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Tag Archives: publishing

The Future of Text Books (and e-Books)

30 Jun

No matter what you think of Al Gore’s politics, his latest book, “Our Choice” points toward the direction that authors and publishers should be heading. Text combined with images, video and interactive graphics, make this e-Book a much more compelling product than a the equivalent physical book. I personally enjoy reading on my iPad, but all of the books I read in my Kindle reader are identical to the print copy (except that I can change the font size, and have a built in dictionary). The price is also right: $5 for the e-Book compared to $17 for the a physical copy.

My first reaction to the Our Choice app (for iPad and iPhone only at the moment) was that it reminded me a lot of CD Rom products from the 1990′s. Call me crazy, but I loved the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia because it not only included text and pictures, but added videos and interactive charts. I enjoyed the media rich CD Rom products that came of of the mid 1990 confluence of CD Roms, color monitors and speakers all shipping standard with PC’s.

So what is different this time around? For starters the form factor of the iPad make for a much more pleasant reading experience than sitting in front of a computer screen. In addition, the navigation interface that the iPad’s touch screen makes possible is intuitive and natural.  Push Pop Press is the company that wrote the software for the book, and from what they’ve said, they hope to make their tools available so that others can publish media rich tools. Watch the video below to see how the “book” works

It was a wonderful experience reading Our Choice. Not all books, especially novels, need videos and interactive charts, but for some books (like school text books in particular) these bells and whistles make a huge positive difference. I hope to see more book in a similar format in the near future.

 
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Posted by on 2011.06.30 in education, iPhone, Work

 

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Creating Ebooks is Easy & Free!

28 Jun

I recently returned from a Law School Technology conference, and while there I learned how easy it is to create ebooks from documents in Microsoft Word or HTML formats.  Elmer Masters lead a session called, Creating eBook Version of Your School’s Law Reviews Using Open Source and Free Tools (see the video here).

The ebook creation process was so easy that during the session I download, installed the tools, and created an ebook of my conference notes before Elmer had finished his talk.  For anyone interest here is the process:

  1. Download Sigil, the free and open source ebook editor for your operating system.
  2. Install Sigil on your computer.
  3. Open the word document that you’d like to turn into an Ebook.
  4. Save the document as an html file by going to “File” -> “Save As” and then selecting “Web Page (htm)” in the drop down box. Then press the “Save” button.
  5. Launch Sigil, and right mouse click on “Text” folder in the left hand column, and select “Add Existing Items…” Add the html file you just “Saved As” from word.
  6. Now press the “Save” button on the Sigil tool bar, and you are done!

You might want to go to the Sigil “Tool” -> “Meta Data” menu to add a title and author to the book to make it look a little more professional looking, but other than that, you’ve created your first Ebook!  Congratulations! If your document is long enough, you can insert chapter breaks to make it easier to navigate.

You might be wondering how you get this ebook on to your iPad or iPhone.  All you need to do is either email the ebook to your self and then open it on your mobile device, or if you use Dropbox, move the ebook into Dropbox and then open it from Dropbox on your iPad or iPhone.  If you’re a kindle user, you should have an email address than you can send file to in order to add them to your Kindle device.

For your reading pleasure, here are my CALI 2011 Conference Notes in ePub, PDF and Google Doc formats. Happy reading!

 
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Posted by on 2011.06.28 in education, iPhone, Work

 

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Collaborative Scholarly Projects: What Tools to Use?

02 Nov

A colleague of mine asked me yesterday what tools I’d recommend for a group of a dozen or so scholars spread around the world to collaborate on a scholarly project.  The good news is that there are lots of good tools available for people to use.  The bad news is that there are lots of good tools to choose from. Depending on your group’s particular requirements and preferences, you may choose a different tool set than your colleagues down the hall.

