It’s possible that you can already, or will soon be able to, buy an ePub version of Balanced Libraries on the iTunes or iBooks site (since I don’t use iTunes, I’m not quite sure what’s what).
If you do so, I’d love to hear about it–and whether the ePub rendition is good.
The skinny
Lulu has been doing conversions of some number of Lulu-published books to ePub for submission to iBooks–always with email to the authors and the possibility of opting out or changing the $9.99 price Lulu sets.
I’m guessing Lulu’s going by sales (Balanced Libraries is currently the 3,082nd best selling book on Lulu) but don’t really know that.
I didn’t opt out. I think it’s a great idea. Since Lulu is, of necessity, converting from PDF (which is all Lulu has), I’m mildly interested in the success of the conversion.
The oddity
This is also interesting because I’d intended to provide the first C&I Reader in ePub and Kindle formats (in all cases, with the price set so my yield would be $4, as it is for the paperback and PDF versions)–and found that, at least for ePub, the freely-available tool to do the conversion just didn’t yield a standard ePub, one that Lulu would allow for submission to iTunes/iBooks. Converting from HTML (Word HTML with headers and footers stripped) should be much easier than converting from PDF, but Calibre–while doing a great-looking conversion–doesn’t yield “standard” output.
So I’m interested in how Lulu’s own conversion actually went. Not interested enough to open an iTunes account and pay for it, to be sure, especially since I don’t have an ereader.
Just curious.
