A Fake Poetry Anthology to Learn Kindle and E-Pub Formatting.
Volume I, no. 1
Winter-Spring 2014
Coding and snide commentary by Bicycle Comics. Lorem Ipsum text generated by www.lipsum.com .
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It’s really hard to edit poetry anthologies. It’s also really hard to format poetry for E-books. Poetry isn’t like novels or non-fiction prose: each line break matters. And an anthology means an editor is trying to “get it exactly right” for a dozen finicky poets, each of whom has his or her own typographical predilections. With due respect to our prose stylists, it must be awfully nice to just dump 45 paragraphs of prose into a chapter and call it a day. We’d like that. Nearly all of the tutorials we’ve seen for “publish your novel on Kindle!” or “Publish your book using Microsoft Word!” assume that the writers and editors are dealing with prose. Poetry is different. When a line of poetry reflows, it can change the entire meaning and pacing of a poem.
This first, fake issue of Yellow Buick Review is our effort to figure out how best to code a fully-featured, standards-compliant, artistically-sound poetry E-book for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo E-readers. We’ll share our process and our findings with everyone, because we believe the whole poetry community will benefit from a systematic exploration of these technologies.
Best,
-Artie Moffa
Editor, Bicycle Comics
San Francisco, CA
“The poetry is not the point; the point is <p> tags.”
– 99% of the Websites out there that teach people “How to format your book for Amazon Kindle.”