you're searching for a specific name in a book.
 
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Just purchased/read, enjoyed thoroughly. Does anyone know if kindle files can be extracted from the program (don't really know the correct jargon) onto the hard drive itself? Would prefer to print off & reread in page format if possible.
 
I would think they've tried hard to prevent that kind of thing, but I dunno.

The irony of a printing an "ebook" is worth noting though.
 
I think they have tried to prevent that, but I bet people have figured out a way to hack it and make prints. Glad you enjoyed it.
 
ebooks are crucial for our blind and visually impaired students. the problem is the books need to be navigable to be useful and by navigable I mean if the teacher says go to page 5 you need to know how to get there, or if you stop cause you are getting off a bus you need to know where you stopped( in the book ,not necessarily what corner though that's important too)
The National Federation of the blind just ripped the kindle in a public statement stating the design was exclusionary.
The reason this is important is that before ematerial enters the school system in a real way the developers will need to resolve the accessibility issue.

That said today I had a visually impaired student studying linguistics at a university in Toronto and the only source I could find that would help us transcribe the text was an article in a Cambridge University database written by a (how ironic is this) a blind professor of linguistics at Bowling Green. I called her and she offered to help the student-which illustrates why the internet and universal access is so important. Unfortunately publishers fearing that some will print their ebooks have insisted on DRM locks that make the material inaccessible for visually impaired users-thats a long way to get to my point.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/na...-lack-of-access-to-new-kindle-fire-2011-09-29

I will get off my soapbox now-
 
Short Bus: why do the blind need to have ebooks printed? Is someone reading the printed book to them? I don't own a Kindle, so I don't know, but it seems they could make them so they can be navigated by spoken commends and also the device could read the text out loud. Perhaps they already have these features. I can't see publishers dropping the DRM locks which protect them (somewhat) from piracy.
 

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