Even more good news everyone, I picked up the tshirts yesterday afternoon, and they will start shipping (hopefully) on friday!

Just a info (I already mentioned in the Volunteer thread): the v1.3 ePub does not work on my Sony PRS-350 (firmware 1.0.00.14080, which seems to be the newest). Can someone confirm this? Perhaps on a different Sony hardware?

I'm already working on narrowing the problem down, but till now I had no success.

Are there other devices choking on the ePub?

I have started reading A Plunge Into Space and I am noticing a lot of typos, but I think I have the first release and these may have been corrected in later releases. But when I go to Ganxy and re-download the mobi, it looks like the same version I already have. It looks like only the epub has been updated. I know I can convert the epub myself in Calibre, but I thought I'd put it out there that the mobi looks unupdated.

On a related topic, is there a place you would like us to report remaining suspected typos? I am guessing some of these are present in the original and were left untouched on purpose, but in my version 1, for instance, there is an instance of "wa3" instead of "was" and I figure that is something that should be fixed if it hasn't already.

Thanks again for the book. I got halfway into Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 and needed a break, so it's arrival is perfect timing.

There were definitely more typos in this release than I'd like to have in future ones, but for a number of rather boring reasons we needed to test the mechanics of this thing sooner rather than later. Promise better quality next time, and thanks to everyone who has submitted corrections.

I'm quite annoyed at myself, because we had caught the vast majority of the typos before sending the book out, but got mixed up on versions and sent out the uncorrected text.

We're going to be re-authoring the book from page one some time this week, and any remaining typos should be picked up in that edition.

We're also going to be pre-releasing the next one to a much wider group of testers/editors, which is a big part of what we learned from Plunge, which was essentially a beta for us.

Thanks everyone for the continued support. I'm so encouraged/enlightened by the quality and quantity of your responses, and more confident than ever that this project will continue to be a great success.

The typos I've encountered aren't really world shattering. Mainly I've noted that at times some smaller case letters with similar look like b and h have been mixed up in words like he/be etc.

I haven't seen anyone else mention this, so please ignore if it's already been raised for addressing. It's something I'd like to see corrected for any future releases if possible.

The .mobi of Plunge into Space for me on my Kindle keyboard (and a friend too) has some extra left margin padding that is unnecessary and pretty annoying on the kindle. The two forewords are laid out nicely, both lining up with the edge of the location/page bar at the bottom of the screen. Once you get into the book though, there's an extra indent on the left which is just wasting screen space.

I'm pretty surprised to not see other people raising this issue to be honest...

I'd have to agree with pjs on this - the indent is pretty annoying resulting in a fair amount more page flipping.

Try the v1.3a MOBI you can download here savethescifi.com/index.php/books/rescued.../a-plunge-into-space

It fixes the margins.

Excellent. That's much better thank you. Just needs proper chapter support now

Thanks, RedDwarf. I didn't know that section was there, and it is easier to download the book that way. Now to load it on to my Kindle.

And I second pjs: chapters would be great. And they are relatively easy to add in Sigil (indeed, sometimes if it is driving me crazy and the book is drm-free, I will create the chapter breaks for my own copy).

I just did that, added the chapter headers and table of contents via Sigil.

I also went into the CSS file and got rid of that annoying right justification. Justification is OK on a paper book, but on a small screen it causes bigger gaps between words since each line has fewer words.

I did write a script that automatically detects the chapters, and I sent both a chapterised ePub and MOBI version to Ash two days ago. The justification was already fixed in the newest MOBI version.

See my gallery for screenshots from my Kindle:
savethescifi.com/index.php/member-area/4...tos/album?albumid=15

The ePub also fixes the problem my Sony PRS-350 has with it.

For those technically inclined: the script does a pattern match on a customizeable regex to find text elements in the ePub XHTML that sound like a chapter title (here 'CHAPTER'). It then searchs the surrounding elements and builds a pattern from them (based on the assumption that all titles will have the same formatting so they will have the same class references). Then it searchs the whole document with this generated pattern to see if it gets enough matches (this can be checked by the operator).

If all of this is true it inserts anchor elements and appends those to the toc.ncx with the found titles. As an extra it will merge title heading with the same formatting that are not farther away than a set number of characters. This merges the CHAPTER and the textual title of the Plunge.

I worked on the ePub cause it is the easiest thing, but I used a ePub that was converted from the MOBI, as this worked for my SONY PRS. After my script added the chapters I reconverted the ePub to MOBI. The two photos in my Gallery show exactly this. One current other manual fix: the SONY was first not happy with the marks, but with a load/save in Sigil it was fixed. Sigil just reorders the files in the ePub as specified in the standard and does some XML fixes, so I guess if I add this to my script I can skip this step.

As Calibre was used for the conversion process, and both my script and calibre are python, it might be possible to either add my script to calibres conversion process, or call the conversion process from my script.

Hello:

I just wanted to say that I had a very nice package waiting for me last week that contained a cool t-shirt and two books that I immediately started reading. I had forgotten how small the type is in those old paperbacks -- big difference in my eyes when I read them then to reading them now.

Thank you and I look forward to reading more in the future. We should have our next electronic book soon -- any hints?

Take care,

Jean

PS: I know you are doing a lot right now but would you speed up this webiste a bit? More people might contribute if it didn't take so long to type a message.

Got TWO books, t-shirt, sticker, and keychain in the smail yesterday. Great job, keep the books coming!

Make those of us at the lower reward levels jealous: share the titles you're getting.