#DancingWithQubits: What about the eBook?

Yesterday was very exciting because I received my first printed copy of the book. There’s just something about holding a physical, printed book that you’ve labored over for many months. Others are starting to get their copies too, and I hope that within a couple of weeks everyone who pre-ordered the print version will have copies in hand.

What if you ordered the eBook? Wasn’t that an option on Amazon? Why isn’t it listed there now? Why was your Kindle eBook order canceled?

The original plan was to provide the eBook in a PDF-like, print replica format that was in color and had active links within and beyond the book. You can still purchase this eBook at the Packt Publishing website.

As for Amazon, let’s just say that they ultimately wanted a reflowable version of the book rather than a fixed format version. As I’ve mentioned before, this presents many challenges to producing beautiful math. The reflowable format allows you to change the font and font size you use on your Kindle or in the Kindle app. It makes it easier to read on small devices. I understand the value.

Hence, I’m now working to create a reflowable version with one guiding principle: as much as possible, I must have a single source for the book that will produce future versions of the printed, fixed-format PDF, and reflowable formats

Here’s the strategy:

• Use tools like make4ht to translate the original LaTeX into HTML. Convert the HTML into MOBI and EPUB3 formats with a minimal amount of hand editing.
• Use standard HTML entities and CSS for as much of the in-sentence math as possible.
• Avoid using extra fonts within the HTML.
• Use automatically-generated PNG files for any other math.
• Use automatically-generated SVG and PNG files for figures coming from LaTeX tikz environments. (This is not working at all right now.)
• Use new macros for the math to produce either LaTeX or HTML versions.
• Use a small Python program I wrote to convert simple math to new markup using the new macros.

There is much work to do but things are looking promising. I can’t now give you any estimated time of arrival for the Kindle reflowable version or any guarantee that it will arrive eventually, but it’s my strong intention to make it happen. There are unknown unknowns yet to be discovered.

In the meanwhile, as I mentioned above, you can get a PDF-like digital version of the book from Packt.

A final point: despite several people staring at the text, a few errors crept in. These are mostly typos or omitted words. I’m keeping track of these on the corrections and clarifications page for the book. I incorporate these fixes into the text as they are discovered and I hope that future versions of the book, printed and digital, include them.

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