Wikipedia wants to delete me!

I doubt my notability all the time, but despite that fact, it's also true that I've sold more than a million books and helped a lot of people learn how to create web pages and ebooks. Just last week, I got a major prize in Barcelona for my publishing work about Catalonia.

However, this evening Dori Smith let me know via Twitter that someone on Wikipedia had marked my entry for deletion due to questions about my notability.

If you think I'm notable enough to be in Wikipedia, you can add sources about my notability to my current page and/or to the AFD page.

Here's what others say:

Omnium Cultural: “The jury for the 25th Joan B. Cendrós Prize has awarded the prize for work about the Catalan nation published outside of Catalonia to the North-American publisher Liz Castro [El jurat del 25è Premi Joan B. Cendrós ha atorgat el premi per a treballs publicats o emesos fora dels Països Catalans sobre la nació catalana a l’editora nord-americana Liz Castro.] Full translation here

Self-publishing guru Joel Friedlander: “Liz Castro’s EPUB Straight to the Point is a fantastic resource with clear instruction and should be in the ereader of anyone whose work involves dealing with EPUB and iBooks.”

Communication Arts magazine: She is the author of the bestselling HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide which together with its earlier editions has sold more than one million copies in more than fifteen languages. She has also written books on Blogger, iPhoto, Perl and CGI, and XML. The guides are written and published for inexperienced Web designers who want to start from the beginning and contain information in bullet points and note form for easy reading.

Vook calls me an "industry expert"

TidBITS: If you're thinking about making a book in iPhoto, my fellow Peachpit author Liz Castro has created a wonderfully useful Web site where she obsessively documents each and every iPhoto book theme

Vilaweb [major Catalan news website] interviewed me in February, 2011: “Recently, Castro published EPUB Straight to the Point (Peachpit Press), a guide for writing books for digital readers like the iPad. She is also the author of the bestseller “HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide” of which six editions have been published and the seventh is being prepared, and more than a million copies of which have been sold. She also wrote “Creating a Web Page with HTML” and “Publishing a Blog with Blogger”, among others. [“No fa gaire va publicar 'EPUB Straight to the Point' (Peachpit Press), una guia per a escriure llibres en pissarretes digitals com l'iPad. És autora del 'best-seller' 'HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide', amb sis edicions (la setena, en preparació) i més d'un milió d'exemplars venuts. També ha escrit 'Creating a Web Page with HTML' i 'Publishing a Blog with Blogger', etc. ”]

Peachpit Press: Elizabeth Castro is the author of all edtions of the best-selling HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide. She is also the author of Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide and XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide--both bestsellers! Liz also founded Pågina Uno, a publishing house in Barcelona, Spain.

The American who talks the most about Catalonia!

Anyone following my Twitter stream today wouldn't be able to avoid noticing that I'm pretty riled up about Google's bizarre and rather random translating of Catalan street names into Spanish. I talk about Catalan a lot on my blog and on Twitter.

Last winter and spring, while I was living in Barcelona, I started a new enterprise dedicated to translating interesting books about Catalonia into English, so that I could share the place I love with the non-Catalan speaking world. First, I published a collection of essays by long-time Barcelona resident but English son, Matthew Tree, called “Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside”. And in July, we presented Toni Strubell and Lluís Brunet's, “What Catalans Want”, their brilliant collection of essays of leading Catalan politicians, academics, economists, and media experts on whether Catalonia could be the next new state in Europe.

The other morning I got a call from Muriel Casals, the president of Òmnium Cultural, a Barcelona-based organization dedicated to promoting Catalan language and culture. It turns out that each year, Òmnium holds a grand gala event—La Nit de Santa Llúcia—in which they present the most prestigious book awards in the country.

Imagine my surprise when she told me that one of the prizes was for me, and if I could go to Barcelona to receive it! They are awarding me the "Premi Joan Cendrós" for works about Catalan and Catalonia published outside of Catalonia. I am totally honored and excited.

So, those of you who sometimes get overwhelmed by my Catalan-related tweets, I thank you for your patience. And I hope you have a better understanding of what's going on there. Every country, like every person, deserves to be recognized for who they are. Catalonia is a vibrant, unique place, and it's not Spain.

There's a lot more work to do. I'm not done yet.

