Avoiding cancel culture issues is becoming an increasing problem for all of us. For us as authors, I’ve been coming to realize we have a relatively simple solution to that hassle.

I’m in the process of making a radical revision of my self-publishing how to book. As that has been developing, I’ve discovered an excellent way to avoid those issues. It started when I started writing my book as an ePUB from the start. That helps a lot, because the HTML requires everything in the book to be assembled using styles.

Because of my workflow, I have styles for paragraphs, characters, swatches, anchored objects, and tables. I have more available, like GREP styles, but I don’t do code. But to get to the point, I’ve discovered that using a new ePUB, exported for a proof, was really helping my writing. Being Macish, my exported ePUB automatically opens in Books. Apple Books is the most advanced ereader available and it can handle all the things I try in my books with no problems. It’s at the same place as using a PDF proof for my print books is.

In this process, I’ve also discovered that the Kindle App is one of the least capable. Nook and Kobo are fairly good. I was getting frustrated that I could not find any information about the state of ereaders in Windows, Chrome, or Android. I finally found Readium and the Thorium Reader. Thorium Reader is cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, and Linux), so I installed a copy. I discovered it is probably the closest to Books in capabilities. There may be better ereaders on the PC side, but I haven’t found anything about that.

While writing, I realized that these proofs avoided the cancel culture

For anyone on a Mac, all I had to do was attach the ePUB to an email and tell my friend to just double-click on the ePUB icon in the email. It simply opened up in Books. But now that I had Thorium Reader, it also did the same in Thorium. I assume that it does the same in Readium.

I see no reason why we can’t just sell the ePUBs directly from our website/blogs. We can just give a brief instruction about the capabilities of Books and Thorium Reader. They should be able to buy the ePUB and easily open it up to read.

The reason why the two ereaders are so important is that I can design beautiful and enjoyable books at a quality level that just isn’t offered by Kindle. They both read embedded fonts, colored type, and anything else I’ve tried. Plus, the people would actually own their books—rather than just leasing them from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so on.

But offering them in this manner, we can produce books that truly help our brothers and sisters with no fears of the Cancellation Corps jumping on us. Let me know what you think, please.

To give you an idea, here’s a capture of the first page in Books.