Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class, page 10

Getting High Quality Art From archive.org

OK, I hope I've convinced you that there is some really good free art in the page images at archive.org. However, the art you see when you flip through the pages online is NOT high enough resolution to use in a book. The good news is that much higher resolution images are available.

Check this URL:

http://archive.org/details/mahabharat...

Notice that on the left side of the page is an entry that looks like this:

All Files: HTTPS Torrent (2/0)

Click on HTTPS and you'll see this:

Index of /29/items/mahabharata01ramauoft/

../
mahabharata01ramauoft.djvu 22-Apr-2009 08:41 93959287
mahabharata01ramauoft.gif 22-Apr-2009 05:57 306063
mahabharata01ramauoft.pdf 22-Apr-2009 12:16 126285010
mahabharata01ramauoft_abbyy.gz 22-Apr-2009 06:12 133
mahabharata01ramauoft_archive.torrent 03-Aug-2012 04:37 25433
mahabharata01ramauoft_bw.pdf 22-Apr-2009 18:12 111039135
mahabharata01ramauoft_dc.xml 08-Apr-2009 15:29 407
mahabharata01ramauoft_djvu.xml 22-Apr-2009 06:12 89
mahabharata01ramauoft_files.xml 03-Aug-2012 04:37 5475
mahabharata01ramauoft_flippy.zip 22-Apr-2009 06:12 62902234
mahabharata01ramauoft_jp2.zip 22-Apr-2009 05:54 701398920
mahabharata01ramauoft_marc.xml 08-Apr-2009 15:29 3247
mahabharata01ramauoft_meta.mrc 08-Apr-2009 15:29 830
mahabharata01ramauoft_meta.xml 24-Nov-2010 21:29 1650
mahabharata01ramauoft_metasource.xml 08-Apr-2009 15:29 374
mahabharata01ramauoft_raw_jp2.zip 22-Apr-2009 05:52 795061048
scandata.zip

Of all of these, this is the one you want:

mahabharata01ramauoft_jp2.zip

This is about 70 megabytes of high resolution images in a zip file. Download it and unzip it.

You'll end up with several hundred page images in jp2 format.

JP2? What the heck is that? I hear you ask. Well, it is like JPEG but more highly compressed. It is also pretty useless, but the good news is you can convert it to JPGs.

How? By using a free software program called Image Magick:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/ind...

Versions for several operating systems are available. Download the one you need and install it. If you have any notion of becoming a serious author I'd recommend using Linux. If you see yourself as anything less you can use whatever you like.

Image Magick does its magick from the command line. If you have three hundred odd page images to convert from JP2 to JPEG you can set the command going, do something else while it chugs away, and when you return they are all converted.

Linux has an excellent command line. Windows is tolerable. Mac is supposed to be pretty good, but don't ask me how to find it.

The command you want to use, from the directory where the images are, is this:

mogrify -format jpg -quality 90% -verbose *.jp2

When it is done running you can delete all the JP2 files. Now you have a bunch of high resolution page images featuring beautiful, public domain, art. Or they would feature that if the pages weren't all yellow and crooked. There must be a way to use the computer to fix that, right?

Stay tuned.

Fonts For Your Book Cover

You can make a pretty nice book cover using just words, if those words are in a good font. It is possible to buy fonts, but not necessary because there are many free fonts you can get. This site was recommended by an article at Create Space, and I recommend it too:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

For book covers Create Space recommends using Display Fonts, which are designed to look good large. They recommend Chunk Five, which I used for the cover of The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-And-Ti...

I've been using a lot of Yataghan lately:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mahabharata...

For my first novel I mixed Yataghan and Akashi:

http://www.amazon.com/Shree-Krishna-S...

The choice of font emphasizes the words in the title. Some of these fonts are a bit much for a book title, but some might be just what you need. If I did a reprint of White Shadows In The South Seas the Trade Winds font would be excellent. A murder mystery set in the 1920's could certainly find several good possibilities for Art Decoish fonts.

