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The Great Gatsby, and Version 1.3

by NJB // // Lafayette, CO

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The classic cover of The Great Gatsby

As you may have heard, The Great Gatsby is now in the Public Domain. One of my goals for 2021 was bring this classic novel to Nantucket E-Books™.

You can read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic here.

As I was adapting the text this week, I thought it would be fun to also create e-books of all the books mentioned within The Great Gatsby. I think this will be very useful for readers and educators, as it provides a glimpse into the literary world of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. The other e-books I created were Clarence Mulford’s western Hopalong Cassidy, the Great War romance Simon Called Peter, and the travelogue Stoddard Lectures Volume I.

In the course of making these books, I began wanting some new features, and found some new bugs, so Version 1.3 was developed. The biggest new features are markup for drop caps (the big letter at the start of fancy books), and something I call ‘flippable images.’

It’s hard to explain ‘flippable images’ in words, but it’s a way to make certain images feel embedded within the e-book, thanks to the wonders of PNG transparency layers. Flippable images are ideal for images of handwriting, or monochrome drawings such as sketches. When set up properly, they will also respond to dark mode. You can read more about how to use flippable images in the Shanty manual.

A ‘flippable image’ at work!

You can read more about what’s in Version 1.3 on the versions page. This was the first update where I tried to implement an actual ‘system’, and I think it helped. I will produce a livestream covering the updates in 1.3 this coming week.

Lastly, I wanted to share this cover I made for Simon Called Peter. I’m a big fan of SVG files. SVGs look sharp at any size, so you can get a high-quality image out of a tiny, tiny file. The image below is only a kilobyte. I use SVG for all the menu icons in Nantucket E-Books™, and I hope to use this platform to realize some of the incredible potential that SVGs have to offer.

The SVG cover for Simon Called Peter.
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