24 January 2015

HOWTO -- downloading an EPUB from Google Play Books


So a bunch of people have had trouble getting to the "Download EPUB" functionality with Google Play Books when trying to get their archive copy of The March North.

  1. If you are logged in to Google with a Google Account other than the account that bought the book, log out.  (Google gets confused about whose books to show you.)
  2. Log in to Google with the Google Account that bought the book.
  3. Navigate to  https://play.google.com/books
  4. In the left-hand vertical stack of options, click on My Books
  5. Next to the title of the book under the cover icon, there's a stack of three gray dots with hover text Options
  6. Click on the three dots; a menu will appear
  7. Select Download EPUB from the menu.
And there you go.  If the publisher put the book up using Adobe DRM, you're going to have a little stub with a permalink that goes to a DRM management setup.  In the case of The March North (and expected subsequent Tallwoods Books ebooks) you're going to have an DRM-free EPUB file.

Updated: you don't have to hover-the-cover to get the three dots anymore, they're next to the title of the book under the cover icon.

23 January 2015

Next Commonweal book -- A Succession of Bad Days

So it's about that time again.

I've got all of three written[1], people have read it, they have not informed me it is dire, dreadful, or despicable, so I can contemplate to publish Commonweal book two, aka A Succession of Bad Days. [2] Which means:

  1. send it out for critique by unfamiliar eyes
  2. get an ISBN
  3. get a cover
  4. copyedit
  5. generate EPUB
  6. make available 

Currently at "it is out for critique".

[1] I'm about forty thousand words into four.  Which bodes well for three happening on the hoped-for annual schedule.

[2] this is not a Line book; it's a go-to-sorcerer-school book.  The viewpoint finds out they're qualified to go to sorcerer school abruptly in a fashion not free from trauma, and things do not obviously improve for some time thereafter.

21 January 2015

An infrequent cat

Black cat exploring fire sprinkler pipes
Aoife does not completely approve of the ceiling pipes; they're more of an obstacle course than a real pathway, and they're way high up and lack obvious endpoints.

She is, however, entirely a cat, so some exploring still occurs.