Progress means reaching a new level of complications

I can finally report that after a dozen or so attempts, I have finally managed to get the E-book working...(on Adobe Digital Editions) at least.  It has only taken me a few weeks, but has cost me years in additional wrinkles. 

Whether I can replicate the process remains to be seen, especially as I had to trawl though hundreds of forums, reading thread after thread of high end techno babble that I really wished I was clever enough to understand. 

Eventually after following every piece of advice I finally found a way of obtaining clear images and presenting it like a real e book.  I even test ran a few pages on my mobile and they seemed to work fine, unfortunately when I loaded up the whole book I still kept getting error messages.  This may be due to the images in The HPM pumping the size of the book up too much.

So now it's on to the next step of getting the book registered and uploaded for sale.  Surely this bit can't be hard?.....

Doh!!

The ebook rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper - Somewhere along the was VAT has been applied to ebooks and anybody who wishes to sell them through the appropriate channels has to be registered for VAT.  This isn't a major problem, but it is still another delay.  In addition to this there are several other hoops we have to jump through to register the e-book with Nielsen Book Data.  Again this is going to take time but on the plus side - every book that gets sold will get counted giving our humble publishing company more credibility.

With the HPM out of the way, I can start the ebook process for the subsequent translations and Be Careful Ethel.

It's a bit like catching an eel - you think you have it, but then it's gone again.

My adventures into e-publishing took a turn for the better after obtaining a copy of Liz Castro's "EPUB Straight to the point".  It is widely regarded as the 'must have book' for all things E-pub - and hopefully will point the way.
Over the past week or so I have slowly managed to re-create The Hairy Plug Monster for Digital Editions.  At this moment in time there are still quite a few things that I am not happy with; such as the image quality and the texture.

As I only have Adobe's Digital Editions to view it on at present I need to download several more e-readers to check compatibility (If anyone wants to give me an I-PAD to aid my product development then you are more than welcome).

It has also become obvious that at some point in the very near future, I am going to need to learn how to write and decode XHTML.  Not specifically for writing websites, although that is not a bad skill to have - but to make amendments in the e-pub file to enhance compatibility.  One of the problems I am having, is not knowing which questions to ask.  This, in turn has led to being taken to some really high brow websites, where I have found myself reading the text over and over again and not having the faintest idea what on earth they are talking about. 

It's a bit like catching an eel - you think you have it, but then it's gone again.