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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

This looks great but.... I’m not going to buy the paperback and I hate reading extended stuff on tablet/phone/laptop - I read books on kindle, kind to my eyes, distraction free, lightweight and comfortable.

Anything plans that address this?

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I tried a number of hours to get a kindle version. But since I wrote the whole book in Latex and every converter from PDF -> Mobi/Epub mangled the book, I wasn't able to get a kindle version.

I settled with the PDF as a soft copy instead (and I put PDFs on my kindle, even though that's obviously not desirable).

If there is a nice way to get PDFs to read natively on kindle, I would jump on that, but I wasn't able to get it to work.

Ah that's a shame to hear — the book sounds really cool (as a layman with an interest) but I too was hoping for a Kindle edition. May pick up the paperback if I can make some room! — now operating a strict one in, one out policy for physical books :)

Can you convert Latex to Word (or ODT, etc.), perhaps with Pandoc, and then from that to epub (e.g. Google Docs allows you to download a Doc as an epub)?

Book looks interesting, btw!

Thank you!

Yes, in theory.. but in practice it didn't work when I tried that route. Because I use the Tufte-Book template, there is a constant margin to the side of the main content that holds figures, equations, and such.

This margin gets brutalized by every program (even the propriety ones Amazon built).

Lessons learned. I need to be more mindful of the various conversion processes in the future.

My conclusion with a self-published book a number of years ago was that, once you get beyond flowing text, creating a Kindle version gets a lot harder. It can clearly be done--e.g. there are Kindle format guidebooks that work well. But when I did another self-published book a few years later, I was giving it away anyway so I just did a PDF version for tablets. (My last one is through a publisher but it's also mostly text.)

> I use the Tufte-Book template

This?

https://github.com/Tufte-LaTeX/tufte-latex

I've often been disappointed at the type of html it's possible to force out of (La)TeX. And epubs are pretty much html, css and images.

I generally think that some kind of markdown with the help of pandoc is the happy path for pleasant writing/editing and good output for html/epub and print/pdf.

I did find this, that have some hints on how to get xml, and then xhtml with support for equations - but it looks cumbersome:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1551/use-latex-to-pr...

See also: https://github.com/duzyn/tufte-markdown And in particular (beautiful!): https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

You know, the book looks interesting - but not in pdf, and not as a physical book (I try to live without physical books - won't I be a sad case when the singularity pushes us into post-apocalypse?)

Did you cconsider selling access to the source (eg: private github repo, suitable license)?

For all you know you are already in a simulation created by Roko's Basilisk. And that comment made you loose points.

Not sure I get the reference. Apparently it's easy to end up in a position like the author, with a large (La)TeX manuscript that easily produce good pdf/PS, but mediocre to awful html/epub.

One option for getting help would be to open up everything to everyone - selling access to the source might be a way to retain some income while enlisting some help in conversion from volunteers (yes, we would first pay full price for the content, then volunteer to try conversion options to produce passable epub output).

Ok, that’s a shame, I wrote my thesis in Latex so am familiar with its ... issues.

The only alternative I can think of is copy the paragraphs to html p tags and then any equations written in latex could be converted to images with LatexIt! (if that’s still a thing)

That all assume it’s enough if a deal for you, understand if it’s not and thanks for the reply

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1551/use-latex-to-pr...

Ok, I spent much of yesterday working on this issue and I have a Kindle version under review with Amazon. It should be available in the next few days :)

I'll update here and on twitter when it's ready.

Amazing!!!!! Great job - thank you

Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XKDHDXT/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&key...

I also sell the epub directly on gumroad bundled with the PDF https://gum.co/everydaydata

Might be just me but seems that Paypal option is not currently working in Gumroad

Bought :-)

"It is easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather."

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