Wednesday, December 27, 2000

 

1:12 a.m. And then today has been as happy and productive as yesterday was miserable and turgid. Go figure. I'd surely better stop blaming the weather, the seasonal glitter, the financial situation, and/or the time of the month. It just must be a big old fluke.

My normal status is bouncy. Enthusiastic, involved, excited. Can't do enough in the time allotted, I tell you. So what was going on yesterday? Dang if I know ... sure, I had a quiet holiday, but that's not a crime. Yet.

Maybe it was the PDF problem, all along. Today I single-handedly solved the whole entire PDF dilemma, and looking back, I have to say that I was getting pretty frustrated and angry about it. I will explain. Or, more accurately -- I will talk about it until I get the psychic clue that your eyes have glazed over or have rolled back in their sockets ... at which point, I will move on.

You see, I have a huge pile of Shadow Lawn product that's just aching to be reissued in the new, hotsy-totsy digital format known as ebooks. See the books in the picture, off to the left? They are some of the titles that we've packaged or published and some of them are now out of print, but nonetheless still wonderful and beloved and very worthwhile.

Now, to enter the fancy world of epublishing, a person must offer the product in a form that is readable (downloadable, gettable, understandable) by most of the people with computers. Enter PDF, that demon spawn of Postscript, and who knows what all else.

The company, Adobe, has knocked itself out to make its little program the most popular, and for now, it is. So I have to learn how to turn my pretty books into PDF, or portable document format. Wait. I have candy. And a pretty animation:

There you go.

Anyway, the PDF program that's included with my page layout software, which is also made by Adobe, doesn't work. Seems I have a printer too old, printer drivers who wouldn't be able to get Miss Daisy around the block, and various other problems. I was looking at about $250 to fix the problem, with no guarantees. Very frustrating.

And then, today: nirvana! I found a shareware program called Print to PDF that miraculously does the deed, perfectly, smoothly, quickly, and neatly, and all for $20. I have been giddy with happiness and I'm already at work making the manuscripts that will become high-quality, durable, classic but edgy ebooks. Soon to be available at my own company store.

Now, you may scoff and you may say that you can't imagine ever reading a book on a computer, and ordinarily I would agree with you, but I think things are changing. People love their laptops and palms and their ibooks, and these machines are becoming a new source of fun and entertainment. And, it's only a matter of time before someone makes an ebook reader that looks good and feels good and costs less than, say, $150.

It's only a matter of time, and I want our books to have a shelf life in the 21st century. And now, they shall and they will. It's thrilling, I tell you.

Tomorrow, I switch from the success of the PDF search to the tangle of the shopping carts, but that's another problem for another day. See you on the other side of the moonlight.