I’ve succumbed to the temptation of producing an ebook edition of The Garden of The Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s. Over a period of two years, we spent a very long time taking extreme care to produce in print a memoir we could be proud of. The very well printed paperback sells for £15, direct from my website. However, knowing how easy and quick it is nowadays to produce ebooks for Amazon, I decided to see if Kindle Direct Publishing software could deal with a highly illustrated book (over 200 black and white photographs and line drawings!). I knew how well black and white photographs appear on a Kindle, so I was tempted to try. The advantage of an ebook edition is that it makes the acquisition of a book cheap, quick and easy. I have spent the last week playing around with the process. Result: The Garden of The Grandfather is now available on Kindle, but the way it appears on the screen is by no means perfect. The format of the print version, so carefully designed by Peter, is of course lost. Perhaps if I created a new version on a pdf especially for an ebook edition, I would manage to get over the problems. But I can’t face the fiddle of it. I tell myself that the Kindle version of the book is good enough in quality while achieving the aim of making what we reckon is a valuable archive of black and white photographs, sketches and descriptive text, readily available at a low price.
All the same, I am doubtful about letting something imperfect go out under our name. Hence, the dilemma.
If anyone reading this would be kind enough to download a free sample of the book, please do so and let us know your opinion. Should we withdraw the edition, or not? I wonder if anyone will respond to this request…