Category: Technology Amateur

And here, as promised, is the second part of  my eBook FAQs.  No, no. Try to control your excitement. I know it’s hard…

Let us now speak of reading and purchasing eBooks.

Do I need an eReader to read an eBook?

No. You do not need to read an eBook on an eReader.  You can also read eBooks on your computer, smart phone, iTouch, or tablet (like an iPad).

Here are some links:

To read an EPUB formatted book on your smartphone, you need Overdrive Media console.  To read an EPUB formatted book on your computer, you need Adobe digital editions  (requires Adobe Flash player).  This link will take you to a page where you can download either, or both, programs:

Link to Kindle apps

Link to Nook apps 

Link to iBooks  (runs through iTunes, can be downloaded for free

What’s the difference between eReaders?

If you decide to purchase a dedicated eReader, you’ll be faced with many different choices.  The biggest difference between the various eReaders is that some use “e-ink” technology, and some use a backlit LCD screen, like a computer.

E-Ink technology was developed to mimic the printed page, and I find it easier on the eyes. The e-ink readers (like the Kindle and the regular Nook) have a little “flash” every time you “turn” a page, but you don’t notice it after a minute.  You need light to read using these readers, just as you need light to read a paper book.  There isn’t glare on the screen.  They are black and white.

The eReaders with the backlit LCD screen don’t use e-ink, so their display is full color.  You don’t have as much of a flash when you “turn” the page.  You don’t need light to read.  There’s more of a glare, and I find them harder on the eyes.  These eReaders are more like computers, smart phones, and tablets like the iPad.

Which eReader should I buy?

It all depends on what you’re going to use it for.  If you are reading a lot, you’ll probably want an eReader with the e-ink technology (like the Kindle or the regular Nook).  But, if you’re reading a lot of magazines or children’s books, you might want to invest in a color Nook or a tablet like an iPad so you can have full color pictures.  And, of course, what you get also depends on how much you want to spend.

Can all eBooks be read on all eReaders?

Well, yes and no.  Each eReader recognizes specific formats.  There is what is considered a “standard” format for eBooks, called EPUB, and many eReaders, including the Nook, will recognize it.  However Amazon, being Amazon, uses a special format for the Kindle.

Okay, so where do I buy eBooks?

eBooks can be purchased at a variety of places on the internet.  This includes, of course, the Kindle store, the Nook store, and the iBooks store.  But you can also purchase eBooks directly from publishers, from Google Books, and from other third party vendors.

Do I need to purchase an eBook from the people who sold me my eReader?

No, but the eBooks you buy will need to be in the correct format for your eReader.  If you purchase from a publisher or third party vendor, their site might give you a choice of formats, or you might be given just the EPUB option (like at Carina Press).  If they do not offer a format your device recognizes, you’ll have to convert the book into the correct format using a conversion program like Calibre.  Just be careful to make sure the site allows you to download the book to your computer if you’re going to need to convert it.

How does the eBook get on my eReader?

There are a couple of ways this can happen.  If you purchase from the Kindle or Nook store, the books will be sent to you automatically using an email address assigned when you registered your device.  If you purchase elsewhere, the site might email the book to you as well.  If that happens, you’ll need to have set up your device to recognize the email address they’re using when they send the book to you. You might also have the option of saving the book directly to your computer and transferring it that way.

Well, that’s basically it for now.  I hope you find the information useful!  And not too boring.  And mostly correct.  LOL 😀

Ever since my book was accepted for publication by Carina Press, a digital first imprint, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about eBooks.  Since the questions seem to pop up regularly and from a variety of people, I thought I’d set up a FAQ page. And THEN I thought, “Hey, why not multitask and get a couple of blog posts out of it?” Win!

So tonight I’m going to talk a generally about what eBooks are.  In my next post, I’ll talk about how to purchase and read an eBook. Hopefully I won’t bore the pants off you.

I’d like to make a disclaimer before I start.  I am in no way an eBook expert.  But I’ve had kind of a crash course in them over the past year or two, so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.

One thing I still HAVEN’T learned is whether it should be “e-book” or “ebook” or “eBook”.  So I just pick one and run with it.

So, here we go –

What is an eBook?

An eBook is a Book with an “e” in front of it.

Thank you!  I’ll be here all week.

No, seriously.  An eBook is a book formatted to be read on a digital reading device.  That device can be a dedicated eReader, but it can also be a computer, tablet, or smartphone. More on that next time.

Is an eBook an actual book?

Absolutely!  The only difference between an eBook and a paper book is the medium in which they are presented.  The same amount of work (or lack of work) goes into an eBook as goes into a paper book.

