Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a kick-ass American feminist writer, lecturer, and social reformer. Her novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, criticizes the contemptuous and infantilizing treatment of women and our health by the medical community.

The Yellow Wallpaper is about a young wife of a doctor. The couple have just rented a home for the summer so the protagonist can recover from an undiagnosed illness. But she is gaslighted into mental illness by her husband and her own physician.

This is the first edition in HTML. Instead of a traditional cover and title page, it gets a home page with a jumbotron image and a contents navigation menu. The skip-to-content link, positioned off-screen, allows a screen reader user to bypass navigation, title page information, and other front matter to get directly to the beginning of the book.

The book is in dark mode by default, but there is a light mode toggle for people who prefer dark text over a light background. It is not black on white, but dark gray on light. This reduces the contrast enough to help reduce eye strain during prolonged reading time.

For the EPUB, I’ve updated cover art and let my Calibre eBook Reader settings handle the display. The CSS code for all EPUBS has been stripped of all instances of the !important rule to avoid overriding the user’s settings.

Have you ever opened an EPUB only to find there are one or two pages marked “This page intentionally left blank” before you get to the first page of the story?

Here’s why I don’t do that:

• When you slap a disclaimer on a previously blank page saying it’s blank on purpose, it’s not blank anymore and you just look like an idiot.
• I can’t see any good reason for it.
• It’s annoying.

There’s a great use for blank space, and it’s this.

Maybe instead of three diamonds, I should have put a sentence there saying “This space intentionally left blank to denote a scene break.”