Author: golgotha_admin

A new, updated release of Derby Daze [squareformat] is available. This isn’t just an errata update, but a complete reprocessing of all the original images.

With over a decade since the last book was published, this editing round represented a fresh eye to the aesthetics of the works, and had them go through a completely different image processing workflow, using Capture One.

Colours have been shifted to a stronger overall gold tone, and there has been a subtle cull of images from the original edition.

This was a bit of a sleeper we switched to working upon while Day And Night is in progress, but this is our newest eBook Release; Fish Noir.

It’s a collection of urban landscape (seascape?) photography from Mosman Bay in Sydney, originally shot in 2013. These images have been worked on several times since then, but we finally felt like they were ready to be offered in this format, to be considered as pairs of colour, and black & white versions.

As always, it’s available from our store directly, in DRM-free, standard Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

Our current project, a book of photography from Matt Godden’s 2019 Japan trip. The text is still a work in progress, but the imagery and book layout is complete. We expect it to be ready in the next couple of months.

Today we removed all our books from sale on the Apple Books Store. From here on, sales will only be through our own Fastspring storefront. The why of it, is best understood from previous posts here, suffice to say selling on Apple’s store is a net-negative for us, so after 11 years, we’re done.

Updates will not be made for Apple Store versions.

Anyone who owns an Apple Books version can get in contact with us, and upon confirmation of their purchase from Apple, we’ll provide a complimentary crossgrade to the Golgotha Graphics Fastspring version.

After some twelve months of rebuilding publishing workflows, we’re happy to announce an update to Surfing The Deathline. This revision, though subtle, represents a milestone in the long-term serviceability and survival of the work from an archival perspective.

Actual changes:

• Thought bubbles have been redesigned to have a noise pattern edge dither, rather than a smooth gradient. This was to solve an optical illusion / screen rendering artefact where the main white body of the thought bubble appeared to be less bright than the edge of the gradient crossing into it.
• Sound effects have been modified in some places to have larger fonts, consistent colour throughout scenes, and less size variance.
• Correction of a visual glitch caused by CMYK and RGB black having a different tone when the same degree of transparency effects are applied.

These updates have been applied to both the Apple Books versions, and the Golgotha Graphics Direct Editions.

Apple Books versions should show up as available updates within the application. Golgotha Graphics Direct Editions should be available with the original download link received when purchasing the books.

We expect this to be the final set of updates to the work, as it is by any reasonable grounds “complete”, and we’ve exhausted our errata searching. In the next couple of months we will probably discontinue our presence on Apple Books, as we consider it a deprecated platform.

• Surfing The Deathline – Full Course
• Surfing The Deathline – First Dose
• Surfing The Deathline – Second Dose
• Surfing The Deathline – Third Dose
• Surfing The Deathline – Fourth Dose
• Surfing The Deathline – Fifth Dose

Golgotha Graphics has published about reasons for diversifying away from the Apple Books Store, but up until recently the Apple Books application (formerly iBooks, currently Books) itself was both a gold standard for reader applications, and for the Mac version, a vital piece in the EPUB production process.

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

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To explain, an EPUB eBook is a website with certain specialised attributes, which is then zip compressed into a single file. Authoring an EPUB book, for people who really care about their craft, is something best done at the code level – editing the HTML and CSS to both place content, and control that content’s appearance.

There are significant technicalities when making the fixed-layout EPUB books we publish – comics and fine-art photo books, which require this code-level precision when authoring.

The role of Apple Books for Mac, was to push an EPUB project to an attached iPad as a proof, while it was still under development and not zip compressed. This ability to update the source files in the proof on the Mac, and see those changes in the actual deployment target made it a vital part of the EPUB authoring process.

This meant an author could change a word, or a colour in the authoring files, save the individual file, and then watch their book on the iPad update in real time as the changes are pushed to the device. Frequently, it would even stay on the same open page in the book, and refresh the page to the new content. This was literally the core of the EPUB authoring process.

