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What Do You Want from an Excerpt?
Seems simple doesn’t it? Nevertheless it’s a question that should be posed because it is one of the few key things that allow people to take a look inside our books via the Internet.
We often provide brief excerpts of our recent titles to allow people to easily check out what’s inside the book and see if they like it — see if the book is for them. One problem — the excerpt was always in PDF format. This either required someone to download it or view it through their web browser. If there is one thing to object to about the PDF format, it would have to be that it is still too slow, cumbersome and large for anyone to view over the Internet.
We’ve partnered with Google to provide you with a Google Book Search engine so that you can search through all of our books. It works excellently — in fact so much so that we’re struggling to keep up with demand and putting up our titles for you to search and browse through. Don’t forget you can search inside each individual book, not just across all Dundurn titles. Still … this is for the full book with protection, not something that is easily shared and it isn’t an excerpt. So what now?
Well we’re now happy to let you know that there’s now another way you can view our excerpts. Thanks to the good folks at Issuu who have developed an amazing PDF viewer that is fast-loading, interactive and very very smooth looking, you can even share the excerpt with your friends over sites like Facebook, over email or embed it on your own website if you really like it! We’ve decided to make use of Issuu’s technology and you’ll begin to notice that more of our excerpts in the future will accessible via Issuu’s PDF viewer.
One of our first titles to make use of Issuu’s technology is a historical true crime/biography book on a number of forgotten Canadian outlaws called Running with Dillinger by author Edward Butts who also wrote The Desperate Ones which was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award. It features John “Red” Hamilton who was happened to be a member of the notorious Dillinger Gang in the United States so check it out — see what you think of the book and this new way of viewing our excerpts. You can surf on over to the website here.
We’re definitely excited about it and we hope you are too. Here’s the excerpt in case you want direct access. This is just the beginning, we’d love to hear more about what people really want from an excerpt.
Tags: About the author
Ehren is the online marketing specialist at Dundurn Press. He's an avid reader of YA novels, graphic novels, and non-fiction titles. While he's not necessarily a fan of literary fiction, he will literally latch on to the few that seriously catch his interest.
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