To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.
I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.
As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.
I love giving people advice on what to do with their books, but I don't really know how a Kindle Single gets covered.
I can hire out for editing, proofreading, formatting, and cover design, and those are fixed, sunk costs. Once those are paid, I can earn 70% on a self-pubbed ebook.
You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.
The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
It was an easy decision for me which books to self-publish as ebooks. I got the rights back to two Avon books that I wrote at the start of my career. I paid to have these two books, 'Bold Conquest' and 'Wild Hearts,' scanned. When I got them back as documents, I had to clean them up and correct all the typos, etc.
I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