Are eBooks shorter in length than regular books?

First of all – let me repeat, eBooks ARE regular books!  You just don’t have to worry about staining them when you spill coffee.  Second – eBooks come in a variety of lengths.  Because the production and marketing costs are different (no paper), publishers are able to sell eBooks that are of short story, novella, or novel length.

Okay, so how can I tell what I’m actually buying?

 Most eBooks note the word count rather than number of pages.  That’s because you can format font size differently on each device to meet your own reading needs.  Unfortunately, this can be a little confusing.

Wikipedia says that a novel is greater than 40,000 words, but that covers a lot of territory.  A regular old-fashioned single copy book by anyone other than Stephen King or J. K. Rowling is probably between 80-100,000 words.  The category romances – the Harlequin romances you see in the grocery store – are usually 50-70,000 words.

A novella, according to Wikipedia, is 17,500-40,000 words. Think about those compilation books with stories by three different authors.  If the whole book is 80-100,000 words, then each of those stories is around 30,000.  And, of course, a novelette or a short story would be, um, shorter.

My book, HOLD ME, is 104,000 words.  In case you want to know. 🙂

Are all eBooks self-published?

No.  Although that has been a common misconception, it seems to me there are three different sources for eBooks:

1.  Traditional.  These are the books originally released in paper copies.  The eBook is a secondary channel for sales, much the same as audiobooks.  The primary channel for sales comes from the paper copies.

2.  Direct to Digital.  These books are acquired by publishers, but instead of printing paper copies, the books go directly to digital and are released primarily or exclusively as eBooks.  This is where Carina Press fits in.  It is the digital imprint of Harlequin.  Several other traditional publishers are starting their own digital imprints, so this market is growing.

3.  Self Published.  This is pretty self-explanatory. The author is the publisher.

So, there’s just some general information about eBooks to whet your appetite.  On Thursday I’ll talk a little more about the different ways to read an eBook, and where they can be purchased.

Not that I’m being self-serving or anything.  LOL 😉

Many of you know that I am a recent convert to the Kindle.  I chose the Kindle for a variety of excellent reasons I cannot remember at the moment (my short-term memory is a bit sporadic).  But regardless, I love my Kindle.  If I had a Nook or Kobo or any one of a dozen great e-reader alternatives, I would probably love them as well.

I really didn’t expect to love my Kindle as much as I do – but I do.  So I thought I would give you 10 reasons why I think e-readers are great.  Oh, and by the way, when I’m talking about e-readers here, I’m talking about the dedicated e-readers that are designed for, um, readers, not tablets or phones also used to read e-books.

Okay, here we go:

1. Generally speaking, free books are readily available.  Need I say more?
2. I can change the size of the type, so I can read more easily without having to buy one of those stupid over-sized paperbacks.  Um, not that I’m middle-aged or anything.
3. E-Readers are light and I can hold them with one hand, thereby ensuring that I can drink coffee whilst I read and not slop it all over everything when I try to turn a page.
4. If I’m eating while I read, and I get food on the e-reader, I can wipe it off without leaving unsightly stains that will forever need explanation. (“see, I was eating spaghetti…)
5. I can read without breaking the spine of the book to see the words in the crease.  And if I’m reading a s*e*x scene, I don’t have to go break the spine in other places so people borrowing the book after me won’t wonder what I’ve been doing.
6. I can pre-order a book, and if I order it from a place with automatic delivery, I can wake up in the morning of the day it’s released and it will be right there as soon as I turn on the Kindle.  Thus ensuring I will be late for work.
7. I don’t have to worry about buying more bookcases. I really don’t have any room in my house for more paper books.  (no, really.  I don’t)
8. I don’t have to worry about whether or not a spider has crawled between the pages of a book I’ve left lying out on a coffee table overnight, thus surprising me when I open the book to read it the next morning. (I screamed.  Loudly)
9. I can carry many books around with me on one little device and read whatever I want to read, whenever I want to read it.
10. And, last but not least, I love e-readers because MY book is coming out as an e-book from Carina Press on September 5, 2011!!  WOOHOO!

So, see?  If you don’t have an e-reader and I tell you to buy one, I’m not being self serving.  I’m only telling you that because I love you and want you to be as happy.  Trust me.  🙂

Here, in one post, I would like to present everything I know about SEO.

I know what the acronym SEO stands for – Search Engine Optimization.

Thank you!  I’ll be here all week!

Okay, just kidding.  I know a little bit more than that.  Search Engine Optimization is a fancy term for helping your blog show up when people search for stuff on the Internet.  Ideally, you want your blog to be at the top of the search results.  It’s all about getting seen.

