PDF Batch Merger

For me there is no favorite alternative though I suppose you can consider IngramSpark. However IngramSpark will cost you more youll get less and everything is more difficult and slower. (The most obvious exception would be for hardcover books since KDP doesn offer this.) The simple reality is that Amazon accounts for the vast majority of book sales (either Kindle or paperback) roughly 738% depending on what report you read. And KDP is the shortest and most efficient path to sell on Amazon. Unfortunately KDP is incredibly deficient in some key wayspared to what CreateSpace provided KDP proof copiese with a giant watermark on the cover thus making it impossible to truly proof the cover! KDP doesn let you buy wholesale copies (aka author copies) unless your book is live on Amazon. This means you can buy a small batch to get pre-publication feedback or reviews nor can you create a limited edition for a special situation. And you can get a pre-publication matte-cover copy and gloss-cover copy topare and decide. KDP doesn support an enormous number ofmon languages like Chinese and Russian. There are many former CreateSpace authors who are caught in a huge bind because KDP doesn support their language. I have a client the author of a Chinese-English book who totally in limbo right now with KDP. The inability to support certain languages made sense when KDP was only producing Kindle books but with paperbacks it should not matter at all since the author provides a press-ready PDF. I could go on and on but those are just a few of the notable problems with KDP for customers who were pulled from CreateSpace. And while it would be understandable that bugs and glitches in the transition are to be expected it actually inexcusable because the KDP-CreateSpace merger was in process for well over a year. And authors were not warned at all of these impending deficiencies so they were left unable to plan an alternative. And worse yet amidst all this KDP has beenpletely silent about when any of these problems will be fixed. So while KDP has yet to do as well as CreateSpace did theyre still better than the other options for most italic print-on-demand situations. I can stress enough that there is never a one-size-fits-all answer when ites to indie and self publishing. Answered What is your favorite rmended alternative to distributing with KDP while they are in the process of integrating with Createspace? italic

19 web design trends for 218 Discover the web design trends techniques and tools that will define website and digital product design in 218 and beyond. to get a little snobby about trends in creative disciplines. After all there nothing creative or innovative about keeping tabs on what hot unless maybe youre doing so just to continuously buck the trends. But the fact is that creativity is a conversation. A conversation that been ongoing since we first learned to recreate elements of our world in ochre and charcoal on cave walls. Since we learned to turn abstract marks carved in clay with sticks into packages full of meaning i.e. language. Trends are just the main threads in that sprawling chaotic polyphonous conversation. Whether we choose to adopt or resist them our creative choices exist alongside these trends. They provide con. Because what innovation if not a break from the normative? And what the normative but last year trends? So just like last year I sat down with Webflow crackerjack design team and asked them to stare into their VR crystal balls and see what will define design in 218. Here what Sergie Magdalin Ryan Morrison Linsey Peterson Nathan Romero and Darin Dimitroff had to say. (Along with a few of my own thoughts of course.) 1. Broken grid layouts In designers neverending quest for more creative and engaging layouts the grid weve always relied on to bring harmony and logic to our layouts has itself be a kind of constraint. u2d Sometimes we all want to go off the grid amirite? italic Which isn to say that broken grid layouts ditch the concept of the grid altogether instead they allow s and begin to overlap and converge often creating beautifully unexpected juxtapositions of bitmap and letterform. u2d Sometimes it hard to say whether these effects are intentional or just a delightful error... italic 2. Illustrations take center stage One of the more interesting challenges Ive witnessed in the world of marketing digital products is that of is just italic a human being. Specifiers like race gender nationality and much more are left undefined making it easier for any of us to project ourselves into the role of that lone thinker contemplating the creative possibilities illuminated by a ging light. 3. Brutalism reaches mainstream status Early in 217 we published an article touching on the rise of brutalism and sought to answer the why italic of the emerging style Brutalism ... is ripping open a space where designers can do what they want rather than what they should. The works created here eschew all the optimization advice and best practices lists in favor of looks and effects that live in the jarring and sometimes border on the offensive (to expectations anyway). So you can imagine our surprise when of all site s two merce italic outlets jumped on the brutal bandwagon Balenciaga Gucci 4. More organic and oblique shapes Nature abhors a straight line. 3William Kent Both web and mobile design have been dominated by card-based UIs for several years now. Until recently most of those cards were (mostly) sharp-edged and right-angled exposing the geometry of their underlying divs in an almost modernist concern for the materials of web design. That changed in a big big way in 217. Now every app from Google Now to Twitter