Self-Publishing and Self-Editing: Part Two
The book is written. The book is edited. On Sunday morning March 9 we loaded iTunes Producer with all the necessary files to publish our work in the iBookstore. We press the submit button. Twelve hours later, nothing had happened. Twenty-four hours later iTunes Producer is still spinning. I wrote to Apple*. I went into the chat rooms. I discovered that perhaps iTunes Producer 3.0 was buggy and flaky. That it often hanged. So I stopped the upload after some twenty-five or so hours. I trashed iTunes Producer 3.0. I downloaded iTunes Producer 2.9.1. And I started the upload again Monday morning 9 AM or thereabouts. Monday night 9 PM, iTunes Producer is still spinning.
Take note, one thing that 25 years of teaching children and 30 years managing computers and networks as a paid IT person has taught me nothing, if not patience.
So I decided to let iTunes Producer continue spinning for the duration. Most fortunately, something actually happend, the activity screen is letting me know that things are finally being done if at a snail’s pace.
It’s really sad, for years upon years I was an Apple Mac evangelist. I took much abuse for being such a person. But always Apple products”just worked”. It’s sad to see them come to a pass where Apple products simply don’t work a lot of the time. IBooks Author is a nice program-oh, I’m dating myself it’s a nice APP- in general many of Apple’s products do work maybe not as well as they should. But think of this. Steve Jobs often referred to and spoke of the intersection between the humanities and technology that represented the intergral part of Apple’s mission. Now, by any and all accounts I am a humanities scholar. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been drawn to the Macintosh and it’s “walled garden”. Now in that context, here is someone who spent his adult life teaching history, unable to do the research that he so desired to do, finally having a chance to read history and write history. I am proud to say that at 62 years old I have written a history book. Imagine the anticipation, the joy, the wonder of compiling that book in order to publish. Now imagine 48 to 72 hours after pressing the publish button to not have done anything. Sure the processes continue, sure, I really expect them to come to an end at some point. But it is disappointing.
Today I should be blogging about how you can now access my book at the iBookstore, how you can download it as a PDF from my website, how you can see the product of years of research and writing and editing. But can I do so, NO.
*I wrote to Apple. Here is there reply to the question about the length of uploads at my DSL Internet speed:
Hello Jon,
I’m following up with you in regards to uploading your iBook. I understand that you have a DSL connection with an upload speed of 384 KBPS, and you’re upload has a .iba file of 45MB, and the .itmsp file is 36MB. There’s no set amount of time it takes for a book to be uploaded that we can provide, as it depends on the speed of your internet connection.
Please let us know if you have any questions or need further assistance. We’re happy to help.
>>>>>>>>>>>>Didn’t he just say he knew my Internet connection speed? Maybe I should have started worrying when I read his spelling of the possessive pronoun for “you”?
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