Hey, kid: did Santa get you a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad for Christmas? Because I’ve got just the thing to load it with: the newly released digital version of The Road to Kosovo, A Balkan Diary, my first book published in 1999, now newly edited and expanded exclusively for digital publication.

Throughout the years, I’ve heard from many people who either didn’t know this book existed or couldn’t get their hands on a copy. Since it was, for the most part, out of print, Westview Press recently reverted the book’s copyright to me so I could make it available online. So rather than spending the past few weeks shopping and getting in the Christmas spirit, I’ve been slaving at the keyboard becoming far more of an expert at Microsoft Word than I’d ever planned. Formatting for e-readers is a science (and a frustrating one at that), but for a first effort, I think I pulled it off with fewer glitches than one might expect. Knock on wood.

What’s that? Santa didn’t get you a Kindle? Never fear, because The Road to Kosovo can be read on practically any digital device from iPhone to laptop, using the free Kindle app for your device. Download the book in 10 different formats here on Smashwords, or have it beamed directly to your Kindle from its Amazon page. The book is also being processed by Barnes & Noble, iBookstore and others and will be available directly through those retailers soon. Once all the sites have it ready to go, I’ll post direct links on my Books page.

Read the author’s note that accompanies the new version, and to find a coupon at the end you can redeem at Smashwords to get it for half price from now until the end of the year …

The Road to Kosovo; A Balkan Diary was originally released in the spring of 1999, three weeks after NATO forces began what was to be a 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia to end ethnic cleansing by Serb forces in Kosovo. The timing was fortuitous for a first-time author, and the book was quickly reprinted in paperback in 2000 with an additional chapter based on my return to Kosovo shortly after the offensive ended. For a brief period of time—the prototypical fifteen minutes of fame—The Road to Kosovo was the most contemporary in-depth source for commentators and pundits looking for an explanation for how we got to where we were. Despite the atrocities of Bosnia that ended just a few years before and the months of violent buildup in Serbia’s southern province, our involvement in the conflict in Kosovo took many people in the United States by surprise. We’re having a war where, exactly? And why?

It was a bit of lucky instinct on my part that The Road to Kosovo came out when it did to help people begin to answer those questions. When I conducted my reporting in the summer of 1998, it was not at all certain that the regional conflict would mushroom into an all-out war involving NATO, one that threatened our international relations with key countries like Russia and China, which were still establishing their footing in a post Cold War world. Or that it would result in one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. It certainly had the potential to get out of hand, which of course is why I was there in the first place. Two years earlier, as the war in Bosnia was ending, simmering tension in Kosovo was considered by many of the correspondents and diplomats gathered at the low tables in the lobby of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn as the most likely source of renewed violence in the Balkans. Serbian aggression in Kosovo, it was predicted, would lead to wider calamity and a return to the sort of butchery and violence that was just being put to rest in Bosnia. When that violence began to manifest in the spring of 1998, I returned to see how accurate the predictions would be.

The Road to Kosovo did its duty to the time in which it was published, offering a snapshot of a confusing conflict rooted in centuries of unrest. So why is it being rereleased now?

As proud as I am with my first book, I’ve long wished that I could tinker with it just a bit more. There were things that, as I matured as a writer, I felt needed a bit of tweaking—after all, I wrote it when I was 25. Like muscles, writing skills develop over time and there are passages in the original printing that, to me at least, show a still-developing writer at work. For example, my younger self had a fascination with stupendously long sentences infested with colons, semicolons, ellipses, and clauses offset with long dashes. The rhythm and timing of certain sections was abrupt and jolting. Passages whiplashed between somber and funny with less aplomb than I would employ today. Throughout the years, I would thumb through The Road to Kosovo and wish I had the chance to take an editor’s pen to the manuscript.

Now, with the emergence of digital publishing, I’ve had the chance to do just that. Over the course of a few weeks in late 2011, I polished and buffed the entire manuscript. This is no major rewrite, but a more of a fine-tuning. I lobbed out some small sections that did nothing to add to the story and introduced some new material that did. Sentences were rearranged to improve the flow and I rediscovered the utility of the common period, of which there was an apparent global shortage when I wrote the book in the first place. Those who were mentally running out of breath trying to find the end of endless sentences will be relieved.

Consider this, then, to be the director’s cut, complete with a new cover featuring a photo of Kosovar refugees taken by my best friend, the late Chris Hondros. With physical copies out of print, it’s a great satisfaction to have improved this work as it joins my other books on the digital bookshelf. Thanks for adding it to your library.

Readers of this blog can get RTK half off from now until the end of the year by entering this code at checkout through the Smashwords site: JZ26N.