Travels with Rhody

A side project that’s been occupying a lot of my weekend time lately has finally come to fruition. It’s an e-book version of the first 80 editions of my weekly Xconomy column World Wide Wade, which focuses on the intersection of digital media, Internet culture, entrepreneurship, and creativity. The book is called Pixel Nation: 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade, and so far it’s available three ways: you can buy a $4.99 Kindle edition that’s readable on all Kindle-ready devices (i.e. Kindles, iPhones, and Windows PCs); you can read it online for free using Scribd; and you can download it to your computer in PDF form, also for free, by clicking on the “download” link at the top of the Scribd window.

The main goal behind publishing the e-book was to bring the columns together in one easy-to-read package. In a column published yesterday (which is also Chapter 80 in the book) I describe the process of publishing Pixel Nation in some detail. It wasn’t easy. I’m glad I did it, because I learned a lot of new stuff about text editing tools and the workings of Amazon’s digital publishing platform. But the experience definitely proved that self-publishing an e-book isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re an author interested in doing this but you’re not versed in HTML, I’d recommend hiring a digital publishing consultant, somebody like Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects. (Tallent’s book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle was an indispensable guide as I went through my project.)

To give you a sense of what’s in the book, here’s the table of contents.

Introduction
1: Reinventing Our Visual World, Pixel By Pixel
2: The Coolest Tools for Trawling & Tracking the Web
3: Google Earth Grows a New Crop of 3-D Buildings, and Other Web Morsels to Savor
4: Turn Your HDTV into a Digital Art Canvas
5: Unbuilt Boston: The Ghost Cloverleaf of Canton
6: An Elegy for the Multimedia CD-ROM Stars
7: The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Screens
8: Science Below the Surface
9: Gazing Through Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope
10: Megapixels, Shmegapixels: How to Make Great Gigapixel Images With Your Humble Digital Camera
11: You Say Staccato, I Say Sfumato: A Reply to Nicholas Carr
12: Space Needle Envy: A Bostonian’s Ode to Seattle
13: You’re Listening to Radio Lab—Or You Should Be
14: Can Evernote Make You into a Digital Leonardo?
15: Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video?
16: Turn your iPhone or iPod into a Portable University
17: In Defense of the Endangered Tree Octopus, and Other Web Myths
18: Pogue on the iPhone 3G: A Product Manual You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
19: Photographing Spaces, Not Scenes, with Microsoft’s Photosynth
20: What Web Journalists Can Learn from Comics
21: ZvBox’s Unhappy Marriage of PC and HDTV
22: GPS Treasure Hunting with Your iPhone 3G
23: Boston Unblurred: Debunking the Google Maps Censorship Myth
24: Four Ways Amazon Could Make Kindle 2.0 a Best Seller
25: Playful vs. Preachy: Sizing Up TV’s New Science Dramas
26: Is Brown the New Green? Why Boston’s Ugly, Expensive Macallen Condos Shouldn’t Be a Model For Green Buildings
27: The Encyclopedia of Life: Can You Build A Wikipedia for Biology Without the Weirdos, Windbags, and Whoppers?
28: In Google Book Search Settlement, Readers Lose
29: In the World of Total Information Awareness, “The Last Enemy” Is Us
30: Attention, Startups: Move to New England. Your Gay Employees Will Thank You.
31: Springpad Wants to Be Your Online Home for the Holidays, And After
32: Speak & Spell: New Apps Turn Phones into Multimedia Search Appliances
33: Former “Daily Show” Producer Karlin is Humorist Behind WonderGlen Comedy Site
34: The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859—and How to See in Stereo on Your iPhone
35: Ditch That USB Cable: The Coolest Apps for Sending Your Photos Around Wirelessly
36: Have Xtra Fun Making Movies with Xtranormal
37: E-Book Readers on the iPhone? They’re Not Quite Kindle Slayers Yet
38: WonderGlen Comedy Portal Designed to Plumb Internet’s Unreality, Says Karlin
39: How I Declared E-Mail Bankruptcy, and Discovered the Bliss of an Empty Inbox
40: Public Radio for People Without Radios
41: Plinky: The Cure for Blank Slate Syndrome
42: Massachusetts Technology Industry Needs a New Deal, Not a New Brand
43: Three New Reasons To Put Off Buying a Kindle
44: Top 9 Tech Updates: Photosynth, Geocaching, Google Earth, and More
45: Google Voice: It’s the End of the Phone As We Know It
46: Tweets from the Edge: The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Twitter
47: Will Hunch Help You Make Decisions? Signs Point to Yes
48: Boston Can Survive, Even Thrive, Without Today’s Globe
49: RunKeeper’s Mad Dash to the Marathon Finish
50: Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think
51: Why Kindle 2 is the Goldilocks of E-Book Readers
52: People Doing Strange Things With Soldering Irons: A Visit to Hackerspace
53: Will Quick Hit Score Big? Behind the Scenes with Foxborough’s Newest Team
54: Are You a Victim of On Demand Disorder?
55: German Web 2.0 Clothing Retailer Spreadshirt Finds Boston Fits It to a T
56: Boston’s Digital Entertainment Economy Begins to Sense Its Own Strength
57: The Eight (Seven…Six?) Information Devices I Can’t Live Without
58: Personal Podcasting with AudioBoo, UK’s “Twitter for Voice”
59: Art Isn’t Free: The Tragedy of the Wikimedia Commons
60: Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft’s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn
61: Shareaholic Becomes the Link-Sharing Tool of Choice
62: Startups Give E-mail a Big Boost on the iPhone with ReMail and GPush
63: Why It’s Crazy for Authors to Keep Their Books Off the Kindle
64: A Manifesto for Speed
65: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part One
66: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Two
67: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Three
68: Ansel Adams Meets Apple: The Camera Phone Craze in Photography
69: How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring
70: Facing Up to Facebook
71: The Kauffman Foundation: Bringing Entrepreneurship Up to Date in Kansas City
72: Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books
73: Is it Real or Is It High Dynamic Range?
74: Using Google’s Building Maker to Change the Face of Boston
75: Digital Magazines Emerge—But Glossy Paper Publishers Haven’t Turned the Page on the Past
76: Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before
77: Entrepreneurship May Work Like A Clock, But It Still Needs Winding
78: The Apple Paradox: How a Company That’s So Closed Can Foster So Much Open Innovation
79: What’s So Magical About an Oversized iPhone? Plenty—And There’s More to Come
80: Kindle Conniptions: How I Published My First E-Book