_________

Here's a translation of the article on Òmnium Cultural's website: (links added by me :)

The American publisher Catalonia Press has won the 25th Joan B. Cendrós Prize for its books and writings about Catalonia published outside of Catalonia. The prize will be awarded during the 61st Night of Santa Llúcia.

The jury of the 25th Joan B. Cendrós Prize has awarded the prize for her work about Catalonia published outside of Catalonia to the American publisher Liz Castro. Castro, a writer living in Massachusetts, has become known in the last few years for her work promoting Catalonia and talking about its linguistic, cultural, and political situation through her publishing house, Catalonia Press, as well as the internet, where she reports on Catalan news in English.

The jury, consisting of Antoni Bassas, Joan Becat, Laura Cendrós, Josep Gifreu and Vicent Partal, paid particular importance to the various digital books that Catalonia Press has published in order to spread information around the world about the reality of life in Catalonia. In that vein, the jury wanted to highlight the publication this year of “What Catalans Want”, a collection of interviews about the situation in this country, written by Antoni Strubell with photographs by Lluís Brunet, as well as “Barcelona, Catalonia”, by Matthew Tree.

The prize award ceremony will take place on December 20th during the 61st Night of Santa Llúcia in the Auditori de Barcelona [National Theater]. The Festa de les Lletres Catalanes [Catalan Literary Festival], where the winners of the Sant Jordi, Carles Riba, Mercè Rodoreda, Folch i Torres i Joaquim Ruyra prizes will be announced and awarded returns again this year to the Catalan capital with a unique show created and directed by Paco Mir, of the group Tricicle.

Google Maps invents own Spanish names of Catalan streets, rendering the program useless (and incredibly offensive)

This morning on Twitter, I saw that Google had decided to replace Catalan placenames with crazy, sometimes random, translations into Spanish. The hashtag #googlecat has quickly become a TT (trending topic) on Twitter as people around Catalonia are outraged that Google has decided to call Catalan places however they like.

Pretty incredible. You, dear non-Catalan reader, might think it's much ado about nothing, really, how much difference is there between "Plaça Catalunya" and "Plaza de Cataluña"? Who cares? But there are very large issues here, which I hope to address one by one.

First, the names of streets, squares, and roads are all in Catalan in Catalonia. If you're looking for a street, the only street sign you will find will be in Catalan. Google Maps won't do a fat lot of good to you if it's giving you a translation into Spanish. For example, one of the streets near my apartment is “Carrer de Sant Domènec" (or Saint Dominic street) but Google has it labeled as "Calle de San Domingo".



(Then, there's the added weirdness that you can't actually say "San Domingo", it would be "Santo Domingo".) There are many, many other bizarre translations. Things like "Verga María" [Cock Mary] (and I don't mean roosters) for "Verge Maria" [Virgin Mary]. Or changing the name of the town, “Sant Boi de Llobregat” into "San Baudillo de Llobregat".

Think it won't matter, that Catalan and Spanish are "close enough"? Try "Calle del Oxidado" instead of "Carrer Rovellat". Or "Rambla de la Colina" instead of "Rambla del Turó". Let's just say I wouldn't rely on Google Maps to get around Catalonia any more.



Vilaweb was finally able to get a first explanation from Google Spain about the problem. “The problem has to do with a database that was supplied by a third party and the technicians are working on updating it."

Ultimately, to Catalans who are continually feeling mistreated by the Spanish government, who will not stand up for the Catalan language in Spain, the European parliament or anywhere else, it feels like a crass political move by Google. Perhaps it's just a technical error, but I just don't have that faith anymore.

Interesting that names in English have not been translated into Spanish, as in Plaça John Lennon, which turned into "Plaza John Lennon" but not "Plaza Juan Lennon".

Check into Twitter and follow #googlecat to see egregious examples and anger. Follow Vilaweb for the latest news.

Creating Custom Sample EPUBs for Apple iBookstore

When readers go the iBookstore and happen upon your book, they can download a sample to get an idea of what your book is like.



The sample file is downloaded to their iPad (or other iOS device) and the prospective customer can read a few pages of your book. When they get to the end of the sample, they are invited to purchase the book:



Apple will automatically create a sample file from your EPUB when you upload your book, using either the first chapter or 5% of the total word count, whichever is more.

If you'd like to offer some other quantity or selection of sample content, you can create a custom sample EPUB file.