Just choosing a good font is only the beginning. While I used plain black lettering for my memoir and I thought it came out nicely, for most covers you should fancy up your fonts with special effects. For example, the two covers that used Yataghan used light blue lettering with a dark drop shadow effect to give a 3D look. That's something I would do for just about any cover. You can also do fancier stuff. Check out the page heading from this link:

https://sites.google.com/site/bhaktaj...

or this one:

https://sites.google.com/site/uncleji...

This kind of thing, used tastefully, can make your book cover look like a professional did it. At the end of the day, that is what you want. There are covers that make people want to buy books, but you need a real artist to make something like that and as a self published author you can't afford that. What you can make yourself is a cover image that is good enough that it won't turn off a potential reader.

So we've covered free art and free fonts. What remains is getting that free stuff looking good on a book cover.

Stay tuned.

Getting Art For Your Book Cover

You might consider buying a stock photo for your book cover. This can be a good idea, but buying a stock photo just gives you the right to use it. It doesn't stop anyone else from using it. Consider the following:

You Have Seven Messages

http://www.amazon.com/You-Have-Seven-...

The Miracle Girls

http://books.google.com/books/about/T...

These Girls

http://books.google.com/books?id=x2Av...

I think the second two got replacement covers, but the links clearly show that originally they used the same stock photo.

So what other alternatives do you have?

Two, really.

1). Photos you take yourself.

2). Photos and art in the public domain.

The first one is an easy one. With digital cameras and smart phones so common you don't need to be a professional photographer to get something useful. On my last trip to Europe I took over 400 photos, and most of them turned out pretty well.

If you have non-digital photos you can convert them to digital with a scanner. Many printers today have a built in scanner that will let you scan at 300 DPI or higher, which is the resolution you need for book covers. If your old pictures are faded you can use free software called The GIMP to make them look like new.

I used scanned photos for the cover of The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim:

www.amazon.com/The-Life-And-Times-Bha...

The second possibility is a bit more work, but can give you some really good art. Public domain art means art that nobody owns. In the United States this is determined in two different ways. The first way, and the most foolproof, is anything published before 1923.

There is also a certain amount of material published after 1923 where the copyright was not renewed after 14 years. Theoretically there is a lot of this, but practically it is VERY difficult to prove that copyrights were never renewed.

The law was changed a few years ago as a result of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which basically said that anything protected by copyright when the act was enacted would have a copyright term of 95 years.

So basically if it was published after 1923, forget it.

Having said that, there is a lot of good art in the public domain. The trick is finding it.

One good source is old books. You could look for actual old books yourself, but you don't have to. A website archive.org has page images from thousands of old books. I found some really good full page illustrations from a series of books starting with this one:

http://archive.org/details/mahabharat...

You can page through this book online. The book is in Hindi, but that doesn't make the illustrations less usable. There are a lot of books in the public domain at archive.org and one of them might have something you can use for free.

However, you'll need high definition page images for your book cover. The ones you can look at online are not high enough resolution. Also, some of these pages are yellow with age, or crooked. How can you get high resolution images that are straight, cropped, with colors corrected to look like new or better?

Stay tuned.

How To Make A Book Cover That Isn't Lousy

Lots of people are self publishing books these days, including me. If you self publish you need to make your own book cover or pay someone to do it. I recently read a posting from an author in a Goodreads forum where she complained that she was no good at Photoshop and wondered if anyone would make her a book cover image for free. Somebody replied that he could do it, but he would charge thirty dollars. This got me thinking.

You can get a professional to design your book cover, and you can even use a website like 99 Designs to get people to design a lot of book covers for you, and you only pay for the one you actually use. Either way you're talking serious money. Certainly more than thirty bucks. Even I wouldn't do a book cover for that amount of money. I write as a hobby. I am willing to spend months writing a novel that might never make any money at all. However, I am NOT going to make a cover for somebody else's book without being paid a reasonable amount for my time.

