Our 3 New EBooks

About a year ago, we gave up on finding a person or agency that could render any of our graphic-rich books into ebooks. So Rick Gordon, our Director of Production, decided to create Shelter ebooks in-house.

Marathon: You Can Do It!, by Jeff Galloway, was the first one. It works on an iPad (and iPhone), as well as the Kindle, and it was a beautiful job; it went on to qualify for a QED (Quality/Excellence/Design) certification from Digital Book World. This certification is given to ebooks that pass a rigid test of quality, functionality, and compatibility. It was also a finalist for a Publishing Innovation Award in non-fiction. See review of it here.

Ebook available here.

Tiny Homes, the 2nd one, was more of a challenge; it contains 1,300 color photos. In May 2012, Rick completed the job, and the (fixed layout) ebook version of Tiny Homes is now available for the iPad (not Kindle). I don’t know of a single ebook of this complexity that compares to this one. It maintains virtually the exactly look and feel of the print version. It even looks good on an iPhone.

Ebook available here.

Stretching Now Rick has completed the e-version of our best-seller (over 3 million copies), Stretching, by Bob Anderson. This one, the biggest technical challenge so far, has lots of interactivity, and some unique and very useful features for navigating through the book and saving personal information.

We had over 20 responses to an earlier post for beta testers and tests are now under way. We’ll make an announcement once we deem it ready to go.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

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