Today I finished what may be the final draft of the book about the Leica D-Lux 5 digital camera.  I fine-tuned it, read through it, and spell-checked it, and generated the index and table of contents one more time.  I took new photographs today for the illustration of the the three different histograms — for underexposed, overexposed, and properly exposed images. I also took a new portrait of my wife, Clenise, for the illustration of the Portrait category under Scene mode, and I extracted a new example of the purple lines that sometimes show up in videos on the D-Lux 5. I could go on taking new photos and tweaking existing ones, but I think I’m essentially done now. I worked on designing the book’s cover, and sent a PDF version out to one camera buff who’s been very helpful in reading drafts of earlier books. So, if I can pull all the last-minute details together, I may release the PDF version within the next day or two.

As for sales of existing books, there was a minor step forward today at Amazon.co.uk.  They initially listed the LX5 book as unavailable, then available within 2-4 weeks, and recently as available within 2-3 weeks.  Now it’s listed as available within 1-3 weeks, which I guess is progress of a sort. They do say it won’t arrive before Christmas, though.

For the PDF version of the LX5 book, there have been six sales today, to buyers from Australia, the UK, Italy, and the Philippines, in addition to the US. The book’s sales rank at Amazon.com has been staying fairly steady, in the range of about 11,000 to 15,000.  The book is still being sold by Amazon for the full retail price of $24.95.  Amazon did receive my shipment of 12 books for the Advantage program today, but I’m not sure if that small number of books (which are discounted quite heavily) will have any effect on pricing.