SoFoBoMo: Crossing the finish line early.
No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
-Stephen King
Yes, I read Stephen King and I like his work. He writes so very honestly. There’s no pretense. I read his book, On Writing: Memoirs of a Craft. And I have to tell you, although small, it is packed with excellent advice for writing or, perhaps any other facet of life. In it, he says that he doesn’t write the stories, he just listen to the little voice in his head. The stories are already written, the just come to him. The book that I produced, may or may not be good. I don’t know. It pleased me. I had no idea of where it was going to end up, but when it finished, it was finished. I know, it sounds mysterious and it is. I wanted to add a lot more pictures, but it just ‘felt’ done and that if I had added more, it would be overdone.
Early finish
Coming across the finish line early has it’s perks, I suppose, but an unfortunate side effect of that is now there is something to compare to. We are, it seems, inexorably drawn to compare ourselves with others. I’ve seen several mentions here and there about raising the bar. I must admit, I looked at Gordon’s book before I submitted mine and thought: Man, that guy did a fantastic job, I hope mine is that good. Then, sanity took hold and I thought, mine is mine, and his is his. There is no comparison. Each book is based on the photographer’s preference, subject, personality, and feelings about the project. No two books will be alike … at all. And that’s a good thing. I’m looking forward to seeing the wealth of ideas presented and the variations on subject, layout, and picture selection.
I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing, save for the structure of the book, thanks to a book about book design … other than that, I was lost, other than when I was taking pictures. What I produced was simply what felt right to me. There was no profound planning, to be sure!
Hopefully, being out front doesn’t cause anyone else to be discouraged. I’m certainly looking forward to see all of the offerings. I’ve already looked at Gordon’s book about 3 times. I’m sure that I’ll go back and have a gander again. So, here’s to the rest of you: Show us what you’ve got, as long as it satisfies you, it’s perfect; after all, that’s who you did it for! Seek quietness so that you can hear that little voice inside telling you what it wants.
If the “bar got raised” it is because we look at what other did/have done and not necessarily try to better what is done by others, but try to improve on ones own efforts and techniques. Because the bar got raised I learned *even more* from others, I am grateful for that.
Paul
I’ve looked at Gordon’s and your finished product [book] and both are fabulous.
I have a few questions to you regarding the creation of the Scribus book, outputting that to a PDF etc:
- How did you contaol the file size? Mine is going in to the 100′s of MB already and its not even half way done. You seem to have managed to keep the resolution high, but the resulting file size is managable for the net. How?
- How does one get a book to “open” like yours where it looks like a book on a table with 2 pages viaible at one time? Mine ends up one flat page at a time!
Appreciate if could share some of the knowledge.
Anil.
Arrgh! All those spelling errors.
contaol = control
viaible = visible
Anil, my book is only 63 pages and just happened to be 18 MB. I tried everything that I could to get it smaller, but I couldn’t do it. I searched on the Internet to find a solution for it and found that Scribus is written to output for printing press (CMYK) and doesn’t do much PDF compression, preferring quality over size.
There are some PDF compression products, but I didn’t find any free ones. Some of them cost $300-$500. I tried a demo, it reduced the size from 18 MB to 2.8 MB. However, it adds a huge watermark on each page and scrambles all of the text.
There is a Wikipedia entry about some perl compression script, but I didn’t try it.
Regarding opening the book in PDF, you need to have the pages display side by side.
View->Page Display->Two Up
View->Page Display->Show Cover Page During Two-up
If you are viewing it directly in your browser, click on the page icon to show pages side by side.
Paul,
I have Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional and would be happy to try and compress ANYONE’s PDF copy of their book. As a trial I download at 18mb and was able to compress it to 2.3mb and still have decent quality. I’ll send you the compressed file if you would like to look at it.
Paul
Thanks for all the info! I figured it out. One needs to set the DPI to 72 and compression/quality to LOW for uploading the book to ISSUU. For the actual PDF to be distributed for printing on a CD or whatever, the file size in immaterial and therefore full resolution without any compression is desirable.
Did a test to ISSUU and it worked just… great!
Anil
@Anil, I’m glad that it worked out for you. ISSUU is a great service and I really liked the output that it provided, too.