My Book is Number 1

My free book, MEMOGRAMS, is today #1 in Amazon Kindle Store >…> Spelling
and #3 in Amazon Kindle Store >…> Writing Skills

My Books

My MEMOGRAMS book finally went free today on Amazon. So, to summarize which of my books are where for how much:

Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book (my how-to book, $3.99 on Amazon)

MEMOGRAMS: Easy Anagrams of Hard-to-Spell Words (free on Amazon)

The Adventures of Dough Girl (free on iTunes/iBooks)

MEMOGRAMS: Easy Anagrams of Hard-to-Spell Words (free on iTunes/iBooks)

Using the MOBI UNPACK utility that I mentioned earlier, you can “unzip” a MOBI file, whatever was used to create it, as long as it’s unencrypted and regardless of whether or not the MOBI file includes its source file.

When I open April Hamilton’s book, From Concept to Community, which I purchased from Amazon in March, 2011, I get a folder named mobi7 inside of which is:

B001TOC9X2_EBOK.html
B001TOC9X2_EBOK.ncx
B001TOC9X2_EBOK.opf
images (folder)

There is no source file.


When I open one of my own books, Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book, which was created using Calibre, I get the mobi7 folder again, inside of which is:

Anyone.html
Anyone.ncx
Anyone.opf
images (folder)

Again, there is no source file.


However, when I open another of my own books, MEMOGRAMS, which was created from an EPUB file using the latest Kindlegen, I get two folders, mobi7 and mobi8, and a file named:

kindlegensrc.zip

There’s the source file, which I can further unzip if I want, and I get:

kindlegensrc (folder) in which are the files:

META-INF (folder)
mimetype
OEBPS (folder)

But I still have the two “mobi” folders to look at:

In the mobi7 folder I get:

MEMOGRAMS.html
MEMOGRAMS.ncx
MEMOGRAMS.opf
images (folder)

In the mobi8 folder I get:

MEMOGRAMS.epub
META-INF (folder)
mimetype
OEBPS (folder)


All this is to say that it is possible to “unzip” a MOBI file. It doesn’t need to include a source file to do so, and it can be done even with MOBI files created with Calibre.

Book Review: “Om Sapphire” by Charlotte O’Neil

Charlotte O’Neil has done what no other author has done: made me want to read her book on no other device but a black-and-white Kindle, in my case my Kindle Keyboard. I say “read” advisedly because there’s nothing to read—it’s a picture book—once you get past the publishing text at the beginning… and past the instructions.

Ah, yes, the instructions. “Turn device sideways” she says, with a big looping arrow. Why? Because the entire book is a collection of pictures—75 of them, plus the cover, drawn with pen and India ink—that are all sized to exactly fit the screen of an e-ink Kindle, but they’re all done in horizontal format (in the graphics realm it’s called “landscape” format) so how do you view them? You turn the device sideways! What else?

And, you know what? It works. The black-ink-on-white-paper technique is perfect for the black-and-white screen that the majority of Kindle devices out there have. And the landscape format is great. It fills the screen with a single image and makes for one picture per page turn. I suspect that the way that her format ratio fits the Kindle screen may have been a little bit of serendipity (she says in her introduction that she used at various times A3, A4, and letter-sized sheets for the drawings) but I don’t care if it was that or if it was carefully planned. It just all fits together.

There is a con to all of these pro’s… the coding of the book is imperfect, which means that every other page turn is quite slow, but that’s a minor problem that could be easily fixed. (She should contact me.)

Her drawing style is interesting, and seems somehow more and more familiar the longer you look at it. Then it strikes you: these look like very elaborate versions of the stream-of-consciousness drawings that one makes when sitting in the back of a very boring class in school—one pen, one line width, one sheet of paper, many disparate images poring out onto the page—except these look like they were made by someone who is a better artist than the average high school or college student (she is, in fact, a mature woman with three children), and, as she says in her introduction, each drawing took about three weeks to complete.

It matters not if you like her drawings or her technique. Every budding picture-book author should get this book and study it. (It’s free, for today at least!) This is an important example of the true potential of a picture book specifically designed for the black-and-white Kindle platform. It could, in fact, be close to a perfect Kindle picture book.