The Four Million

Copyright © 1906 O. Henry. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by Vintage Volumes™

Austin, Texas U.S.A.

www.example.com

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

Henry, O.

The four million / by O. Henry.

p. cm.

“Thought-provoking short storied from the master of the surprise ending.”

LCCN: 6516516584

ISBN: 978-0-12345-678-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-98765-432-1 (hardcover)

1. Short Stories--Classic.

2. Short Stories--20th Century. I. Title.

 

UA65.R68Q68 2008        485’.325’1588

QVI08-700583

tags, but you can also use the poetry mark-up shown on page 57.

  Table of Contents

  The Table of Contents (TOC) is one of the most important parts of your book. A common complaint about eBooks compared to their print counterparts is the inability for the reader to easily see where they are in the book or to navigate between sections. The TOC alleviates that issue. It also allows your readers to easily skip forward or backward in the book and to find sections that they might otherwise overlook altogether, such as a glossary or an index.

  Page numbers in an eBook can be useful or irrelevant. They are useful if the book is used for reference and will be cited in a paper or another book, but even in those cases writing style guides give ways to cite a source when the page numbers are not available. On the Kindle, the text will re-flow when the reader changes the font size, so what they see on the screen is not equivalent to what is on a page in the print book.

  As a result, the page numbers listed in your Table of Contents will be irrelevant to the reader. They can be left in, but in most cases they will just be a distraction. The same is not true of page numbers in a subject index, as we will discuss below.

  To make the TOC in your book useful to the reader, each item should be linked to its position in the book. This goes for all chapter titles, any major subtitles you feel are important, the bibliography, index, about the author, and glossary sections—basically, anything you want the reader to see. That means your TOC may look a little bit different than the one in the print book.

  Also, while it is helpful to have some subheadings listed in your TOC, you should be careful not to put in too many. Some readers may be turned off by the apparent size of the book if every single subheading level is included in the TOC. Usually one level is enough.

  To create the links in your TOC, use the bookmark anchors described on page 90. For example:

 

  ..........

 

Contents

 

Acknowledgements

 

Preface

 

Introduction

 

Chapter 1

 

Chapter 2

 

Section 1

 

Section 2

 

Section 3

 

Chapter 3

 

Chapter 4

 

Bibliography

 

Index

 

About the Author

  There are a few important elements to point out in this example. First, there is a named anchor in front of the

heading, like this: . This anchor is required by the Kindle in order for the link to the Table of Contents in the Kindle book menu to be activated.

  Second, the link to the Introduction is . This is another named anchor required by the Kindle. It determines where the book opens to for the first time after the user buys it and where the “Go to Beginning” link in the Kindle book menu sends the reader. This anchor can be placed anywhere, but the most common place to put it is at the introduction or the first chapter.

  We will talk more about these two links and more in the section about creating the Guide in a Mobipocket book on page 128.

  Third, the paragraphs are given a hanging left indent (width="-30") and are left aligned (class="left"). This is very useful in the Table of Contents because it makes the lines wrap nicely when they are long or when the font size is large, but removes the extra spacing that is inserted when fully-justified lines wrap.

  Fourth, I used the

tag for the subheadings under Chapter 2. While it would be great to have the option of using a poetry-style paragraph tag (described on page 57) the non-breaking spaces at the beginning of the paragraph would cause the Kindle 1 to treat the paragraph as if it includes un-linked text. So, instead of immediately taking the reader to the subheading (the default action when a paragraph only consists of a link), they would first see a pop-up menu and would be required to select the link from there. This is not a problem in the Kindle 2, of course, since it uses the 5-way joystick for navigation.

  Headings

  Closely related to the Table of Contents are the book’s headings and subheadings. There are a variety of ways to format the headings in your books, so let’s look at a few examples. If you want a simple chapter heading, you can do something like this:

 

  ..........

  gebreak />

 

Chapter 1

 

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident...

  The heading is centered and given a top margin of 30 pixels, and the first paragraph is given a no-indent style with a top margin of its own. You could also give the paragraph a more pronounced top margin, a style that is common in some print books. Notice that the anchor tag is in front of the

tag. As mentioned above, placing the anchor there will mitigate problems with the style of the heading being lost when the user follows the link from the Table of Contents.

  Another example:

 

  ..........

 

 

1

 

A Shifting Reef

 

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident...

  In this example, the chapter number is placed in an

tag, and the chapter name is placed in an

. This formatting imitates another layout commonly found in print books.

  The possibilities here are practically endless, so it should be fairly easy to mimic whatever style is used in your print book.

  Subheadings

  If your book has multiple levels of subheadings, it is important to clearly identify the heading structure through unique formatting so that your readers can follow the flow of your content easily. As I mentioned in the section on headings on page 67, the

and

headings are not really that different in the Kindle, so you essentially have 5 levels of formatting to work with. You can increase the number of available levels by adding italics and all-caps formatting, and by changing the alignment of the headings.

  Also, it is important to add a top margin to your subheadings. Usually 20px or 30px is sufficient, but headings with no top margin can get lost in the text of your book.

  Pull Quotes and Sidebars

  Since the Kindle does not support floating elements, the placement and formatting of pull quotes and sidebars becomes a little bit tricky. The first issue to resolve is placement. In print books, pull quotes and sidebars are often placed wherever they fit within the layout, such as on a page that does not have any other special formatting or images. These elements may not make sense in the text where they would be automatically placed by the conversion process, so you should ensure that they are moved in front of the paragraph to which they apply or to another logical place.

