Re: [IAEP] Please review E-Book Enlightenment
James, Thank you very much for your work. It is very useful for my current projects. I put my notes on my blog: http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/ebook_enlightenment/ Here is what I wrote. Book review: “E-Book Enlightenment” by James Simmons http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/ James Simmons set out to write about One Laptop Per Child e-books, but decided to go more general. I appreciate the clear and concise categories of information by chapters and within the chapters – it’s a big service to the reader, and it takes a lot of thought and work for the writer. Moreover, each piece of data tells a story with a strong exegesis in the area of open and free – meaning, it’s interesting to read, at least for someone who cares. I thought I would skip the first chapters, on finding e-books, but I learned much I did not know – for example, the story of this touching projects: *The Rural Design Collective (@rdcHQ http://twitter.com/rdcHQ)* is a not-for-profit professional mentoring organization which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects. They devote a portion of their program to continued exploration of technology surrounding digital books. In 2009, they built an interface for approximately 2000 digital books using a subset from the *Internet Archive Children’s Library*. It was easy for me to skim the chapter comparing different formats, because of the clear structure, but the tone is human and personal (“Advantages: I can’t think of any.” on RTF). The Sugar activities and architecture for discovering and sharing books looks like something all children’s environments should be adopting (I am looking at you, Club Penguin). My daughter is probably older than the intended audience – she uses Shellfari for the purpose. I don’t know if there are tools like this beyond Sugar, for young kids. With one click, you can share books with a person or your neighborhood. And, it has text to speech. Remember the lovely Living Books from the 90s, with text-to-speech (and animations) done via recordings, rather than generated? That was hugely useful for literacy, but not sustainable, and only a few were made. James describes wiki-software for making books, called bookihttp://www.booki.cc/. I am looking at it for next book projects of Math Future (we are using Google Docs at the moment). I think I will wait for versions beyond alpha; meanwhile, James’ adventures with collaborating are illuminating, and echo my experiences: Starting a book from nothing is intimidating. However, once the book reaches a critical mass and there is no doubt that there *will* be a finished book you’ll find that getting help and feedback is easier, almost inevitable …If we didn’t start with the awful machine translated version we would never have gotten the good one. The first thing is that there are good reasons to collaborate and not so good. A good one is that your collaborator can bring expertise to the book that you don’t have. A bad one is that you think there will be less work for you if you have a collaborator. There are many human activities where “Many hands make light labor”. Writing a book isn’t one of them. Mokurai’s Replacing Textbook project involves several Math Future people such Don “The Mathman” Cohen, and uses bookihttp://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks, which James mentions. My materials about fractions may go there, as well. An obligatory Russian proverb: “The world isn’t small, but the stratum is thin.” I would appreciate if the book compared booki with Google Docs, rather than Microsoft Word (which isn’t a wiki technology). For scanning books, I may consider building a *Simmons Home Book Scanner Mark I*. It looks quite easy and the name is fun to say. However, my new flatbed scanner is fast enough, and I have kid interns who think it’s fun to scan – at least a few pages at a time. James recommend the batch image editor Image Magic http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php, which can apply the same operation to multiple images. This will save me a lot of time when I next scan a book! And for Windows, the mass renamerhttp://www.albert.nu/programs/renamer/main.htmfor files will come in handy. And looks like Scan Tailor http://scantailor.sourceforge.net/ software is even more powerful, so I will give it a try as well. Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ is the free EPUB editor James recommends. And calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ is the software for managing and distributing collections of e-books. Overall, the Publishing section of “E-Book Enlightenment” deals with the technical side of making the book available, and not with the social aspects of “making the book public” (Doctorow). I would like to see a chapter on how to connect creators with readers, post-production. I will go back to “E-Book Enlightenment” for step-by-step guides
Re: [IAEP] Please review E-Book Enlightenment
Maria, Thanks for your kind review. One thing you suggested was comparing Google Docs and Booki as collaboration software. I think Google Docs is pretty good for collaboration, probably as good as Booki. Where Booki is better than Google Docs is when it comes to *publishing* the work. Booki has a tool called OBJAVI that produces output in a variety of pages sizes, including those used by Lulu.com for print on demand. This makes it easier to format a book for printing. It also produces Web Format PDF (with a table of contents pane) and EPUBs, and finally you can get a static website out of it. That's the real genius of it. So while Google Docs will help you collaborate on a manuscript, Booki goes that extra mile and helps you get it published at the push of a button. Think of all the work you'd go through in turning your Google Docs MS into a website, an EPUB, or a PDF ready for Lulu and imagine that your methodology required you to do that every week or so. I wrote a book on my personal Booki and wanted to have some people review it. I distributed PDFs. One reviewer said she had trouble reading a book on the computer screen but she did have a Kindle. I emailed her a Kindle version a few minutes later. Booki is still rough around the edges, but I would not hesitate