Saturday, December 24, 2022

X-ray Yankee Zebra

I just added X-ray to all my Kindle books. Not that it does much. X-ray is an inline annotation system Amazon was pushing, but when I went through my Kindle collection, I only found one author had turned it on. From within a Kindle reader or equivalent software you can generally call up dictionary, Wikipedia, and maybe a few other things besides.

Which is why I spent a few evenings at it. I figure, if they can just click to find the Wikipedia entry on "Athens," if I am going to serve the reader who clicks, it needs to be an experience they won't get by side-swiping to the Wikipedia answer.

There's no clear cut-off point so I stopped when I felt like stopping. It will only show up on new sales, anyhow, unless I talk them into a "push." What few sales there are. I put A Fox's Wedding on free giveaway last weekend and moved five (5) copies.

Also found a few more errors. But that always happens. Unfortunately, the X-ray console won't tell you where in the book it found a mis-spelled name. Or anything it found. It does its best algorithmic attempt to locate nouns and that means when it says "Hey, there's a character named Bob that needs an entry" if there really is or it got confused by "Bob's your uncle" or "bob for apples."

Nor will it allow you to split or sort -- not good news if you have more than one Steve, and it is kind of a big point in the first book that there is more than one entity going around with the name Athena!

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Finally back to work on Sometimes a Fox and even started watching Amelie. Realized, though...I'm really not that into Paris. Maybe that's why this one is such a slog.

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A relative wanted to see what Doctor Who was all about. I didn't have DVDs I'd recommend (they don't do streaming). Ended up purchasing -- they were really, really cheap! -- complete collections for the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th doctors. Minus one or two Christmas Specials and Children at Need episodes. The bad boy, the pretty boy, the young boy with old eyes, and the old boy with attack eyebrows. But not Jodi. She hasn't quite finished, and there isn't a cheap box set for her.

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