Richard Schwier

Let's talk about software that you have found useful, or that you may have heard about, that can help with the process of creating e-books.

Heather Ross reminded me of Scrivener, a wonderful little tool for writing big projects (books, screenplays, etc) that she told me about when I was starting my e-book project and expressing some frustration with traditional word processors.  Scrivener allowed me -- no, almost forced me -- to write in pieces, and it made me think differently about the chunks of material I was producing.  Getting away from a linear mindset in my writing made a huge difference to me.

Then, also in another part of this seminar, Nicolas Bowskill mentioned:

"There's also things like Calibre software for converting from one ebook format to another and for creating ebooks from scratch. They can even be saved in pdf, epub or mobi (or all 3) so that they can be read on any device."

"When you create and post to Amazon I think you give away a good chunk of the price but you set that price in the first place. Plus you'll get one of the most popular shop windows there is. In addition, Amazon won't kick back your book like Apple might. You can publish whatever you like whenever you like for whatever price you like."

Let's follow up on these ideas.  What software have you found to be helpful as you've designed e-pubs? How might you go about distributing your material after you create it?  Amazon is a good option, but the last time I checked, they required you to sell your book -- no freebies allowed. So it wasn't an option for me. That policy may have changed, but regardless, what distribution channels have you thought about or tried?

Thank you for these wonderful suggestions and observations, Edward!  I haven't yet explored Discovering Discovery, but I plan to dive in soon.  Your expansion of what we can include in immersion and interaction is very valuable.  Indeed, Montessori materials and Cuisenaire rods are indeed powerful technologies. I remember suffering through some James Joyce when I was an English major many years ago.  Maybe I'm in a better place now to tackle Finnegans Wake, and should give it a second chance.

You offer an important lesson that we should pay close attention to things in our environment, and not filter them out, but rather find ways to sue them to create meaning. And we should develop learning resources that invite learners to do the same thing.

And by the way, isn't the OERu initiative exciting?  I was fortunate to be in Dunedin when Wayne called together the inaugural meeting of the group, and the energy was palpable. His leadership is really something to behold!

Great observation, Don.  Thanks!  I think you're on to something very important here.  e-books make it easy and inexpensive to distribute materials for sure, and there does seem to be a growing appetite among educators to write material and share it for little or no return.  I think academics are coming to understand that the real incentive for writing material is to reach an audience, and traditional publishing outlets such as subscription-based scholarly journals and academic publishing houses are not the most effective way to reach a wider audience with material.  Of course there is still the institutional attention paid to conventional academic publishing, especially when considering tenure and promotion, but those walls are being chipped away little by little.

My own experience has been that my free ebook outperformed any previous book I had ever written, and it did it in less than three months. And now I see the classic long tail of e-distribution stretching out behind the initial burst of downloads.  I really like Google Analytics, and it provides some of the data we need to be able to document the performance of publications.

Here's something I've been wondering about, though. Because ebooks require some kind of technology to read them, is there an equity problem? For people who can't afford or don't have access to readers, laptops, notebooks, etc., are they being systematically excluded from learning opportunities?  Maybe this is where things like e-reader loaner programs from public libraries become even more important.

Your thoughts?

Oh my, a novel?  I'm impressed.  And collaborative?  I'm doubly impressed!  I've never even tried to move into fiction (beyond the lies I tell in my teaching to make a point!). :-)  How do you find the process of writing different when you're writing fiction vs. your doctoral research?