As an author, on the other hand, I am like a small businessman. I absolutely hate the idea of having employees. According to Karl Marx, employees have a surplus value to their labor. What you pay them should be less than what their work is worth to you. The difference between what their labor is worth and what you make from their work is the surplus value. As a businessman you make money from the surplus value of your employee's work.

Now if you have an established business it's easier to like your employees, because their work has a significant surplus value. If your business is just getting started, you resent having employees because they are guaranteed to make money from your work, but you aren't. And that sucks. So you do the work yourself.

In my own case I have another reason to do my own book covers, etc. I actually am fairly good at it. By this I mean that I know my way around a computer and I know what it can do. I do computer work for a living, and under my real name I've written books about them (that don't sell either). So I know how to format an e-book like a professional, and I know how to make a book cover that doesn't suck.

Before I tell you how to do that yourself, let's look at some book covers. First, a cover of a science fiction book, one of my favorites:

http://www.amazon.com/Web-Spider-Wiza...

The art on this cover is by Rowena. No way in hell can you afford a cover like this. I've been to science fiction conventions and have seen exhibits of science fiction cover art, and the people who do it are real artists. I don't know if any of them ever get rich, but they deserve more money than you'd be able to pay them.

Now let's look at another cover:

http://www.amazon.com/Reamde-A-Novel-...

and another one:

http://www.amazon.com/Franny-Zooey-J-...

I like these covers. They definitely look professional, but you could make a cover like these pretty easily with The GIMP and some free fonts. The covers put the reader on notice that the authors think their words alone (and their names) are enough to sell the book.

As an unknown author you might not be able to get away with a cover like this. So let's compromise. We'll do a cover with a nice font and some free art. Like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Mahabharata-Boo...

Now that doesn't suck! Any author would be proud to have a book cover like that, and I'm going to tell you how to make one.

Stay tuned.

The Complete Mahabharata In English!

If you read The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim you know that I had read quite a bit about Krishna before my first visit to a Hare Krishna temple. One of the things I had read was the Mahabharata.

Correction: a summary of the Mahabharata.

The Mahabharata is one of the world's longest books. It weighs in at 200,000 verses, making it longer than the Bible (31,103 verses) or any other book you could imagine.

There are a number of summaries of the book, but only one English translation of the whole thing: that of Kisari Mohan Ganguli.

Kisari Mohan Ganguli

The summaries take the eighteen books of the whole and condense it down to one. Some of them are pretty good. I like the one by William Buck, for instance.

William Buck

Having said that, if you are serious about reading about Krishna (something that Hare Krishna devotees must be) you cannot be satisfied with a summary of the longest book about Him composed by a non-believer.

It is a fact, however, that the Hare Krishnas have to content themselves with a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is a mere 700 verse extract. No serious person will deny that it is the most important part of the whole, but still you have to wonder what you're missing by not having the whole thing.

Imagine being the sort of person who takes Ayn Rand seriously. You hear about the novel Atlas Shrugged and how it is her greatest work, but the only part of it that is available in your own language is John Galt's radio speech. The only other information you have on the the book is a Wikibooks summary written by Noam Chomsky.

It's actually worse than that.

Now there is a way for a devotee to get the complete English translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, and soon there will be another one.

The first way is to get the e-book from Project Gutenberg. Since it is such a long work there are four e-books:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15474

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15475

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15476

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15477

You can get these for free, and Amazon has its own version of these texts which you can also get for free.

Now while I love e-books there are some books that really should be bound and printed. For instance, I just bought a King James Bible with illustrations by Gustave Dore. There is no way to make a e-book that is as good as that printed book is. No doubt you have your own favorite books that you absolutely must own as bound and printed volumes. The Mahabharata falls into that category.

Now when I say "bound and printed" I mean something beautiful that has been labored over with love. I do NOT mean printing off the Project Gutenberg web pages and slapping a quick and dirty cover on it.

