Ebook Spotlight

For a long as I can remember, there have been two things I have wanted in my life.

A career in drawing cartoons and a series of books that would preserve them for the world to remember me by, just like all my cartooning heroes. I succeeded in the first goal, and when the second seemed as if it was going to be one for two in the wish department, taking the matter into my own hands was the only choice.

Print books had enormous hurdles just to get something into a book you can hold in your hand form, but then in 2010 along came the e-book, more precisely, the ePub file format. Suddenly one could put together a “book” that you could distribute to the masses electronically for almost nothing except your own sweat equity. I was sold.

In this newsletter we take a look at the first book I authored, edited, illustrated and e-published of my new comic strip feature on AM Universal’s Gocomics website. It was also a first epub created in iBooks Author. You might remember it as the ebook authoring program Apple created for aspiring educational textbook authors to work with their proprietary iBooks ebook format. It did not last long.

Author didn’t export to the ePub format even though it was based on it. People didn’t take to it like they had hoped, and they didn’t keep working on improving it like they should have. It made the most beautiful e-books at that time, which could handle multimedia like video, audio, and more, but a 2 GB file size limit hurt. It also didn’t help when the US government accused Apple of e-book price fixing.

On July 1, 2020, Apple killed iBooks Author, and I migrated to a new app coming from Italy, called Pubcoder. It was a match made in e-Heaven for producers of image-heavy, fixed-layout e-books! Drag-and-drop simplicity, working in layers, instant, flawless coding on export, CSS capabilities, multimedia—you name it, and this thing had it. If you have the content, you can publish it with Pubcoder. It does apps too.

Anyone who is a cartoonist, photographer, or children’s storybook author can easily learn to master this, and publishing is a breeze too. Finally, an author need no longer be shackled by a system that is not slanted to the right of a creator to profit equitably from his creations.

Special Audience-Specific Content Section: Free ebooks for The Founders of Cartoons by Collins. Paid subscribers will also get goodies in future ASC posts!

Buy this e-book along with all my others on the Collinstoons.com website store.

Or for your iPad, iPhone etc…on Apple Books!

If you want to see more cartoons on Cartoons by Collins…

I will leave you with one more cartoon that I hope you enjoy enough to give My Cartoonist Is Not Funny a look-see and perhaps add it to your e-library. E-books are the best way to enjoy my “inklings” (cartoon children) and it won’t cost very much to always have them stored on your favorite mobile device for whenever you might need a little humor to grease the wheel of life as you travel down that road.