Patrick Roberts

Computer Generate Audio Books

I first tried another text-to-speech program, TextAloud, but the result was too poorly phrased to bear. The program didn't even interpret multiple blank lines as a new paragraph. It would just say the words on both sides of the space without any pause between. Stupid.

via www.mindmaking.info

On the blog for my book, I shared a script that uses speech synthesis to automatically record an audio book from a text file, phrasing and pronouncing it well.

Convert OpenOffice.org Writer / HTML to Kindle

 

The ebookmaker.py that I recently posted now also helps you to publish your book on Kindle. The script makes a zip of a specially formatted HTML file of your book, plus resized images, that you can upload to Amazon's DTP. Judging from the preview of my book, the conversion works well.

Luckily Kindle now supports non-US authors.

Convert OpenOffice.org Writer / HTML to ePub

I found no easy way to make a decent-looking ePub, the standard ebook format, from my book (sadly) composed in OpenOffice.org Writer. Seeing an excuse to stop writing passive prose, to write living code, I sketched a script that makes an ePub from the HTML that Writer exports:

ebookmaker.py

Example: python ebookmaker.py mybook.html

This produces mybook-clean.xhtml -- clean simple HTML of your book that you can paste into your blog or wherever -- and a mybook.epub containing resized images.

The script starts with a table of options to personalize. Those options probably don't yet offer enough control to make the script work perfectly with other books, depending on how the formatting differs from mine, but if you know a little Python and regular expressions, you can adjust the rest.

Do you know a better tool? I tried a few other converters, such as Stanza, but the results were hideous.

Let me know if you use this. It wasn't much fun to write. ePub uses XHTML, which is XML, which, if you can imagine, is the kind of formal language that a herd of UN lawyers would design.

Now that I have my ePub version, do you know any popular sites to share it on?

Book Cover Concept

Too classy?

The Aphoristic Genre

Nietzsche, Rochefoucauld, Aurelius - who writes books of aphorisms now? No one very successfully. With our patience cut by electronic media, I'm betting on a return of the aphoristic genre. Expect my own book of aphorisms, maxims, epigrams, proverbs, parables and koans, culled from this blog and my private notes, once I'm wiser from Cor and other experiments.

Drafting a Book Online

I'm moving the draft of my book to the Cor blog, posting each chapter as a blog page. Maybe this will flick that hidden unconscious switch, the one that decides whether I'm filled with energy and poetry. The book as web pages, not printed copies, not a PDF, is the form most will read it in, so it's right to make it the primary point of truth. I heard a hundred times to release early, release often but I somehow didn't imagine keeping the book, while writing it, online.

Ignoring TypePad's glacial text editor, using a blog's convenient enough: comments, slick template, and little HTML. Still, does anyone know of a web service, even paid, that will host my book at a sub-domain of mine? It could automatically build a table of contents, add navigation between the chapters, have a search form optimized for a book, keep a revision history like a wiki, and support customizing the look.

Social Bookshelves

I heard of GoodReads from Felicia Day and then found Shelfari and LibraryThing. They all let you publicly list the books you read, are reading, or will read, and see the same of other users and groups. I think this is my point of diminishing returns from social web-services, but one of these might just be worthwhile for marketing my book.

From the cute book widget on the right, you can tell I chose Shelfari. You might think that the designers of sites for literati could, excepting GoodReads, coin names that don't cause blood to drip from my ears. LibraryThing has a one time fee. It's small, but I just can't bring myself to pay money for the meager privilege of them keeping a list of a few hundred books. GoodReads seemed fine. I just disliked their widget. Shelfari's owned by Amazon, so at least it won't disappear, and frankly I like cold faceless corporations.

Public Works

Slick blog, professional photo, give city, Flickr photos, Twitter micro-blogging, Delicious bookmarks, YouTube videos - my experiment in working publicly. The downside: time spent separating what should stay private. The upside to others: they can enjoy and benefit from my thoughts, solutions, photos, links and videos. The upside to me: some of that attention is occasionally, and maybe someday very, useful to me. Another advantage: all these polished cooperating services, available on all my devices.

Working publicly also builds my habit of finishing work, especially writing, even if only a sentence, and quickly putting it where others at least have a chance of seeing it. Real artists ship.

What next? A wiki.

Blogger Mortality

Tonight my parents warned me that including my photo and city on my blog will cause readers to track me down and kill me. I hadn't imagined that my existence was so offensive that it must be concealed. Seriously, many bloggers do the same as I am, and judging from the dates of their posts, have somehow managed to survive for years.

Blogs

I'm finally taking a serious shot at blogging, even micro-blogging. The entire Cor site is done as a blog - been editing HTML for too many years; no more. Plus this personal blog. Lastly, a blog to market my products that actually make money now, which I've seen recommended a 1000 times, which is how often I need to be poked before I actually bother; sale referring websites are tracked, so I'm looking forward to seeing sales from the blog.

Everyone recommends installing WordPress. I value my time too much to spend it installing security updates all year, forever. I'll happily pay someone else $200/year so I don't have to stay up at night worrying that a hacker/spammer will wreck my server and zero my income. So I chose TypePad.com. WordPress.com blocked embedding Flash in your posts - pass. Blogger.com seemed to be for amateurs. TypePad.com seemed for the serious. You can even control your favicon.

So now I'm committed. Really. I write in my personal journal everyday. Most of the material there could be public and at least the solutions to technical problems and product recommendations would interest others. Also, I think I'm mature enough to reliably judge what, ten years from now, I won't regret posting.

As for the micro-blogging, Twitter, I'm using it, mainly from iPod Touch, as a way to track my time - slept, woke, watched movie, emailed, etc. Maybe having my decadent lifestyle broadcasted will shame me into some diligence.