I’ve been having a great time converting Tarchin’s books into full digital editions that can be sold on Kindle and Kobo. So far I’ve completed Daily Puja, Foundations of Mindfulness, Walking in Wisdom, Breathing, and Natural Awakening. I’m hoping to have Growth & Unfolding and True Refuge completed by end of this year. These have been published via Wangapeka books, and the profits are being donated to the Wangapeka Centre. The pricing theme is — make them available — that is they’re all less than $10 USD and Natural Awakening is $4 USD.
The motivation to do this has been percolating for a few years. I first learned how to make an e-Book in 2017 when I pieced together a personal Blog collection. Then I documented the Q Mind 2018 program, tinkered with Bonni’s Blog Collection, and History of Sayadaw U Thila Wunta. I also took a stab at Tarchin’s Daily Puja and Foundations of Mindfulness, thought about putting them on Kindle, did a preliminary conversion of each, and then dropped it.
And then “2020 A Year of Clear Vision” came along, and Bonni had this idea of Namgyal Legacy Videos. That idea resonated with me because I had the experience of purchasing Bokar Rinpoche’s Chenrezig book on Kindle because it was out-of-print. Then it hit me, someone needs to preserve NR influenced books to keep them available. And it would be good to build the capability of e-Books for new NR influenced authors.
It became apparent that I was the one to do this and that Tarchin’s books could be a good place to start. I connected with Tarchin and Mary earlier this year, we made a plan, and now Mary and I are very good e-mail buddies. I also leaned on my friends to help me out — Thank You — Graham, Chani, and Noreen.
On a technical front I’ve learned a lot about eBooks, epub, and mobi. I find it very cool that an epub book is like a website. “Under the hood” it’s all coded using html and there is a folder system for text, images, stylesheets, and more. The process in a nutshell — each book is coded using a formatting language called Markdown, this is then compiled into an epub document using Pandoc, the epub html code is edited a bit by hand, and then the epub is uploaded to Kindle and Kobo. And there is a ton of proof reading of the epub done by Mary and Noreen!
The biggest horror so far was that the source for Breathing was a scan. There was no text file. We ran the scan through text recovery software (called OCR) and then Noreen fixed it. WooHoo! In the end she re-typed most of it. It was a huge job.
The biggest feeling of joy so far was figuring out how to do the Chapter headings in Natural Awakening.
Where Are the Books? and How Do I Get One?
To find the books you can look on the Wangapeka publications page, or search for Tarchin Hearn on Kindle or Kobo.