For the Win Cory Doctorow’s latest young-adult novel, For the Win, came out last week in hardcover, and also in the free e-book form that Cory Doctorow traditionally makes available on his site.

The book seems to be an expansion of the themes Doctorow first explored in his 2004 Salon.com novella “Anda’s Game”—labor organizing meets MMORPG gold farming. I haven’t yet read the book, but I have been looking forward to it.

There’s one slight problem with the offering, however. Doctorow has a policy of hosting the first e-book conversion anybody sends him for a given format—as he says, he is unfamiliar with the esoterica of the various different formats, and does not want to be put in a position to make a decision based on what he does not know.

I managed to get in first for the eReader version of a couple of his books—Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Content. But for For the Win, someone submitted a horribly-formatted PDB that looks as if all they did was run it through Dropbook as fast as they could to get something they could send in and get their name up on the page.

However, since the book is released under a Creative Commons license, there was nothing stopping me from doing my own version whether Doctorow would host it or not. Consequently, you can download the PDB file here, or a zip file containing PDB + PML source here.

If you want to download it directly into eReader from your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, click this link from Mobile Safari (or use this link if you use the Barnes & Noble eReader, or this one for the Barnes & Noble iPad eReader which has not come out yet at the time of this posting). Enjoy!

Update: The person who created the previous eReader version asked Cory to swap mine in for his, and this has since been done.

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9 COMMENTS

  1. I agree.

    For a better ePub version, look here:
    http://83.92.176.71:5222/?function=download&id=202&format=epub

    I was about 20 minutes late on the ePub version and like you said, the “winner” looks like somebody just passed a txt file through Calibra.

    So Cory. Could be you should change your policy. More or less every single fan-made conversions on your page looks like shit (there are exceptions). Do you really want to supply your readers with second (no. FOURTH) rate conversions done by people who know nothing about books.)

  2. Jotunbane, I downloaded your ePub version, but it doesn’t have paragraph indentation or a blank space between paragraphs, and quotation marks are replaced by those » « things. I got better EPUB results by doing the Calibre conversion myself (though I wish I could do something about all the straight quotes that I’d really prefer to have be smartquotes).

  3. [quote]I downloaded your ePub version, but it doesn’t have paragraph indentation or a blank space between paragraphs, and quotation marks are replaced by those » « things. I got better EPUB results by doing the Calibre conversion myself (though I wish I could do something about all the straight quotes that I’d really prefer to have be smartquotes).[/quote]

    No paragraph indents. Thats your reader that sucks.
    No space between paragraphs. Thats an american tradition. You don’t do that in europe. And you (well … I) definitely don’t do that in ebooks (its a waste of space).
    The ‘angle’ quotes are a feature. Thats my favorite quote. And since this is my private library, I do things my way.

  6. [quote]With Calibre I can set either blank spaces between paragraphs or indents that show up on any EPUB reader—even ones that “suck”. You think that people are going to change their readers if they get a badly-formatted book or two?

    Ok… Try to open the book in Calibres e-book viewer.
    Hey presto, no problems.

    Now open the same book in FB Reader. Totally f**ked up.

    Now. Is that a problem with the book, or a problem with the reader??

    So I can do one of two things. I can say “FB Readers problem” or I can try to “fix” the book to work around the problems in FB Reader. (And then redo that exercise for every single reader on the market).

    I choose #1 for several reasons.
    1. It works for me.
    2. I am not helping to start a new “browser-war” here. The standard is as the standard is. If your reader cant handle that, then your reader can’t handle ePub (it may be able to handle a SUBSET of ePub, but thats not enough).

  9. [quote]The reader I was using is Adobe Digital Editions, which is basically the standard EPUB reader.

    A bit like Internet Explorer is the standard browser?
    I use Linux, and as such don’t have access to ADE. So in my world ADE is not “standard”.

    [quote]E-books should be formatted correctly when they are created

    Exactly.
    Where is my ebook formatted wrong? (And dont tell me “It does not show up correctly in ADE”… That is not an “Error”).

    [quote]and not rely on individual readers to add formatting flourishes on their own.

    Says the guy who just told me to accept ADE as the “standard”.

    What can I say. It works for me. That I happen to use a function not sanctioned by Adobe is a very minor headache for me. (because I don’t use ADE and don’t know anybody who do (present company excluded)).

    I am not about to change my (perfectly working 😉 ebook just to please Adobe and their customers.

    As a followup to this discussion I took my book and passed it through the ePub validator. And let me be the first to admit that there was some warnings (AND errors). I fixed the ones that made sense, but none of them had any relation to indent.

    So whats the problem?
    Well clearly ADE is ignoring the CSS property “text-indent”.
    If you can show me where in the ePub standard is says “don’t use text-indent” I will be happy to comply.

    Until then. My book is right. ADE is wrong.

    Enough said…

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