Bradley Hall (editor of the Pirate Party’s No Safe Harbor book) says, I’ve been translating old public domain German-language books that I have been finding on Gutenberg.org. So far I have done two - a book of Japanese Fairy Tales and an old never-before-translated science fiction novel from 1909. The science fiction novel, The Red… READ THE REST
I actually did something similar for Saki’s When William Came, an alternate history novella from 1913. Translated it into Brazilian Portuguese (ASIN: B00D2CIVVI), and published it on Amazon using Kindle Desktop Publishing. I also did something similar for a 19th century Brazilian playwright, and helped professor friends at university publish English translations of Machado de Assis short stories on Kindle. I’ll bet there are other translators doing the same in their respective languages.
Oddly, a friend of mine has a very similar French novel from the same time period about a comet hitting the earth called “La Fin Du Monde,” but it went into a whole aftermath Shape Of Things To Come/Metropolis storyline.
FWIW you should get InDesign so you can export to epub for distribution everywhere.
Just pirate it.
Since we did No Safe Harbor (I’m the co-editor of that with Brad) we’ve changed our workflow for No Safe Harbor 2. One thing we are looking at, is InDesign, since it makes ePub’s easier, but then it makes the editing process a little harder. So do I save time in layout and spend it in eBook creation, or save time with the ebook files, and spend more time on layout…
I think Brad has the easier job proofing the work, and correcting the english…
Have you tried AsciiDoc as a publishing tool? It converts to docboocs xml, from which it’s easy to make pdf, html, epub etc…
Thanks Mr. Doctorow for posting this.
(I’m Bradley Hall).
I am glad that it seems I’m not the only one raiding the public domain like this, that’s why we have the public domain.
Rock on.
1 Like
Any word if these books in the PD are any good?
Just like books not in the public domain, there’s good ones and bad ones.
I really enjoyed both of these books as being artifacts of past eras that no English speaking person had ever uncovered before.
I’m working on a third book off and on right now (I’ve been busier than I was when I first did these two).
1 Like
Sorry to double post, but I wanted to mention that I lowered the ebook price of the Japanese Fairy Tale collection to $2.99 so Boingers can get it a bit cheaper than it was listed earlier in the day.
Thanks again.
These are also listed in the Nook store, but the price for the Japanese Fairy Tale book has not dropped yet.
1 Like
Dude… InDesign is the industry standard for a reason.
Do you mean editing as in the editing the copy, or editing the layout? At first InDesign seems slow and clunky, but eventually you’ll drive it like a boss. I use it to create 1 or 100 page documents.
Yeah, I know, my wife’s worked at a book pre-press company for years (and did magazines and newspapers before that).
She does her stuff and her books, I do mine, but shes there if I need her 
VariableRush there (Brad) does the copy (he’s the English language guy, I’m just the English nationality guy.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
