Literature and the Web

I am still splashing around in the web water, not always quite sure why I do what I do, but the one thing that has become clear to me is that whatever I write, web-based or hard copy, it has to be digital.

My latest book (just published:  a short story collection called Out of the Mountains ) had electronic galleys that came to me by email.  I was supposed to print them out and mark them, but some publishers I’m told are asking the authors to do mark-up electronically as well.

But here’s the point:  I have at least three books from the early nineteen eighties when I was first publishing that are out of print from the original publishers and were never digital in the first place.  A couple of them can be ordered now through the wonders of one-book-at-a-time technology  (the hard copy was scanned in as  .pdf files), but as I begin to prepare some of my books for e-readers, I wanted to get them scanned in as word processer files so I can make changes and digitalize for e-readers.

I’ve now done one with a pleasant-to-work-with company in Missouri called Golden Images, LLC. If you try them write to  Stan Drew, who may be the whole show, but is in any case very responsive to email.  The price is less that .50 a page, much less for .pdf files, but I think most of us with old books want the word processor files.  Even with Stan’s good work, I am having to go through the book  (Higher Ground) looking for anomalies  (apostrophes that became Greek sigmas, etc.) but that’s fine because I wanted to see how the book felt anyhow– this was a book that I wanted at one point to make changes in, but couldn’t face retyping.  So I’ll take my time and have fun.

More later about the differences in a typewritten book and a word processed book.