  Pull Quotes

  Formatting pull quotes is actually quite easy. You can place them in

tags, along with

---

tags in

tags above and below, to set them apart from the text.

 

---

 

We must have a concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can comprehend it.

 

---

  You could also add a class="right" (with the proper CSS) or align="right" to the quote’s

tag to give it a right-aligned style.

  As was mentioned above, the Kindle 2 supports the use of HTML tables, but the Kindle 1 does not. The great thing about table support on the Kindle 2 is that tables can have borders and table cells can have a background color. While using tables for tabular data is not suggested, here is a great little hack that lets you format your pull quotes in a way that looks great on the Kindle 2 and still looks good on the Kindle 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We must have a concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can comprehend it.

 

  The div tag around this pull quote ensures that the table and text are centered on the page. The table contains cellpadding attribute with a value of 10 that ensures the table cells have some spacing, and a margin-left: 0 CSS value that removes the default left margin from the table. The

---

tags are given a full with, and the middle cell with the text in it has a center alignment, a border, and a background color.

  Here is what the above code looks like on the Kindle 2:

  And here is what it looks like on the Kindle 1:

  The extra spacing below the first

---

tag on the Kindle 1 and the lack of cell padding on the right of the Kindle 2 text are the only issues. Other than that, the pull quote looks good on both devices.

  Should you use this hack? That’s up to you. The key is to know that there are hacks out there; all you have to do is play with the code.

  Sidebars

  Sidebars can be formatted in a manner similar to pull quotes. Placing

---

tags above and below usually works well in showing that the sidebar content is not the main book content, and you could even double the tags to make sure the reader sees them. However, since the text in a sidebar is usually much longer than in a pull quote, formatting the text in

tags is not usually a good idea. It just makes the text harder to read and makes it fill up more space in the book. You could format it in italics or small caps to make it stand out more, or you might find another format that makes sense in the context of the book design.

  However you decide to format them, it is important to make sure the reader can tell the difference between these elements and the regular book text. Without the ability to use background colors, you are limited to using horizontal rules, spacing, and even font size changes in creative ways to accomplish this goal.

  Footnotes and Endnotes

  A footnote is a note placed at the bottom of the page, while an endnote is a note placed at the end of the chapter or at the end of the book. In Kindle eBooks all footnotes should be converted into endnotes. Since the concept of “pages” is gone, it is much easier to direct the reader to a linked endnote than it is to force them to scroll down and read a footnote that is interjected into the book content. (Note: In this book, I use the term “footnotes” in the more general sense that includes both of these types of notes.)

  Linking to a footnote requires the same type of bookmark links you use in the Table of Contents. Within the text, the footnote reference is usually superscripted, and the tag can go inside or outside the ^{tags. In the Footnotes section the note number is usually also superscripted, but the} should be placed outside the paragraph.

 

The year 1866 was signalized¹ by a remarkable incident...

  ..........

 

¹ To make conspicuous: distinguish, mark [back]

  On the Kindle 1, when a reader clicks on the line in the text with the superscripted “1” they will be given the option in a pop-up menu to follow the link. On the Kindle 2 the user can navigate the cursor to the link with the joystick and click on it directly. In either case, they will be taken to the correct footnote in your Footnotes section via the anchor tag.

  To get back to the text, the user just has to press the Back button on their Kindle. While there is some confusion in the Kindle user community about the functionality of the Back button, most users intuitively understand that they should use it to get back to where they were reading after clicking on a link.

  To eliminate confusion and to ensure easy navigation, it is a best practice to also include a link at the end of the footnote back to the beginning of the paragraph where the footnote number is in the book. This also allows the user to peruse the footnotes section independently.

  Indexes

  An index is an important part of most non-fiction books, and can be valuable for quickly finding specific information or fo
r researching related topics in the book. In Kindle books, the page numbers in indexes can be turned into links to the book text, allowing the user to easily navigate to the content they are researching.

  This functionality also utilizes bookmark links, just like the Table of Contents and Footnotes. Your first task is to add a named anchor for each page of the hardcopy into your eBook. Usually the page numbers are ignored in the conversion process from PDF or Microsoft Word into HTML and are not included in the eBook. You will have to go back through the book and add page number anchor tags (e.g., ) manually to the text of the book. These tags should be added where the top of the page content begins, not the bottom. If a heading or a new paragraph begins at the top of the page, place the anchor outside the heading or paragraph tag.

 

My friend the reporter left me, and I wandered further afield....

  If the page begins in the middle of the paragraph, place the anchor in front of the word at the top of the page.

 

Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as clear as a steel engraving...

  If the word is hyphenated across the page break, I usually do not split the word with the anchor tag since that can mess up the search results for that word on the Kindle. Instead, place the anchor after the word and remove the hyphen.

  After your page numbers are all added back into the text you can tackle the index formatting. Usually, an index will have two or three levels of indentation underneath main topics. These indentations are most easily formatted with the poetry-type formatting described on page 57. Not only does that formatting allow you to manually adjust the left indent to your liking, it also comes with a built-in hanging indent, making the text much more readable. Your index should look something like this when you are finished:

 

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