Like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Mahabharata-Kri...

There are several paperback editions of the Ganguli translation of the book for sale at Amazon, and all of them are quick and dirty efforts.

I am making my own Create Space edition of the book. It will be more readable, more attractive, more complete, and lower priced than all the others.

How? stay tuned.

Second giveaway Friday, September 6th, 2013!

Tomorrow you will be able to get Shree Krishna and the Singularity on your Kindle for FREE!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EMGB2MI

The sad state of religion in Science Fiction

It has been a long time since my last post. I spent most of that time finishing up my novel. I always intended that this post, when I got around to writing it, would be about religion in science fiction.

There have not been many science fiction novels with religious themes. Religion is a kind of background noise in some stories: the Orange Catholic Bible in Dune, The Force in Star Wars, and probably some others. It isn't the main thrust of the story. I can only think of a few examples where religion is really the theme of the story:

Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

Project Pope and A Choice Of Gods by Clifford D. Simak (which I have not read).

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Behold The Man by Michael Moorcock

Valis and Do Androids dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Quite a few science fiction novels seem to suggest that religion is something the human race will outgrow. I am not a religious person in the ordinary sense, but I don't see humanity giving up on religion any time soon. Humans are the only living entities on Earth that have intelligence, opposable thumbs, and religion. These things go together. A lot of unintelligent things have been done because of religion, but without intelligence you don't have religion. You might need the thumbs too.

The other observation I will make about religion is that humanity will never settle on just one religion. There will always be more than one, and their followers will always think unkind thoughts about each other. I'd like to think that at some point we stop killing each other over differences in belief, but the unkind thoughts are always going to be there.

So religion will always have a future, and that future is a suitable subject for science fiction. To make a science fiction novel about religion you need to have a story that could not happen in the present day. Something has to happen either during the story or before the story begins that changes things and causes someone to have a problem that is both religious and science fictional. It could involve the creation of a totally new religion, like Heinlein's novel did, or changes that affect an existing religion, like Miller's novel.

In my own novel a group of scientists develop a machine that can feel pleasure and pain and is self aware. This is a staple of science fiction that goes back to the play R.U.R., and maybe further back than that. If somebody actually did that it would pretty much disprove a central tenet of Hare Krishna beliefs. In the world we live in this would have no effect upon the Hare Krishna movement whatsoever. They already believe that the Moon landings were a hoax, so believing in one more hoax would not be an issue for them. They could easily do it.

To actually make this work as a science fiction story you need to have a character who is an exemplary practitioner of the faith who cannot simply ignore the reality of a conscious machine. Something in her life experiences will make this impossible. What she does about this is the story.

But about her, more later.

The sad state of machine consciousness in Science Fiction

Among other things, my novel will concern the idea of whether a machine can be conscious. This is hardly a new idea in science fiction, so why bother? In my opinion the question of how a machine can achieve consciousness has almost never been dealt with well.

In the vast majority of SF novels on the subject the way the machine (usually a big computer) achieves self awareness the same way Herbie The Love Bug does. In other words, magic.

A good example is the book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. This is perhaps my favorite Heinlein novel, but it contains a character Mike who is a computer that becomes self aware. The explanation given is that Mike started out as a normal computer but the authorities on the Moon needed to make it more and more powerful and at one point the machine had so much processing power that it just woke up and became Mike.

Back when that novel was written the average person had never seen a computer up close and didn't know anything about how they worked. I'm guessing that Heinlein didn't. In 2013 we have computers far more powerful than anything a Lunar colony would ever need (not to mention the fact that the International Space Station uses laptop computers for most of its computing needs and a Lunar colony would too) but not one of our supercomputers has become self aware.

If you make a big computer you just have a big computer. A big computer is no more likely to achieve consciousness than a vintage Volkswagen Beetle is.

