Re: Is there an alternate format for Euphoric Mysteries Ebook?
- Posted by cran0g Oct 04, 2009
- 1323 views
Sorry, Kinz,
Like I said, it was originally meant to be a commercial offering. Some form of protection would therefore have been necessary to stop it being ripped off. See, I wanted to put out a hard copy book on Euporia (I have published several times in the past) but I didn't even try as no publisher would consider risking their money on a book with such a small potential market. So, I thought an eBook could be marketed among the faithful at VERY low cost - much cheaper than a commercial book, would bring me enough income to make it worthwhile - everyone's a winner (except the big publishers who charge such inflated prices for IT books). It's up to the author, surely, the format in which he offers his materials. In the end, I just could not spare the time to complete it, so put what I HAD done on the site for free. All I asked was some feedback so that I could refine and complete it. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
The whole point of making it an exe is that I can include animation, automated tests, MP3, colour images and a book-based metaphor. These are difficult to do in a simple text file and you lose the richness of the format. And what's wrong with exes anyway? We USE Euphoria to make them. And, since it's a bit difficult to write programs WITHOUT a PC, I don't see what's so difficult about asking people to read the book WHILE they're on a PC. On the other hand, I agree that people don't like reading a lot of text on screen but I had taken certain design steps to minimise that AND provided other stuff that a traditional printed book could not offer.
I partly make my living by writing stuff like this so giving it away free represents a significant loss in terms of work time so the IPR will rest with me. Of course, I will leave the book on the site for as long as people want it but the lack of response so far leads me to believe that any further work would be wasted. Almost certainly, I'll want to re-use a good deal of it elsewhere so will not be releasing any editable version.
