Wednesday, April 1, 2015

New Wine into old wineskins

I rather like that snippet from the Bible as I have long felt it applies to eBooks.  The eBook has to date been treated by legacy publishers as an online copy of a print book.  These publishers cannot quite figure out why their new wine is not working in their old wine skins.  Yet the possibilities are much greater than this if one uses new wineskins.

I began The Man who fell from the Sky six years ago by writing disconnected snippets - chunks or modules is the term introduced in this blog post and this one.  I intended from the outset to have a core story with links to side stories.  For example, my main character Simon earns his living writing children's books.  So I wrote some of those stories, which I intend and have intended always to be linked so a viewer of the core story could make a hyper space jump to the children's story, or to any other stories that fall off the dusty shelves of my mind. I am also writing adult side stories to be linked and also poetry. Each 'module' or 'chunk' will be available separately or as a whole.

This also applies to my temporarily put on the back burner History, Religion & Society. Way back when, I pitched the idea to a university press who had sent their Acquisitions Editor to the University of Guelph.  He liked the idea and gave me guidelines to submit a full proposal.  When I asked him about doing it as an eBook, he said, well, sometimes we take older books and produce pdfs that we put online.  I walked away from this as this book should be a multimedia, interlinked eBook - as should all History books.

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