Richard Schwier

Great stuff, Jaymie.  Thanks for pointing to "Alice".  Yeh, the good 'ol cut and paste doesn't begin to cut it with this new medium, does it.  As for what is an e-book and how is it different from a paper book, I think that's going to be a good part of what we discuss here!  It sounds like we're reaching a general agreement that there's something different going on with e-pubs generally, and probably e-books specifically.

Thanks, Valerie, I think this is an important and difficult issue. Format migration has plagued all of us over time (want to see my 1/2 Sony beta cassette collection?). I hope, but don't always trust, that reformatting options will be available as we move from format to format. And this is also related to publication standards, the very kind of thing Apple seems to be trying to deal with in publications offered through their store. I'm really glad you brought up this issue, and I wonder if it shouldn't be a topic for a discussion thread all of its own. This also raises another interesting question about what we mean by "book" again. One of the characteristics of traditional books is permanence. We gather them, store them, and in many cases display them almost as trophies in office spaces. I wonder if e-publications will receive the same level of reverence and attention to permanence? Is an e-pub, by its very nature, considered to be less permanent and more effervescent? Do we have different expectations?

Ohhhhh myyyyyy, you just hit me with a wave of nostalgia!  HyperCard remains my favourite all-time tool, I think!  And you're right. It was definitely an authoring tool for designing many of the kinds of things we're talking about in this seminar.

 

Cool, LaDonna! My best advice is to jump in with both feet.  Just find something you've already written and that you think has an audience.  Scott Leslie will be doing a videoconference on the 7th about how to start putting things together, and I know that will be an excellent session.

A number of programs can export epubs (inDesign, Pages) and if you start with a simple template and add things as you normally would, you'll probably find it pretty easy to get a first draft together.  I'm a Mac user, so I used Pages and their template for e-pubs.  It helped a lot.  There were still a lot of things to learn and deal with, and I still haven't figured out all of them, but it was a good place for me to start.

Hyperlinks and images were relatively easy to deal with, but there were some tricks I picked up along the way.  Video was another issue.  I never did get embedded video to work for me consistently, but I have a graduate student who has it all sorted out, so I'm anxious to find out how he solved my problems.

I'll be starting a discussion thread on some of the technical stuff around writing epubs in the coming days (thought I'd wait until Scott introduced things).  I'd love to share software ideas and coding horror stories! :-)

If you're looking for some good reference material on this stuff, I really like Liz Castro's publications.  Check them out at http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/

Thanks, Kirk, and thanks for showing me your book!  Could I persuade you to share it here? It's a nice example--love the way you used sparse text, but heaps of photos with an option to have the pages read to you.