Making an Ebook

Notes on how to transform a physical book into its best digital self, so it makes the trip to Mars and lives on forever.

Core structure

• Digital Translation to Ebook
• Hardware
• WebStorm (IntelliJ)
• Pandoc
• TeX Live (MacTeX)
• Kindle Previewer

Main ideas

• The goal is to transform a physical book into its best digital self for long-term preservation.
• Scanning began with the idea of building an "Archivist Quill."
• WebStorm (IntelliJ) serves as the text editor / IDE of choice.
• Pandoc is the "Babel Fish" of text documents, handling format conversion.
• Producing TeX documents requires installing a TeX environment (TeX Live / MacTeX); Kindle Previewer checks the output.

Why it matters

This is the project's tooling and workflow reference — the practical pipeline behind turning Fuller's out-of-print volumes into faithful, durable ebooks. It records the hardware and software choices (scanning, WebStorm, Pandoc, TeX Live, Kindle Previewer) that the rest of the corpus depends on.

See Also

• Test Book (Test Book) — related work

Sources

• making_an_ebook/ — process project directory (repo-local source tree)
• making_an_ebook/index.md — synthesis index for the process project
• making_an_ebook/ebook-process.md — the ebook production workflow
• making_an_ebook/regex.md — regex notes for text cleanup
• making_an_ebook/comic_books.md — notes on comic-book digitization