I’ve wanted to start doing more gospel-related art (along with my science fiction and fantasy illustrations), and this is my first piece, “First Vision Triptych.” It’s also one of my first forays into semi-abstract art. (The main reason I did it this way, though, is that I’m not good at drawing people yet.)
Volumes 5, 6, 7, and 8 of the Journal of Discourses are now available.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My new reader’s edition of the Doctrine and Covenants is now up and ready for download (PDF and EPUB).
Basically, I’ve taken the text of the D&C, stripped out all the verse numbers, reparagraphed the text, reorganized the sections chronologically (I only had to move a handful of sections), gave each section a name (based loosely on Dane Laverty’s post, but I think I only kept around 10% of his titles), and pulled the date and place of each revelation up to make them more visible.
This also marks the release of my first EPUB. I’d thought about exporting straight from InDesign, but I’m a do-it-myself kind of a guy (at least at first), so I handcrafted this one. The process: I exported the text from InDesign to a plain text file (before I did copyfitting), then used Vim and some regular expressions to put a marker in between each section. I couldn’t figure out how to split the sections into individual files from Vim, so I wrote an awk script that did it for me, then wrote a Python script to take each text file and put it into an HTML file formatted the way I wanted it. And there were a few other scripts I wrote to generate various parts of the EPUB. All in all, not too bad, though I wish EPUB readers like Stanza would give me at least a little more control over formatting. (None of my CSS worked. Sigh.)
I should add that I’ve tested the EPUB in Stanza on my iPhone and in iBooks on my iPad and it works fine in both places. Let me know if it doesn’t work on your reader (or if it looks weird).
I’ve been working on a reader’s edition of the Doctrine & Covenants for the past month and figured I’d give y’all a sneak peek at how it’s coming:
I’m currently about a fourth of the way through reparagraphing the text and hope to have everything done by the end of the year.
The book will be available as a free PDF, and you’ll also be able to order a hardcover or paperback edition through Lulu.