to Facebook boasts almost aggressively italic rounded corners on their cards input boxes profile avatars and more. u2d If these boxes get any rounder theyll just be ovals. italic And it not just those primary elements growing more organic shapes. Backgrounds now abound with almost amoeboid blobs of color dramatic diagonals even dashes of the real world rendered almost cartoonish. But designers aren just turning to organic curves in their never-ending search for a way out of the box. Many simply give those boxes a twist out of their usual 9ub angles freshening up their designs with a simple change of perspective as on Stripe homepage. All this isn to say that right angles are going to go the way of the dinosaur. Weve also seen several sites double-down on straight lines and mix them effectively with more organic and spherical shapes. Youll also notice the emergence of flashing or vibrating colors in many website UIs. While these colorbinations create incredibly striking effects including ghostly after often just won do. After allplexity tends to unfold over time a still something GIFs struggle to do without exponentially ballooning in size How italic to do those things But UX writing can do much italic more than that. The words within an interface can also be a powerful tool for shaping perceptions of the brands behind our favorite UIs. Just think of all the tweets youve seen highlighting a hilarious line of copy in a web app or all the 44-page showcases with witty messaging designed to drive action in a suboptimal moment. This bes most obvious in the UI format known as the chatbot. Generally speaking these UIs consist of nothing but words. Words be italic the UI. The chatbot personality or brand can only be expressed through language. With maybe a few carefully chosen emoji thrown in for spice. As an experienced UX writer Im so excited to see this key role getting more of the acknowledgement it has long deserved. Were designers too. We just work in syllables and letterforms. We can wait to work with you. 18. Design. Systematized. Now that design has earned its place at the table the conversation has shifted away from assertions of value to a more mature analysis of how to make design successes more systematic scalable and cohesive across a brand many outputs and environments. Design systems focus on translating brand aesthetics and approaches to functionality into modularponents that can be mixed and matched to meet (ideally) any UI unique needs. When a design language is systemized it simplifies decision-making cuts down on development times and frees up designers to work on higher-profile projects where design patterns haven already been established. And brands are per usual right on top of the trend. UXPin launched Systems a tool for creating and maintaining design systems. Shopify launched Polaris to high praise for its unique merger of content design and development gelines (something I feel pretty passionate about s@johnamwill ). UX Power Tools launched a library that attempts to make Sketch a viable design systems tool (well see!). Expect to see much italic more of this in 218. 19. Principles-first design The design world has long been obsessed with one of those chicken-or-the-egg debates content-first or design-first. Ive always been on the content-first side of the argument. And not just because Im a content guy. To me it just seems like pure logic to nail down the message before you decide how to package it. But lately as Ive moved away from designing content strategies for specific deliverables to more systems-oriented work (brand-level content strategies) Im warming to the idea that our work shouldn start with design or content. It should start with principles italic . Everything else how it looks how it works how it sounds should flow from and depend upon a set of well-defined and precisely articulated principles. Or as Shopify senior UX lead Amy Thibodeau put it in her beautiful article Locating Polaris If the system is created to enable real work it should reflect how an organization makes things and what it values. A design system that doesn include anything about principles or an approach to content for example may not prioritize thinking about those things in the practical day-to-day. Principles provide a framework for all other decision-making from how long the copy in the hero should be to what image provides the backdrop for the content. After all brands are founded on principles a mission a vision and a promise. Each of these things requires underlying beliefs to animate them to make them relevant to others. In other words principles provide the why italic . For example at Webflow our mission is to empower designers entrepreneurs and creative professionals to bring their ideas to life on the web. That mission infuses everything we do from the aesthetic approach Ryan created for us to the voice and tone standards Ive designed. And it those standards that ge our first drafts inform our feedback to each other and that hopefully suffuse every blog post email marketing page etc. So far it's a great place to start. What do you think 218 will hold for digital design? Every time I put together one of these lists Im overwhelmed by how much I could italic talk about and how much my constraint of year + 1 forces me to prioritize. That why Ive left out some obvious forces like AR and VR which we mentioned last year s that have to date had limited impact on the web. With that in mind what would you add to this list? (Please note that if you include s in yourments theyll be flagged as possible spam. So feel free to leave out the s give us enough to Google it and we should be good to go.) And hey thanks for reading.