Back in the USSA

Almost a week and it both feels like we've always been here and like I'm a time traveler overlapping my steps, looking at the old me living my old life. Very strange. It's going to take a few days to get up to speed. But I've got lots to talk about!

My Catalonia Press has published a new book, “What Catalans Want”, by Toni Strubell, a collection of interviews of interesting and important Catalan public figures, including Jordi Pujol, Oleguer Presas, Elisenda Paluzie, and many more. It's available in gorgeous color (with beautiful photographs of the interviewees by Lluís Brunet), will be available in a more economical black and white edition, and or course can also be found in EPUB and Kindle formats, from Amazon, Apple's iBookstore, or directly from Catalonia Press, where you can also download a sample.

Next, Apple has just published a new iBookstore Assets guide (4.7 Rev 4), which promises to give information about creating Read Aloud EPUB books. If you're an iTunes Connect member (more info here), you can download it from the Deliver Your Content section. (I have a new miniguide coming soon on the same subject, and will announce it here as soon as it's ready.)

In addition, there's a new version of iTunes Producer (2.4) available from Software Update that promises that "common EPUB errors can now be fixed automatically". Not sure what that means, but I'll let you know when I do.



Finally, I recently noticed that two EPUB samples that I had posted to the iBookstore over a year ago had just been approved by Apple. It wasn't that they were studying them all this time; they had said they were not accepted into the iBookstore because they were just samples. I disagreed, couldn't figure out how to delete them altogether and just left them there languishing with those sad red dots. Imagine my surprise when I look up my Sales info and see that people are downloading them left and right. It doesn't seem quite right to me that Apple should first reject them and then a year later decide to approve them without telling me. For the record, the samples are about how to embed audio and video and are OK as far as they go. They are pretty outdated, however, and have been superseded by my much more complete Audio and Video in EPUB miniguide.

More soon!