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.
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.
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.
(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.)
My second book release for today is Преступление и наказание (Crime & Punishment). This is an EPUB edition of Dostovesky’s novel (which I love) in the original Russian.
This marks my first attempt at creating an EPUB from a text in a non-Roman script (Cyrillic), and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all went. I should note that Stanza displays the book just fine, but I haven’t yet tested it in iBooks.
I designed the cover in Photoshop. There’s a higher resolution version available on Flickr.
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.
An itch scratched: md2epub, a Python script for making an EPUB out of Markdown files.
All it takes is a simple book file, which gives the script some basic metadata about the book and then lists the files that need to be included. The script runs Markdown on the files and makes an EPUB.
# Sample book file for md2epub
# 9 Jun 2010
Title: My Sample Book
Author: John Doe
Language: en-US
URL: /books/my-sample-book/
CSS: content/style.css
# Chapters
Foreword | content/foreword.text
Chapter 1 | content/chapter_1.text
Chapter 2 | content/chapter_2.text
Chapter 3 | content/chapter_3.text
# Images to be included
Images: images/illustration1.jpg, images/illustration2.jpg
Image: images/illustration4.jpg
And then you just run “md2epub myfile.book” and voila, instant EPUB. I’ve already used it on my Pearl of Great Price reader’s edition (which I’ll be releasing shortly) and it works like a charm.
Last but not least, the code is based on my friend Matt’s script GetBook.py. (And, in fact, that’s where I got the idea for this script.)
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.
It’s available in both PDF and EPUB. You can also buy a hard copy on Lulu.
Let me know if you find any typos or if the EPUB doesn’t work on your reader.
Genealogy on the computer is nice, but sometimes you just want to write things down on paper. I’ve put together some minimalist pedigree chart templates for that purpose (downloadable as PDFs).
Standard and 2x (since you usually don’t need all the space the standard chart gives you):