to recommend it. James Simmons On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 7:41 AM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: James, Thank you very much for your work. It is very useful for my current projects. I put my notes on my blog: http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/ebook_enlightenment/ Here is what I wrote. Book review: “E-Book Enlightenment” by James Simmons http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/ James Simmons set out to write about One Laptop Per Child e-books, but decided to go more general. I appreciate the clear and concise categories of information by chapters and within the chapters – it’s a big service to the reader, and it takes a lot of thought and work for the writer. Moreover, each piece of data tells a story with a strong exegesis in the area of open and free – meaning, it’s interesting to read, at least for someone who cares. I thought I would skip the first chapters, on finding e-books, but I learned much I did not know – for example, the story of this touching projects: *The Rural Design Collective (@rdcHQ http://twitter.com/rdcHQ)* is a not-for-profit professional mentoring organization which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects. They devote a portion of their program to continued exploration of technology surrounding digital books. In 2009, they built an interface for approximately 2000 digital books using a subset from the *Internet Archive Children’s Library*. It was easy for me to skim the chapter comparing different formats, because of the clear structure, but the tone is human and personal (“Advantages: I can’t think of any.” on RTF). The Sugar activities and architecture for discovering and sharing books looks like something all children’s environments should be adopting (I am looking at you, Club Penguin). My daughter is probably older than the intended audience – she uses Shellfari for the purpose. I don’t know if there are tools like this beyond Sugar, for young kids. With one click, you can share books with a person or your neighborhood. And, it has text to speech. Remember the lovely Living Books from the 90s, with text-to-speech (and animations) done via recordings, rather than generated? That was hugely useful for literacy, but not sustainable, and only a few were made. James describes wiki-software for making books, called bookihttp://www.booki.cc/. I am looking at it for next book projects of Math Future (we are using Google Docs at the moment). I think I will wait for versions beyond alpha; meanwhile, James’ adventures with collaborating are illuminating, and echo my experiences: Starting a book from nothing is intimidating. However, once the book reaches a critical mass and there is no doubt that there *will* be a finished book you’ll find that getting help and feedback is easier, almost inevitable …If we didn’t start with the awful machine translated version we would never have gotten the good one. The first thing is that there are good reasons to collaborate and not so good. A good one is that your collaborator can bring expertise to the book that you don’t have. A bad one is that you think there will be less work for you if you have a collaborator. There are many human activities where “Many hands make light labor”. Writing a book isn’t one of them. Mokurai’s Replacing Textbook project involves several Math Future people such Don “The Mathman” Cohen, and uses bookihttp://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks, which James mentions. My materials about fractions
Re: [IAEP] Please review E-Book Enlightenment
James, I just wanted to thank you for the work you've been doing in the documentation and content development field. IMHO,. most impressive is not what you've produced (although it is impressive), but that you have carefully blazed (marked) the trail so that others might follow. You get my Lewis and Clark award, if I had a Sacagewea dollar around, I would send it to you. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea_dollar Warmest regards, On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:05 AM, James Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: I think I have the book E-Book Enlightenment in a pretty good place to think about publishing it on the Internet Archive and on the Kindle Store. I don't plan to put the book on Lulu, however the PDF for the Internet Archive will be formatted in Lulu compatible Crown Quarto format, just like our other FLOSS Manuals, and Anne Gentle came up with a nice cover design for it last year, so it should be possible to make printed books. Other than making sure that the PDF is well formatted for the purpose I'm not pushing the idea. I'm not asking anyone to read the whole thing, but there are probably chapters you will have a special interest in and I'd like feedback on those. I've just revised the instructions in A Booki Of Your Own where I identify several issues and explain how to get around them. I am especially interested in feedback on that chapter! I describe the experience I had with the translation of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! in the other chapter on Booki. If you participated in this effort you may have seen things differently than I did, and I'd like to hear about that. If you haven't check out this book before, it's about E-Books: reading them, finding them, making them, getting them published or distributed, copyright laws, etc. I seriously considered calling it Everything You Always Wanted to Know About E-Books* (But Were Afraid To Ask) but nobody under the age of fifty would get the reference. In the course of researching the book I did everything described in it. I made every kind of e-book. I donated e-books to Project Gutenberg, PG Canada, and the Internet Archive. I wrote some of the software described in the book. I made my own book scanner. I installed personal copies of Booki and the Pathagar Book Server. I also read a lot of e-books. As a result of this research I think that the XO, Sugar and free e-books have enormous potential to change the way we teach reading and writing, language, history, and many other subjects. It is my hope that this book helps teachers and students learn what is possible. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
