Australian Poetry Journal in eBook form

If you’re signed up to the Australian Poetry Journal’s fortnightly newsletter you'll already know that APJ’s plan to release their journal in ebook form has happened.  If you're a financial member of Australian Poetry, you should have got a code to download a copy for free.

Sadly I am not a member (yet) but decided to take advantage of their Tomely ( Tomely is a service which allows vendors to offer discounts if purchasers announce their purchase on social media) offer for a copy!

So I ended up forking out about $8 for what has been up until now a print publication I just can’t afford.

Now any small publisher who takes on eBooks is brave, especially if it’s not been part of their workflow before, the different formats and the differing devices can make a meal of a straight prose text.  Producing a text filled with poetry and its sometimes bespoke formatting, no doubt calls for long hours and stiff drinks.

So first impressions:

• Egads! A 30mb epub file - it turns out that this issue contains a few images (photographs/concrete poetry) and embedded multimedia files.
• Ok, once over the file size shock I opened it in ADE and in Calibre viewer and it seems to work well *
• There’s scads of top quality poetry, some essays and reviews

*Apart from the fact that I can’t view any of the multimedia files – don’t worry APJ are aware of the situation. If you experience the same issue let them know.

And the price feels about right to me, in that it’s probably worth more than that but it’s about what the market will bear.  I hope that they sort out the multimedia issue because the concept is cool.  I am not sure about the 30mb file size though – I dare not load it on my Voxto test it out.

All in all a good first foray into the digital realm you can test it till the cows come home but you never really know until the product is released.