Ben Crowder

Issue 11 of Mormon Artist is up, with some rebranding and redesigning:

Just a quick note to say that volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the Journal of Discourses are now available for download. Enjoy.

Today I’m pre-releasing volume 1 of the Journal of Discourses, available in both ePub and Kindle formats.

Why a pre-release? Because there are still a few typos (these editions are based on the Wikisource text, which is mostly correct but not entirely), and I’d like to crowdsource the proofing so I can make these editions available sooner. If you find typos, let me know and I’ll fix them. Each ePub and Kindle file has a version number on the copyright page, so you’ll will be able to know if you’ve got the latest edition or not (like software, basically). These pre-releases are at 0.9, and once the typos are all fixed, I’ll bump the number up to 1.0.

This marks my first Kindle release, by the way. Amazon’s KindleGen does a decent conversion from ePub to Kindle (Mobipocket, actually) and seems to work just fine. But if you run into any problems with the Kindle edition (or the ePub, for that matter), let me know.

Twenty-five more volumes to go. It’ll probably take another month or two to get them all out the door, FYI.

Remember the Mormon Digitization Project I mentioned back in March? It’s still going, and I need more people to help out with proofing. More specifically, you’d be comparing the digitized text (about five pages at a time) to the original page scans and making sure everything is exactly as it appears in the image. If you love catching typos, this is right up your alley. No special software required. Email me if you’re interested. (Depending on how fast you are, it doesn’t take very long to proof five pages, by the way.)

As for MDP news, we’re almost done with Joseph Smith As Scientist and will be starting on The Life of Heber C. Kimball soon. If there’s a particular Church book you’d like to see digitized (and it was first published before 1923), let me know.

My friend Liz Busby sent me this bit on the stolen chapters of Mosiah:

Royal Skousen, a BYU professor of linguistics and the editor of the monumental Book of Mormon Critical Text Project, said in a phone interview that our current Mosiah chapter 1 is really just the beginning of Mosiah chapter 3. Most, if not all of the original first two chapters were stolen along with “The Book of Lehi.”

Fascinating. Skousen (who I’m rather fond of — he was one of my professors) has some good evidence backing his hypothesis, too.

A week or two ago I was reading the Book of Mormon with my wife and noticed the part at the beginning where it talks about which books were part of the small plates of Nephi and which were part of the large plates. I don’t normally think of the Book of Mormon broken up that way — usually, I just think of it as a flat list of books — but the idea intrigued me.

The result: The Book of Mormon: Plates Edition, an experimental edition now available in ePub.

What’s different? Just the divisions between books and chapters. Beyond the main small/large plates grouping, I’ve made new books to indicate where the record changes (for example, the Book of Omni actually has several different authors, and I’ve broken it up so they each have their own record; I’ve also pulled the record of Zeniff out of Mosiah into its own book) and made the authors’ lineages more clear in the table of contents. The words themselves haven’t changed, nor has the order of the text.

So yes, it’s different and even a little weird. Keep in mind that this isn’t by any means meant to supplant the standard edition — it’s just another way of looking at the Book of Mormon. Enjoy.

It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but Mormon Artist Issue 10 is finally up:

The ePub edition of my book Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon is now available for download.

(The book is a reader’s edition compilation of twenty-two sermons from the Book of Mormon. It’s also available in PDF and you can print a hard copy through Lulu.com.)

The ePub edition of my reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon is now available. You can read it in Stanza or iBooks on your iPhone/iPad, in Aldiko on your Android, or using any number of other ePub readers. (For iPad reading, I should add that the PDFs work nicely in iBooks, and the typography is (ahem) much better than iBooks’ ePub display.)

Maker’s note: I’m finding that my md2epub script has made ePub production incredibly easy. Granted, I’m working with books that don’t involve charts or tables or images or pull quotes or anything complicated, just straight text, but it’s still a breeze.

One other note: The current version of Stanza has a bug where it displays the title of an imported ePub as a random hash string instead of the actual title. They’re aware of it and hopefully we’ll see a fix soon. In the meantime, you can edit the title in Stanza yourself.

Following in the footsteps of my reader’s editions of the Book of Mormon and D&C, here’s that reader’s edition of the Pearl of Great Price I mentioned earlier today.

It’s available in both PDF and ePub. You can also buy a hard copy on Lulu.

(If you download the ePub and it comes out with a .zip extension, just rename it to .epub and you’re good to go. I haven’t yet been able to get Apache to serve the application/epub+zip MIME type. Sigh.)

Let me know if you find any typos or if the ePub doesn’t work on your reader.