Hi everyone: I think most people in the group know about the Heart of Empire CD-Rom and how I have been stressing about turning it into an ebook... The reasons for this are that I spent 18 months of evenings and weekends working on it - with Bryan - and it is an absolute labour of love. It has every single page from Heart of Empire in it pencilled, inked and full-colour final-printed version - and also in ultra high-rez version too. Then Bryan wrote 60,000 words of annotations and then I put it all together. (and then for the second edition we also added every single page of the Adventures of Luther Arkwright too!) Being such a passionate advocate of usability, the over-riding consideration for me was to make it easy to use: so - you would be able to to go page 2 of the pencils from page 1, from the top AND bottom of the page... - and then on page 2 pencils you would need to be able to go to page 2 inks, colours and annotations - all the way through the comic. AND it would need to work on any computer ever... - and so the only way I could think of to make it work was to manually create all the pages in HTML - this lead to there being over 250,000 links in it, each one checked and re-checked. And it works on any computer able to read HTML: a chap once bought one at a comics convention and told me he used Linux: I said if he can read webpages and PC formatted CDs then he should be able to read this: but if not - come back the next day for a refund. He came back and bought me a pint: not only could he read the whole thing but he was blown away! Now: my stress has come from all of this work and passion becoming unavailable due to CDs slowly dying out. You know a format is heading for the door when Apple stops including it as standard. And so I have been trying to work out how to convert it into an ebook - but the problem here is that ebooks are strictly linear: you can go from page 4 to page 5 to page 6 no problem, but going from page 6 inks to page 6 colours to page 7 colours to page 7 annotations to page 8 annotations to page 8 pencils - that it couldnt do. So I was getting sad that it would have to basically die out - but then this week, off with my son for the summer holidays I thought I would give it one more try and just allow people to download the whole thing via a zip file for a dirt cheap cost. I know this means people could pirate it and even re-sell it themselves - but there was not much of a barrier to stop people doing this when I sold it on CD. Also: selling just the files means that I can sell it a LOT cheaper: no CDs to buy: no cases to buy: no inserts to print and cut to size: no shipping costs.... And so: with no further ado, allow me to present: the Heart of Empire Directors Cut download for just £3.00! This is the first time I have sold anything via Payloadz so let me know if anything goes wrong: you WILL get the download even if I have to resort to posting you a CD!! bryan-talbot/onlineshop/heart-of-empire-cd-payloadz.php
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 10:08:07 +0000
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