Editorial: October 2010
September has been an interesting month. Reaction to Salon Futura at Worldcon was very positive, but then I went and won a Hugo as part of the Clarkesworld team and that rather distracted me. I did, however, bag an interview with Jay Lake, which you can find in this issue, and one with Seanan McGuire that we will have up next month.
Kevin and I then took a week’s vacation, which was probably not advisable from a schedule point of view, but was worth every minute. The rest of the month has been spent in whirl of catching up on the day job, getting Dark Spires ready, and looking at various means of selling books online. Progress is being made on the latter issue, but we are still well short of being able to offer the sort of shopping experience I want to provide. The upshot of that is that the ebook version of Salon Futura is still free.
I should also note that our podcast, The Salon, is now available (for free) through iTunes. You can find it here.
You’ll note that this issue did not come out on the first of the month. That’s because we are slowly moving towards the middle of the month so as not to coincide with the many other fine magazines that have first-of-month release dates. Issue #3 will be fairly early because it needs to be ready for BristolCon, but in December we’ll slip a little later (which also means I don’t have to spend the holidays producing a magazine).
Cheryl
Cheryl, many thanks for Salon Futura. The first couple of issues have been every bit as good as I’d expect from you.
But I will make a suggestion. While it’s splendid that you make a ebook version available, you really need more than ePub to cover the bases. ePub is fine for folks using the Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble nook, and an assortment of other things, but there are a huge number of people using an Amazon Kindle of one of the Kindle apps for PC, iPhone/iTouch/iPad, or Android based device. Amazon uses the Mobipocket ebook format, and the Kindle doesn’t *do* ePub.
I don’t know what your production process is to generate the ePub file. I used Calibre, a free and open source application by Kovid Goyal, to convert the ePub to Mobi format, so I could read it on my PDA which doesn’t do ePub but does have a Mobi viewer. The conversion was flawless. The links to online content were no-ops, since the PDA isn’t connected, but everything else was fine. On a device that handles Mobi files and *is* connected, like various Kindle models, those should work too.
You can get Calibre here: http://calibre-ebook.com/
It’s cross-platform, and available for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux. *Highly* recommended for anyone dealing with ebooks. It’s a Swiss army knife with a multitude of functions.
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Dennis
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for the kind words about the content.
As for formats, I definitely intend to make the magazine available for the Kindle. However, I’m still getting to the bottom of exactly what I need to do to make it look good in that format. Automated converters are fine for enthusiasts like you who who know what they are doing, but they don’t catch all of the subtleties of the HTML, and crucially the converted file may fail the validation that Amazon requires before you can sell on the Kindle. So there will be a Kindle edition, hopefully as of next issue, but it will be done right.
I have Calibre. I do not recommend it unless you are prepared to put up with formatting errors.