Apparently there are these little robots out there that go and look for words and phrases to match to.  And if you have a matching word in your post or post title or permalink, then the robots find it and retrieve your post when somebody searches for that particular word or phrase.  The more matching words or phrases you have to things people generally search for, the more likely your blog is to come up in the search results.

There is a lot of thought out there as to how to make this work, since everybody wants to optimize their blog (i.e. – get noticed and/or make money).  I’ve read articles suggesting that you research keywords people are most likely to search for, then sprinkle those keywords throughout your post to optimize the recognition potential.

Yeah.  O-kay.

Here are my thoughts on this.  These thoughts have made this blog the standard in blogging that it is today.

Don’t worry about it.  Just write the best blog post you can.  Don’t worry about using buzz words or where they show up in your post.  If you have enough time to research buzz words and you’re not getting paid for doing it, you’re not spending enough time actually living, so go do something productive!  Besides, it sounds stupid when you force certain words into certain places in your post just to get noticed.

On the other hand, there are a few easy things you can do –

You can try to give your post a meaningful title.  Don’t lose sleep over it, but it helps improve searchability on a lot of levels.  “What I did last summer” doesn’t mean nearly as much to anyone as “My awesome trip to Yellowstone.”

If your blogging platform will allow it, you can change your post permalink to a “pretty permalink”, so it assigns words instead of meaningless numbers.  This gives the little robots one more place to hang their hat, and it’s easy to do.

If your theme has SEO fields, you can fill them in to highlight different keywords.  If this isn’t part of your theme, there are tons of plugins out there to give you that capability.  It’s helpful to associate certain meaningful words with your post to help searchers find you.  Sometimes I do this, sometimes I don’t.  It depends on my mood.

So there you go!  Everything I know about SEO in one blog post.  Hmmm…I wonder if, by repeating the term “SEO” over and over again, someone looking for expert SEO advice on SEO will find my post about SEO in their search results and come to my blog where I’m talking about SEO…

Um, if that’s what you did?  Sorry.

There are those of you who think that I should not speak of things technical, as I am a technology amateur. And yet, my friends, I have seen much of the world whilst going through what I like to think of as “Blog Hell”. And what kind of a person would I be if I didn’t share my knowledge with all of you? I would be no kind of a person at all!  And so, critics be damned, I’m going to talk technical.

Okay, so next to the website URL there is a wee little picture. In many cases, this is the standard blue “e” of Internet Explorer.  But you may have noticed many websites and blogs (including, I hope, this blog) have a different picture there.

I would have been quite content with the blue “e” when I set up this blog, however the template I used changed it to a big black “G”. I could even have lived with the “G” if there’d been a “G” anywhere in my name. But there isn’t, so I made it my life’s goal to change the “G” to something else.

The first step was finding out what in the heck that wee little picture was called. I googled “what is the picture next to the URL?” and found out it was called a “favicon”.  You can find anything on Google.

It turns out that you can make any picture a favicon. You need to pick a .gif, .jpg, or .bmp and run them through a “favicon generator” website. I recommend a free site.  Here’s the one I used, but there are tons of them out there.  Once you run a picture through the site, you’ll get a file called “favicon.ico”. If you use the site I linked to above, you’ll get a zip file. You need to extract the file, and pull out the favicon.ico file into a directory where you can find it later. I put it on my desktop.

As an aside, when you create a favicon, remember that it’s going to be VERY small. So you probably don’t want to use a complicated picture. It took me a couple of tries to find one that seemed to work.

Once the favicon is generated, you need to add it to your blog. I can only tell you what I did in WordPress – you’ll have to check out your own software.

When I look at the FTP site for this blog on my host, I have a folder called “wp-content”. In that folder is a subfolder called “images”. There might already be a favicon there, as there was in my case with that big black “G”.  If there is, delete it. Then copy in the new favicon file you’ve just generated.

Favicons do not automatically update in your browser. You need to force the browser to refresh to see the new favicon. To do this, hold down the “shift” key and hit “refresh” at the URL. If that doesn’t work, then delete all temporary internet files and you should see the new favicon next to your URL. There also might be a problem if you are using an older browser.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  And yeah, I guess it basically was. But every time I messed up something and had to reload the theme, I had to change the favicon back as well. And it didn’t seem to change every time I changed it. So I guess what I’m saying is, as with all things computer, it might take a try or two to get things to look right. Just remember to breathe deeply.

And that is everything I know, or want to know, about favicons. May we use this knowledge only for good.