Above, you have my “about the author” graphic.  If you blog on the online version of WordPress like I do, you can infer I took a screenshot of my front matter.  You know that because of the text paired with the photo being so much smaller than the text you’re reading.  WordPress doesn’t allow me to change my font size, which is to say this blog can’t show two different font sizes.

Not until I cheat and digitize some of the text by taking a picture.  Not by taking a photo with my phone, although I could do that were I digitally poor, but by simultaneously keying in a multiple key pattern.

Control-Command-Shift-4, on a Macintosh keyboard to copy the screen within my cursor.  Maybe you think it’s easier on a Windows keyboard.  Try typing degrees as ° instead of the word.  Without a ten-key, you can’t.  I hit Option-Shift-8.  I tend to reference the weather in my running blogs.

Back to the story on text being part of the photo.  It’s also single-spaced.  I would never do that on my blog.  On any other digital platform, line spacing would be double, as it is here.  Could be 1.5, my eyes aren’t that good, but I believe this and most online reading is in a 1.5 to 2.0 line space range.  Someone tell me I’m wrong.  Of course, printed word is single-spaced.  Always.

Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP among friends, forgetting for just this moment that they also do print now, publishes most of their content in a digital form factor.  And their ebook formatting guidelines require, no let’s say suggest since it’s not enforced, single-line spacing.  How stupid is that?

I’ll say this one time.  Leverage the digital space.  Not sure this is original thought.  Gates said to leverage the network.  We can publish double-space within ebooks and it makes for easier reading.  We’re in the habit of single-space for a final compile to print formats but we have double-spaced drafts. We compile our draft manuscripts double-spaced as a convention established on paper to allow an editor space to bleed red ink onto the page.  Wendy.

Back to point, I think KDP converts your digital manuscript to double space.  Or 1.5, somewhere in that range.  I compiled my Indian ebook edition for Full Spectrum Cyberwar at double-space and KDP maintained it, at least within a close range.  It sure as hell ain’t single-spaced.

But I see ebooks single-spaced.  They look horrible  So hard to read.  And there’s no point.  Digital paper is free.  At least, at the scale of a book from zero thousand words to a million words.  Doubling your word count doesn’t measure as a cost factor in the current scope of online storage costs.  I see well-published books using double-space, despite the single-space guidelines.

Shoot, clearly I take it further.  If and when I have to, I take a screenshot.  It’s difficult to embed fonts.  I had trouble when I used Adobe InDesign to compile an ebook.  I couldn’t gain recognition for a font I bought outside of Word or my system.  Stencil.  Ultimately, I bought Garamond too, but I needed Stencil for the military-type font.  Like in MASH.

Even though I own the font, it’s difficult to transfer because of shit software.  So I take a picture.  I screenshot my title page to retain the Stencil font that KDP would otherwise devolve into Times Roman.  It’s pagan in the twenty-second millennium.  This gets me past the enforced guidelines on font type.  To be clear, the Kindle, and most e-readers nowadays, enforce the font on the Kindle device itself.

That’s why the only way to defeat the convention is to digitize the text into a photo.  I probably could have said that in less words.  If my ramblings seem techie to you, what is it you don’t understand about the tech-thriller genre?  RTFM and the EULA.