First, make a copy of your final EPUB. You obviously don't want to work on the original! Make sure to delete the .iTunesMetadata.plist file if iTunes has unhelpfully and surreptitiously added it to your file.

Next, decide how much of your book you want to offer as a sample. I like to offer enough of the book to get a taste, but not so much that they don't need to buy my book! :)

Eliminate the files that shouldn't be part of your EPUB. For example, you might delete all of the XHTML files from Chapter 2 onward. If you have particularly long chapters, you might not even want to include the entire first chapter. In that case, eliminate the part of the XHTML file that should not be included in the sample. In this case, make sure that the code in the remaining file still validates (e.g., has all of the appropriate closing tags).

The next step is to go through the XHTML files that will be included and search for IMG to see which image files you'll need to keep. Then go through your OEBPS folder and actually eliminate the image files that are not used in the sample. Repeat this step for any other extra files (audios, video, pdfs) that may not be a part of the sample.

Since you've removed both XHTML files and media files, you'll have to remove their declarations from the <manifest> in the content.opf file. I keep my images folder open, gather the declarations for the "good" images at the top of the manifest, and then delete the rest with one fell swoop.

Don't forget to remove references to the non-included XHTML files in the spine and guide sections.

Next, get rid of all the links that refer to documents not included in the sample. For example, you might have a TOC that links to every chapter in your book.

Here's what the code looks like in my book:

<p class="TOC-Header-3"><a href="EPUBwCS55-body-1.html#toc_marker-2-1-8">Columns</a></p>

And of course, each entry may have a different class, a different destination, and a different title.

I use GREP to quickly remove the links. And the links end up looking like this:

<p class="TOC-Header-3">Columns</p>

You can't have any links to files that are outside of your sample EPUB.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, it makes more sense to make the links remain, but go to the final page. I haven't tested it (and it may be two weeks before my next books is live on the iBookstore), but this is the GREP I will use:



(That lovely thing says "find a single link and remember the clickable text and then replace it with a link that goes to the buy button at the end of the book but keep the clickable text the same." Don't you love GREP?)

And here's how my code will look:

<p class="TOC-Header-3"><a href="EPUBwCS55-body-1.html#com_apple_itunes_epub_end0000">Columns</a></p>

Notice that I'm changing all the links from the deleted files to the same target "EPUBwCS55-body-1.html#com_apple_itunes_epub_end0000".

Finally, the hardest part is to adjust the toc.ncx file so that the Table of Contents items in the non-included chapters appear in gray—so the prospective customer knows what will be available in the full book—but don't generate errors in EpubCheck (as the actual links would).

Here's a part of the toc.ncx file from my recently published “From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle”:

<content src="EPUBwCS55-body-6.html#toc_marker-7-3-1"/>
...
<content src="EPUBwCS55-body-6.html#toc_marker-7-3-1"/>

But the "EPUBwCS55-body-6.html" document is beyond the scope of the sample. Change it as follows:

<content src="EPUBwCS55-body-1.html#com_apple_itunes_epub_end0001"/>
...
<content src="EPUBwCS55-body-1.html#com_apple_itunes_epub_end0002"/>

where “EPUBwCS55-body-1.html" is the last available file in your sample EPUB, and “com_apple_itunes_epub_end0000” ends in a unique, sequential number. Start with 0001 and increase by one for each grayed out link.

You'll also, at the end of the final document in your Sample EPUB, have to create a bunch of a tags whose id is equal to each of the com links you created:



Make sure you have as many ids as you do numbered coms in your toc.ncx file.

Any link that has the com_apple_itunes_epub_end0000 link will appear in gray in the navigational TOC.



Once, for Barcelona, Catalonia, by Matthew Tree, I grayed out some interior items because I wanted to include the afterward. It worked fine, though it might feel a little confusing to someone paging through the sample.

I usually have to run EpubCheck about six times to catch all of the missing bits. It probably won't take you as many passes, but I recommend you use it to make sure you've caught all the changes.

Once you've zipped your Sample EPUB up, you can attach it to your ebook in the Assets panel of the iTunes Producer window:



If you've got any suggestions for how to choose the content for a Sample, I'd love to hear what strategies you've used or considered.