With macOS Monterey, Apple discarded the Mac version of Apple Books, and replaced it with the iPad version, running through a compatibility technology. The iPad version lacks the entire push-to-device proofing workflow, and so the Mac version has lost that workflow.

What was previously:

1. Change an authoring file.
2. Save the change.
3. eBook is automatically updated on the iPad to reflect the change while reading position is unchanged.

Is now:

1. Delete the old proof copy from the iPad (because images are cached so aggressively that changes to them won’t show up unless the file is physically removed and re-added).
2. Change an authoring file.
3. Save the change.
4. Airdrop your development version of the file to your iPad. Apple Books is now buggy for airdropped proofs, so you have to drop the EPUB into the Mac version of Apple Books, then (new steps below)…
5. Make sure you have enough storage on your iCloud plan.
6. Wait for your EPUB file to upload to iCloud.
7. Wait for your EPUB file to download to your iPad.
8. Manually page through the book to find the updated part.

If the change isn’t quite right?

Do those steps again – one keyboard shortcut for Save, the old way, Vs. multiple steps and bandwidth use as the new sweet solution.

Every. Single. Change.

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Apple, for its part, avoids addressing this workflow regression by stating that EPUB authoring has now moved to the Pages application. This would be fine, except that the Pages application outputs terrible, unprofessional spaghetti code, and the image compression settings provide for no real control over the quality of the compressed images produced.

The result of this; Pages and Apple Books are unfit for purpose as authoring tools.

The only real solution, therefore, is to use an older copy of Apple Books on an older Mac, running a pre-Monterey version of macOS, since Apple Books can’t see a connected iPad from within a (VMWare Fusion) virtual machine, even though iTunes and Finder in that virtual machine can.

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After 30 plus years of using Macs, we are profoundly disappointed that a bad decision to replace a Mac app with a less-capable iPad version, has resulted in this entire task becoming something we simply cannot do as well with a contemporary Mac, as we could with the systems of a few years ago.

We are giving significant thought to abandoning the EPUB format entirely, and moving to simple CBR / CBZ archives, which will probably see us pull all our books from the Apple Books Store entirely, and stop expending effort on optimising for Apple devices.

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Ultimately, the solution to this would require Apple to return the proofing workflow to the iPad version of Apple Books, where it would then carry over to the Mac version. A good solution, which could avoid the need to engineer a direct Mac-to-iPad push-to-device system, would be to allow Apple Books on an iPad to load, and maintain a live connection to an uncompressed proof directory that is stored on a network share, via WebDAV or SMB. That way an author can just enable file sharing to the directory in which they keep their development EPUB, load the development version as a proof from the iPad directly, and the whole push-to-device problem is solved.

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Edit 21 / 08 / 2024: We have just tried to do an update to existing books, using Apple’s new web-based submission portal. The field where you spawn a file browser to select a book file to upload didn’t work until we had gone to the next screen in the process, and then navigated back. Also, the web portal offers no way to submit, or edit screenshots for a book.

Though it is considered deprecated, iTunes Producer still runs on macOS Ventura, and still acts as a full-featured professional file submission application. So, we eventually used it to do the submission. This however only hardens our resolve that Apple Books is a mismanaged platform, best considered deprecated. We will probably exit it entirely in 2025.

Edit 29 / 08 / 2024: Apple have advised that the lack of any ability to submit, or modify screenshots from a book within the new Web Portal is not a bug, but the tool working as designed. We would wonder why no one thought to question how that was supposed to work for makers of photo books and graphic novels, but the announcement of a mass layoff at the Apple Books division this week leads us to suspect it isn’t a priority.

Attached is a submission to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Services Inquiry. It brings together a number of ideas which relate to Golgotha Graphics’ eventual decision to cease bringing new content to the Apple Books Store, and to pursue an independent sales model.

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