FreeBSD book Integrated by Design launched April 23 with four last-minute surprises: a broken font glyph, cover PDF artifacts, KDP VAT pricing confusion, and a queued Kindle edition.
Key Takeaways
JetBrains Mono’s 8 numeral had an unclosed Bezier path that printed as 0 on matte paper; fix required manual glyph surgery and full recompile.
KDP’s “list price” input is actually net price; European book VAT is added at checkout, making a €90 entry show as €96.30 in Germany.
Cover PDF carried invisible adjustment layers that caused visible navy-to-grey density shifts on print; fix required full flatten, re-export, and re-approval.
Kindle edition was still in Amazon’s review queue at launch; direct order via Voss’scher Verlag bypasses Amazon’s timeline entirely.
KDP price corrections take 12-72 hours to propagate, and the dashboard locks during propagation, leaving mis-priced listings live at launch.