While I can forgive Heinlein for this I have a harder time forgiving the authors that came later and used exactly the same idea, or worse.

Consider SkyNet in the Terminator movies.

Consider Colossus, The Forbin Project. Two supercomputers, one in the U.S. and the other in the U.S.S.R., become one self aware computer when they discover each other and start communicating with each other.

Consider Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2. Apparently in those movies a robot gets hit by lightning and that gets consciousness going. (I haven't seen these movies and don't intend to).

Consider Electric Dreams, a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac story involving a personal computer that becomes self aware when his owner spills champagne on it. (I did go to see this one. Bud Cort plays the computer. It had a decent soundtrack featuring music by Jeff Lynne and others).

Magic. Nothing but magic.

Did anybody do this well? The only one I'm aware of is The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan.

Maybe my novel can be a second example of a good treatment of this idea. That's my hope, anyway.

So what does the future of the Hare Krishna movement have to do with this?

What indeed?

How do you do a Hare Krishna Science Fiction story?

After I left the Hare Krishna movement I wrote the first draft of what would become The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim on a Royal Sabre manual typewriter. After that I considered the amount of work it would take to get it into final draft form, plus the likelihood that anyone would publish it, and gave up. It would remain in a box, ignored, for thirty years.

I did not give up writing, though, and it seemed to me that what I had learned in the Hare Krishnas could be used as the basis for a novel. I had never managed to write a novel before, but I had this notion that I could write a story about Krishna, the ordinary human who would one day be considered a god.

The problem with that idea is that Krishna only makes sense as a god. Just as an ordinary guy named Brian could not do what Jesus is supposed to have done, an ordinary man could not possibly be used as the basis for the god called Krishna.

It was a really lousy idea for a novel, but I spent a long time trying to do research for it, and I did manage to get through a draft of that too. The less said about that draft the better. Unlike my memoir, I did throw this one out.

Now that I have finished and published my memoir and some people have actually liked it I have given some more thought to the idea of using my experiences in HK in a novel. Specifically, I wanted it to be a science fiction novel.

The Hare Krishna movement had its own idea about what its future would be. Back in 1979 some of its leaders thought there would be a devastating atomic war and afterwards the Hare Krishna movement would become the dominant religion on the planet.

After thirty years of not writing novels I have more sense than to try to use that as the basis for a novel. Anyone who tried would wind up with something worse than the Left Behind series, if such a thing is possible.

The key to using the HK's in a novel, I believe, is to describe the movement as it is, not as it sees itself, and to invent a future for it that it could never imagine for itself. I think I have done that much in the novel I am currently writing.

About that novel, more later.

Free Books!

In a previous post I complained that Amazon's Kindle catalog was filling up with Project Gutenberg titles where the submitter just put together a quick and dirty cover image, submitted the PG version otherwise unchanged, and charged three bucks for the results.

Amazon has cracked down on this practice. From now on if you want to submit a public domain book to the Kindle Store you have to make it significantly different from the PG version. That means a new translation, or a study guide, or original
illustrations. Most of the crap artists I complained about have had their books blocked.

That's the good news. The bad news for me personally is that a couple of my books got the same treatment. I felt that my case was different from the others for the following reasons:

1). I produced the original PG submissions.

2). I then improved on the original submissions by reformatting them for the Kindle. The PG version is a web page converted to an EPUB then run through Kindlegen. Usually this gives you something readable on a Kindle but not up to the standards Kindle users should expect. In the case of books of poetry the result can be unreadable.

3). I only charged .99. I wasn't getting rich from these. I just wanted them to be visible to Kindle users.

Amazon does not feel that formatting changes alone are enough to make the books better than the free PG versions. This is OK with me. I have published the ebooks in question at the Internet Archive and you may download them for free there:

Vidyapati Bangiya Padabali: Songs of the Love of Radha and Krishna

Chaitanya's Life And Teachings: An abridged translation of the Bengali Chaitanya-charit-amrita

Happy reading!