David Pogue tweets today: 'Michael Rubin's $35 biography of George Lucas and Lucasfilm, "Droidmaker," now available as a FREE download. What a deal!While Rubin writes that he hopes that people will also want to buy the actual hard-copy book, here is the link to the free set of three PDFs that comprise this electronic version.
Rubin hopes that if you don't feel like getting the hard copy that you will click on his "Donate" box for the e-copy.
To reward Michael for this, people might consider (as he requests) getting the hard-copy also, as a gift for fans of Lucas or Rubin or filmmaking.
Rubin doesn't know how long he will have this free version on the Net, so get it while it's there. The book has received 25 reviews on Amazon with an average rating of '5' out of the max 5 Amazon uses. There's no Kindle version yet, though.
At that reviews area, Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar writes:
' After years of reading mangled "histories" of Lucasfilm/Pixar, I am extremely pleased to read one by a guy who gets it right, including the arts, the technologies, the businesses, and the personalities. Michael Rubin not only gets the gist correctly imparted, but also those pesky details. '
UPDATE - 7/25/09 - Can a Kindle guru help with making this happen?
Original posting of entry 7/24/09 at 8:59PM
Michael Rubin has added a comment to this entry, and maybe someone can help him with his interest in getting the PDFs converted for the Kindle and making them "appropriately available that way. I'm told it's possible, but I haven't figured out how to do it from my Mac..."
I also think his publisher should make the book available as a Kindle edition and I clicked on the box at the Amazon book page to ask the publisher to do that.
These PDFs will be fully readable on the Kindle DX, of course, as is.
But for the Kindle 1 & 2 -- While I know Stanza and Calibre (both will work for Mac) might convert these from PDFs, these are fairly complex ones with double photographs on a line and lots of footnotes which are on both sides of the body of the text, something that I know MobiPocket Creator doesn't convert very well at all.
I might ask at MobileRead forums.
SIDE NOTE:
Here is Rubin's response when asked why he was doing this. I had wondered also, and from a creator's point of view, it makes a lot of sense.
He also welcomes any feedback any of you may have.
Readers at his site say they have a difficult time not reading it all right away.
Thanks, Andrys for the notice. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the PDFs converted for the Kindle and make them appropriately available that way. I'm told it's possible, but I haven't figured out how to do it from my Mac...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, enjoy the book. I welcome any feedback your readers may have!
Hi, Michael,
ReplyDeleteI've updated the blog to include your interest in converting the pdfs to Kindle format. Have also put out a call for anyone with info on how to do that with a fairly complex pdf layout.
This is a rich offering. I think anyone interested in filmmaking should read this.
Will continue to ask around.
- Andrys
I'm happy to report that DROIDMAKER will be released on Kindle in the next month! In Color! Only $9.99!
ReplyDeleteWhew, that took a long time to make happen. Thanks for your patience. I hope you guys will check it out.
In the meantime, I also just published my brother's book "How To Write Groundhog Day" which is funny and fun. You can read that while waiting for the Droidmaker release :)
Cheers,
Michael
Fantastic! I still have the old PDF but this will be easier to read and I'll be getting one. Please drop a note here when it's actually released. Thanks!
ReplyDelete