Presenting my books as fine art has become the delight of my life. But as usual, my way is unusual. Writing in InDesign makes fine art ePUBs possible and I love it. Of course the limitations of HTML are always going to be a problem. But InDesign can do a lot.

Another part of the problem is that you never really own your ePUBs. Kindle, Books, Nook, and Kobo plus all the rest of the distributing companies only give you a lease for your ePUB. They can cut you off at any time, your license reads that you only have the right to use their software under their lease restrictions.

My plan for presenting my books as fine art is to give them free to subscribers of the Biblical Reality Advice Substack site

This offer is for any of the subscribers to my substack including the free subscribers. My plan here is to enable you to avoid the need for dedicated readers like Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. I will ask you to message me with an email address that can handle larger attachments within problems. My ePUBs run from a few MB to dozens of MB. My Niche Publishing ePUB, for example, is over 40 MB. Even my new Biblical Reality book is over 8 MB.

You will need to use Books on Apple products: Macs, MacBooks, iPads, and iPhones. Or you can use Thorium, an excellent free ereader for MacOS, Windows, Linux, or the Readium Browser extension in Chrome. You can simply open the ePUB in either of them. I’ll have more complete instructions on the Substack posting.

What I want to do here is show you a little of why it matters to me

These captures butcher things pretty bad. Books is a good looking ereader. Thorium reads well, but the interface kinda looks like a Linux/DOS hybrid. First here are a normal page with Books on the left and Kindle on the right.

Type treatment of Section pages: Note the image quality. They both used the same JPEG.

Type treatment of chapter heads: Note headline itself. In Books on the left, I can use a numbered list to automatically add the chapter number. Then notice that the fonts were replaced by Kindle [not my choice], the character styles were radically changed, the background on the note style is dropped, the character style for The hidden truth is simply butchered. Believe it or not, the Kindle version on the right is a different file carefully reset to work as good as possible in Kindle.

Kobo and Nook have their own problems. Here’s the Kobo preview from their site. It’s using the same ePUB as Books uses.

This is a rough sample (not properly sized so the type shown is not the same) from Books