Luxembourg's low VAT could give Amazon and Apple the edge in Europe

A hugely important article crossed my Twitter stream this morning, thanks to Sacha Heck. It said that Luxembourg plans to apply its reduced 3% VAT to ebooks [fr]. At first glance, you might think it shouldn't matter a whole lot how the tiny country taxes ebooks, but it turns out that the rule in Europe is that VAT is applied according to the seller's country (not the buyer's). That means that any company who sells ebooks from Luxembourg will only have to collect 3% VAT.

Next consider that although the reduced rate VAT is applied to print books across the EU, up til now they have insisted on classifying ebooks as services and applying the regular rate. That regular rate ranges anywhere from a current low of 15% (in Luxembourg, surprise!) to 25% in Sweden. The Huffington Post cites this application of the regular VAT rate on ebooks as one of the major reasons Why the UK is behind America for Ebook and E-reader Adoption.

This has two major effects. First, it makes it harder for publishers to deliver ebooks at competitive prices with respect to their print books. And second, ebook sellers in countries with lower VAT will have a huge competitive advantage over local sellers in countries with higher VAT. Sometimes the difference between print VAT and ebook VAT is as much as 20%.

Take Spain for example. The regular VAT is 18%. So an ebook that "costs" 20€ without VAT will cost 23.60€ including VAT. But if you buy that same book in (or from!) Luxembourg, it'll only cost you 20.60€. That's a big difference. Add that to the fact that many (most?) European countries have fixed pricing rules on books and you get a significant competitive advantage.

France has been threatening to lower the VAT rate for ebooks for months, promising to bring it down to 5.5% in January. But in the UK, just yesterday in an article in The Register Treasury Minister David Gauke said their hands were tied: “Under EU law, VAT on electronic books must be charged at the standard rate.”

Luxembourg doesn't seem to think so. But who's going to sell books from Luxembourg? Shoot, where is Luxembourg*? The answer is Amazon and Apple, of course, who already have their European headquarters (and tax homes) there and anyone else who wants an immediate advantage over their competitors. Amazon has made a fortune in the US by carefully avoiding having to charge customers sales tax. (In the US, you don't have to charge sales tax to residents of states where you don't have a tax presence yourself.) It clearly hopes to follow the same strategy in Europe.

(Photo by Wesley Oostvogels, used with Creative Commons permissions.)

Luxembourg, of course, is in the center of Europe, occupying about 1000 square miles, and home to half a million people.

From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle

I am proud to announce a new Straight to the Point Miniguide: From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle. The digital edition bundle—which includes EPUB, Kindle/Mobi, and PDF formats—is available right now, and it will be available in print soon.

This new miniguide, 76 pages in length, explains all the new features that Adobe added to InDesign CS 5.5 and how to take advantage of them when creating ebooks, both in EPUB and Kindle formats. It is not a beginner's book and assumes that you have some basic knowledge of both InDesign and EPUB itself. If you have my EPUB Straight to the Point, I think you’ll find it very useful.

The digital editions of From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle cost $10 but for a limited time, I'm offering a 30% discount on my website to anyone who has already bought my EPUB Straight to the Point book (in any format and from any vendor). Just send me a proof of purchase (a receipt is good!) and I’ll send you a coupon. If you bought EPUB Straight to the Point from me, you should have a note from me in your inbox with the coupon inside.

Here's the table of contents so you can have an idea of what's inside:

Table of Contents

InDesign to ebook in 10 steps

Envisioning your book

What can you do in an ebook?

Running headers/footers

Page numbers

Fonts

Text size

Other text formatting

Spacing, page breaks, and orphans

Alignment

Columns

Drop caps and all caps

Non-Latin characters and other symbols

Images

Borders and background colors

Table of contents and index

Hyphenation

Links

Tables

Audio and video

Creating your book in InDesign

Creating a template

Saving a template

The importance of styles

Creating a cover

Generating a cover from the first page

Placing images and controlling export order

Using inline objects to control export order

Custom positioned anchored objects

Using articles to control export order

Placing and exporting audio and video

Creating links

Creating hyperlinks

Creating cross references

Creating footnotes

Formatting footnotes

Creating a navigational TOC

Generating a TOC

Mapping tags to export

Specifying metadata

Exporting to EPUB

Adding more metadata

Generating a cover

Ordering the contents upon export

Margins, lists, and ADE

Options when exporting images

Image Size and Alignment

Image formats

Navigating the Contents panel

Looking at the CSS options

Using Existing CSS

Ready to export!

