zeileis, 10 months ago

@brodriguesco This is perfect and comes exactly at the right time for me. Thanks, Bruno!

We are just wrapping up a quarto book and I was wondering how to do these things.

• Web is almost done.
• PDF is ok but I will profit a lot from your advice.
• Epub didn't work yet because of some math array stuff that I wasn't able to figure out yet.

I have a couple of follow-up questions, though, if I may. They are hopefully short/easy...

zeileis, 10 months ago

@brodriguesco

1. If I want to sell the printed book and the epub, I would have to set up separate deals with Amazon and Leanpub, respectively?

2. If I just want to sell the printed book, then only a PDF for Amazon is needed?

3. How does the cover work for the printed book, is there some template for it?

4. What is the difference/advantage of documentclass "scrbook" vs. "scrreprt"?

brodriguesco, 10 months ago

@zeileis 1) there are no deals really to speak of, you just make an account and upload the epub and pdf on Leanpub, same for Amazon but you need a VAT number. You can also go only with Amazon and sell the epub there as well, or only go with Leanpub: they will sell the physical book for you on Amazon, so they take care of everything, but ofc you'll have less royalties (Leanpub for digital and Amazon for physical maximises royalties)

2. yes just a print ready pdf

3 and 4 in next message...

brodriguesco, 10 months ago

@zeileis 3) Amazon provides a cover editor, you only need to provide an image. But you can also provide a complete book cover made with image editing software as well.

4. I don't know I just went with the book class since I was writing a book 😅

Hopefully this helps!

zeileis, 10 months ago

@brodriguesco Very much appreciated, thanks for the advice!

Possibly we will then start with Amazon only bc I don't know whether I will get the epub ready before the teaching (based on the book) starts.

How long is the delay between uploading the PDF and Amazon shipping copies?

brodriguesco, 10 months ago

@zeileis When you upload the PDF, you can preview it and need to correct any mistakes. Typically, these "mistakes" are text that overflows (which is a problem in default verbatim environments, where lines don't wrap, the template I posted deals with that), you set price, cover etc, and submit. Ama then does some checks, and if everything is ok the book will be available. These checks by Ama can last for 3 days, but in my case it was 4 to 6 hours (I needed to correct the pdf two more times) 1/2

brodriguesco, 10 months ago

@zeileis Then the book was available on Amazon.com within the day. Other marketplaces took two to three days more (France and Germany were fast, UK took like 4 days). The two things I had to correct were colour bars in a graph that I needed to remove (see the image for an example) and the "g" from my name "Rodrigues" was cut a bit by the cover editor so I had to correct that (put my name a bit higher) 2/2

brodriguesco, 10 months ago

@zeileis Also, because it's print on demand, it takes some days until they ship a copy to a customer. It seems to be quite fast on Amazon.com, but other marketplaces take a bit more time it seems. But usually, customers don't have to wait more than 5 to 6 days to get their book

zeileis, 10 months ago

@brodriguesco But that's still very fast. If I introduce it in one week, they can all have the book for the second lecture 😇

brodriguesco, 10 months ago

@zeileis Regarding the math equation in the ebook: you're probably aware that there's the possibility to show conditional content with Quarto depending on the format. For example here I show some code for the PDF but show something else for the other formats: https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rap4all/blob/e201bf12ba4e86c6222f131bc20623a47089c89e/ci_cd.qmd#L116

maybe you could show an image of the equation for the epub format?

zeileis, 10 months ago

@brodriguesco Thanks for the pointer. That's very useful in general, I'm not sure whether it will be the solution here. It's a 500-page introductory math book, originally written fully in LaTeX.

Getting everything into Quarto with HTML and PDF in sync was already a bit of work...