Scott Leslie

Well isn't this timely - just about to finish off the latest in my "Open Textbook Authoring" series of posts with one on Booksprints and ways to support them, both f2f and virtually. I will leave the details to that post, but a few comments:

- if you haven't read it, the Booksprint methodology page (and the site as a whole) is a great intro to the concept and practice.

- I think the idea has real merit, especially because a good chunk of content for the proposed book will already have been created in these forums and discussions and so a lot of what remains will be collaborative rearranging, massaging, filling in the gaps, and the approach is not only good for that, it also respects the fact that we're dealing with lots of busy mid-career working people, and this would help it not drag out

- one group that has pioneered an approach that, while not identical to booksprints, is close and shows how well this can work virtually, is the P2PU organizing group. Their technique (from what I've heard - I have not participated in these) is a combination of synchronous voice chat (any of elluminate, skype or google hangout could work) side-by-side with an etherpad document for real-time collaborative note taking and editing. As luck would have it, we run an etherpad installation at http://abbott.bccampus.ca:9001/

So don't want to steer this at all, but if people were interested in trying this out, I could be game for that, even if it were just a couple of hours to hammer out a table of contents and agree on what else needed to be done and who'd do what.

Cheers, Scott

Clint, good points, making me re-consider readers, well a little bit at least ;-) The integration with RSS and web clipping services definitely seems like a plus for the Kindle and something the Sony Reader I use doesn't do at all (I use the hack of printing long pages to PDF but and reading them on the reader, but that is extremely kludgey.)

Cheers, Scott

I definitely hope people don't self-censor offering their favourite eBooks simply because they are not conventional "books" - I think that's the exciting part of what we are seeing, the innovation in the form itself, not just a shift of text from print to electronic.

It is also, though, the place where things start to get all messy too - think about the web and how Flash and Java were the early answers to incorporating richness, and only much later did full open standards and web-native capabilities come along. We're seeing similar happen here to in the ruch to richness. Interesting times indeed!

So reading your other message to Julia just now, it sounds like you may have an iPad too? In which case, I'm intrigued; had I access to both a Kindle AND an iPad (that can run the kindle software, I think) I can't see why I'd want the Kindle anymore. And it seems to me that is indeed why Amazon chose to do both - a dedicate appliance AND an app. Both so they didn't constrain their market but also anticipating a day when dedicated devices disappeared.

I am really interested; my personal take is that "eBooks" are a combination of hangover from an older age and marketing ploy by both booksellers and hardware vendors, and that when you take the covers off it just looks like a bit of the web bundled up so it can sell. But maybe I am really missing something that is special to eBooks and eReaders?

Yes, I believe you can author a book with their software but give it away. But you can NOT sell it except for from their store.