Cracking open EPUBs

Why I still crack open InDesign EPUB files

New issues

How do you crack open an EPUB?

Opening EPUB files in BBEdit

Converting to Kindle/mobi

Creating Kindle-friendly EPUBs

Body text

Page breaks

Spacing

Text wrap

Borders and background color

Fonts

Covers

Table of contents

Marking where a book should open

Images

Converting a Kindle-friendly EPUB to Kindle/mobi

Using embedded fonts in iBooks

Additional Resources

Index

I hope you find this new miniguide useful. Let me know what you think!

I've just added a Complete EPUB Package to my website. Digital editions of all four miniguides, EPUB Straight to the Point, and Barcelona Beyond Gaudí for just $39.

And that lovely cover was designed in Blender, Cheetah3D, and Photoshop by Andreu Cabré.

iBooks 1.5 increases page size by about 15%

Apple released version 1.5 of their iBooks ereader app last night. The biggest improvement to iBooks 1.5 is undoubtedly the new Full Screen mode. To access it, click the Font menu, and then click Theme in the pop-up menu. Then turn on Full Screen at the bottom of the extended menu.



Full Screen mode hides the faux pages, the faux spine, the space between those faux pages and the edge of the screen, etc. and increases the size of the page about 15%.

Here's what my upcoming book on InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle looks like with and without the chrome in vertical orientation:



Notice that there's hardly any difference vertically. Though you can see the line endings change ever so slightly, I couldn't measure any difference. The old page measured 560px wide by 760px, and the new page measures 560px by 850px high.

And here's what the horizontal two-page view looks like now, with chrome:



and without:



Of course, the pages reflow when you go from Full Screen to Normal view, and so it's hard to compare two pages that are exactly the same. In my test, my book takes up 205 pages in normal view and only 178 in Full Screen, a difference of about 15%.

With chrome, a small page (in horizontal view) measures 400px by 540px high. In Full Screen mode, the page now measures 410px by 600px.

iBooks also removed three existing fonts—Baskerville, Cochin, and Verdana—and replaced them with new ones with curious, or at least lesser known names: Athelas, Charter, Iowan, and Seravek. I wonder if this is a licensing thing? Here's what they look like:

Athelas:



Charter:



Iowan:



Seravek:



They've also changed the highlighting system slightly, and added a Night-reading theme which darkens the background so it's easier on your eyes and your sleeping companions. Indeed, it not only darkens the background, it eliminates it completely. Watch out if you have any images with white backgrounds, the white will stand out:



That will have to be fixed! (I'm hoping to get From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle out the door today or tomorrow... more details soon.)

Kindle Store and Kindle Direct Publishing open in Spain and Italy

Wow, Amazon has just opened both the Kindle Store and Kindle Direct Publishing in Spain and Italy.



This means that people in those countries can self-publish their ebooks to the Amazon ecosystem and it also means that existing self-publishers on Amazon KDP, including folks in the US, will receive 70% of royalties from sales in Spain and Italy (as well as San Marino, Vatican City, and Andorra). Up until now, only sales to customers in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, Guernsey, Germany, Isle of Man, Jersey, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland, and the US received royalties of 70% (sales to customers in other countries only receive 35%)

Amazon has translated most of the self-publishing help files into Spanish and Italian, simply click on the language button at the top of the Kindle Direct Publishing site:



I would recommend going carefully through the legal and tax information. Amazon recommends taking advantage of the tax treaties between countries in order to avoid double-taxation. Such a tax treaty exists at least between Spain and the US, I'm not sure about Italy.

For starters, Amazon says there are 22,000 books in Spanish for Kindle on the Amazon Kindle store. And I just found 1028 Kindle books in Catalan, 68 books in Galician, and 138 in Basque. There are 16,262 in Italian. Amazon says in its documentation that it only allows books in Spanish, French, German, English, Portuguese, and Italian,  but that clearly is not the case, at least not for big publishers.

Too bad I can't buy any of them. Looks like you have to have an account on Amazon.es in order to buy them. That's pretty ridiculous, this is the perfect opportunity for a small publisher to reach out to the world. My books published in the US are available on Amazon.es, now I would like to see those Catalan books available on Amazon.com. Please?