Thesis Kindle

"Looking In: An Examination of Design as Method" (2007) is the intellectual foundation underpinning Qpoint's design methodology (mapped in c7, codified in brand/design_methodology.md). Preserving it in durable, modern formats — accessible on Kindle and as a print-replica PDF — makes the philosophy tangible and re-readable in daily work. Currently only a PDF survives; moving it to a formal foundational-documents home signals its role in the practice.

1. Create brand/foundational/ directory and house the thesis there as a primary artifact
2. Hand-reconstruct the thesis as semantic Markdown chapters (durable full-text source for the repo)
3. Generate a reflowable EPUB3 for modern Kindle via Send-to-Kindle, with curated image embedding
4. Generate a lossless print-replica single-page PDF preserving the original two-page-spread layout
5. Validate both outputs (epubcheck, visual proof-read) and deliver to brand/foundational/

• Source: cycles/c7.design-as-method/mparson-thesis.pdf (39 pages: cover + 38 two-page spreads, ~120 images at 100ppi)
• Destinations: brand/foundational/ (primary home), cycles/c70.thesis-kindle/ (working directory, book source)
• Key files to create:
  • cycles/c70.thesis-kindle/book/ — Markdown chapters (01-front-matter … 06-bibliography), metadata.yaml, epub.css, cover.png
  • cycles/c70.thesis-kindle/book/images/ — Curated image assets
  • brand/foundational/mparson-thesis-2007.pdf (moved from c7)
  • brand/foundational/mparson-thesis-2007.epub (generated)
  • brand/foundational/mparson-thesis-2007-pages.pdf (generated)
  • brand/foundational/README.md (foundational-documents index)

• brand/foundational/ created — new home for source documents underpinning the design philosophy; thesis PDF moved there (git mv) as mparson-thesis-2007.pdf, with README covering provenance and regeneration. CLAUDE.md and c7's prompt.md updated to point at it.
• Full-text Markdown reconstruction — book/ holds the entire thesis (~11,200 words) as semantic Markdown, one file per part, hand-reconstructed spread-by-spread from renders (pdftotext output alone garbles the multi-column layouts). Author's text preserved verbatim, including original typos (flagged in fork-agent reports rather than silently corrected). Margin notes as .margin-note divs, captions as .caption divs, 32 curated images in book/images/ (full-page photography, diagrams, and whole-page treatment for the Corvo collages with captions also transcribed as real text).
• brand/foundational/mparson-thesis-2007.epub — reflowable EPUB3 built with pandoc (book/metadata.yaml, book/epub.css, cover from the original front cover). epubcheck: 0 errors, 0 warnings. Independent QA fork verified all 37 content spreads against the markdown — no omissions.
• brand/foundational/mparson-thesis-2007-pages.pdf — print replica: each 1224×612pt spread losslessly split into two 612×612 pages via pypdf CropBox halving (76 pages, text selectable). Note: mutool poster 1.28.2 was broken (malformed page tree on any input), hence the pypdf route.

Complete (2026-08-15). Three formats of the thesis now live in brand/foundational/: original PDF, Kindle-ready EPUB, and single-page print-replica PDF — plus a quotable full-text Markdown source in this cycle's book/.

Delivery: email the .epub to the Send-to-Kindle address (or drag into the Send to Kindle app); it arrives as a real e-book with resizable text, TOC, and images. The -pages.pdf variant can be sent the same way for the design-faithful reading experience.

Learnings:

• A designed InDesign book converts well only via reconstruction: renders are ground truth for reading order; pdftotext is raw material.
• 100ppi source imagery is perfectly adequate for e-ink; whole-page figures + transcribed captions beats shredding collages into fragments.
• pypdf CropBox duplication is a reliable lossless spread-splitter when mutool poster fails.