Clickable

So I have an ebook promotion coming up, and I’ve been uploading new versions of some of my ebooks to the various sites.  The new versions have clickable links, which means that if you like the book, you can immediately click on another book by me and and download it.

(And that is certainly an advantage etexts have over traditional books, for sure.)

Anyway, I’ve had no problem uploading up the revised files, except on Kobo.  Because Kobo refused a couple of the uploads, telling me “We can’t upload your book,” without saying why.  Which is no damn help at all.

After wasting an hour or so trying brute-force tactics mixed with fiddling with the files to try to guess what was objectionable, I realized that I probably wasn’t the first person to have this problem, and I decided to use magic and invoked Google.  Which gave me the solution.

Now Kobo sells ebooks exclusively in epub format, a format used by all ebook providers but Amazon, which employs mobi.  Kobo wouldn’t accept my epub files for reasons best known to itself, but it will also translate to epub from files in other formats.

Ah.  You see where there is going, yes?

So I used Calibre to translate my epub file to mobi, which is Amazon’s format, and then I uploaded the mobi file to Kobo, which doesn’t sell mobi files.  But Kobo converted my mobi file back to epub, which it then allowed me to place on sale.

Because artificial intelligence, right?  Right?

I feel a little less threatened by the Singularity now.