Out Of My Comfort Zone

Into The Business World

Flowers in Dorothy’s garden

For the time being, the best colorful subjects at hand for photos are right here at the Treehouse. It is a transformational time of year and the riotous display of spring flora is still a few weeks away. In the meantime one can find a few early and late bloomers here and there.

Yellow example of the Fibonacci sequence

Today I managed to reach someone at iBooks to find out why I can’t seem to find my book that iConnect assured me was published in 2012.

Johnny jump-ups I presume

In 2011, I spent an enjoyable year documenting the creation of a John Harrison viola and another couple of months developing an iBook for the iPad with interactive pages, text, images, video, queries and John’s explanations during the process of turning wood into an instrument that gets played by 3 different viola players.

Some sort of cherry blossoms

I had a wonderful time putting the book together. It stimulated creative energy in myself and all who were involved in the process. What a thrill. Until I began the publishing process. No wonder my dad let the publishers of his books do that part. It is nearly all anti-creative activity.

Dorothy’s daffodils

I spent 2 gruelling weeks trying to fit art into arbitrarily configured parameters to satisfy the constraints of the iBooks software and publishing details. Numbers, licenses, bank accounts, dollars and foreign currency equivalents had to be exact and triplicated. Fonts I had used were no longer supported, pictures were 2 pixels too big or small. Gaaaahhh!

Josie’s geraniums

Then to make the process even more interesting, there were operating system and iBooks upgrades and updates happening during the time I was wrestling with numbers and restrictions. This meant I had to make changes in the layout and redo some of the actions the reader could touch.

Finally I got the publishing part to accept the book. At least I thought it did.

Stylish in stripes

The person I contacted today informed me that the type of video I had used was no longer supported in 2012 at the time I sent in my book, but the publishing entity failed to notify me. He advised me to get the latest versions of iBooks Author and iPublisher then submit the book again using those Apps.

Hahahah hahahahahah So, I got the new stuff and began falling down the rabbit hole into artist hell this evening. I emailed the error reports back after 3 hours of futile folly, and commented, “I’m a musician Jim, not a computer technician”. More on this story as it happens.

Today’s Video;

50 Fox News Lies in 6 Seconds

Net Neutrality Won Today