That said, here are my primary and secondary recommendations for collaborative tools, along with some rational for my selections: Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on 2010.11.02 in education, Work

 

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Just in Time for School: Collaborating on Group Documents Just Got Easier

03 Sep

Google Docs has been my choice for collaborative document editing for some time now, but this past week a new feature was added, that will make the process of collaborating on a single document even less painful.  If you and your classmates are working on your project document at the same time, the text that others in your group are adding or editing will be highlighted so you can easily see the changes as they are made, and make sure you’re not inadvertently working on the same section of the document.

Not only does collaborative highlighting show you where you classmates are working, but it will also show you when they highlight blocks of text, so you can watch to see if the text get deleted or moved.  I wish I’d been able to use Google Docs when I was a Bachelor of Commerce student continually working on group projects!

Some of the other features that college students will appreciate are:

  • Footnotes and Endnotes
  • Table of Contents tool
  • Inline Thesaurus and Dictionary lookups
  • Add new words to a Custom Dictionary
  • Auto save every few seconds

Enjoy!

 
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Posted by on 2010.09.03 in education, Google, WebApps, Work

 

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An Insightful iPad Review by Anne Kirschner

05 Aug

A couple of days ago, I ran across an insightful iPad review by Anne Kirschner, a dean at City University of NY. Her iPad experience closely matches mine. Here are some of my thoughts:

  • The move from the morning paper to reviewing the news on the iPad, make breakfast a much more pleasant experience, because of the smaller and more easily managed iPad form factor.  I actually do a lot of my “newspaper” reading in bed now.
  • When used in meetings, it gives you the ability to take electronic notes and consult the web for meeting related material, with out “barricading yourself behind a screen.”  For me this has made a huge difference, especially now that the novelty of the iPad is wearing off and more people have them in meetings.
  • When traveling, it’s 10 hour battery life makes long flights more endurable as I can watch movies I really want to watch, or play games while in the air.
  • The 10 hour battery life means that I don’t need to recharge it during the day, and often I go 3 or 4 days between charging.
  • Reading using the Kindle reader is a joy. I especially appreciate being able to go back and forth between my iPad and iPod and the Kindle app knowing where I left off on the other device (this work across all Kindle apps and devices).

What I’m hoping gets fixed in version 4 of the iPad OS:

  • One of the main drawbacks is it’s limited ability to multi-task that we’ve become accustomed to on laptops.  Copy and pasting text or an image from a web page just takes a lot longer.
  • One other drawback is the iPad’s current inability to sync files from your desktop computer, or from some cloud based system.  If I could have 2 way syncing of some of my DropBox floders I would be a very happy man.
  • This is not a big issue, but I’d love to be able to output the contents of the screen via the Apple VGA dongle, from every application, not just Keynote.

That’s it for know… You should really read Anne’s article for all the interesting details she includes.

 
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Posted by on 2010.08.05 in iPhone, Work

 

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Tired of Power Point? Prezi Makes Presentations Fun Again

11 Mar

Prezi.com is a web application that allows you to create a map of your presentation in a mind map like style, and then when you present, you zoom around the map with ease.  For those who do not like the linear strait jacket that Power Point forces their presentation into, Prezi will be a breath of fresh air.

Converting an existing presentation, or creating a new one from scratch is not difficult after watching Prezi’s tutorial for new users.  I ended up converting a presentation I am giving next week on “Backing Up for Disaster” from PowerPoint to Prezi, and the results I think are impressive.

Not only is the navigation engaging, but it also allows the presenter to give the audience a better overview of the presentation up front (if he or she wants to), and allows the presenter to skip to different parts of the presentation with ease.  No more paging between slides to find the right one, you just have to zoom out, find the area you want to speak to, and then zoom in to it.

Here is a Google Apps version of my “Backup” presentation, and here is the Prezi version.  You be the judge of which one you’d rather sit through.

 
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Posted by on 2010.03.11 in WebApps, Work

 

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Google vs. the Library – Goliath vs. David?

04 Mar

I spoke to a local Rotary club recently on topic of - Google vs. the Library: Research & Collaboration in the 21st Century. The group wanted to know if Google and the Internet would be putting our libraries out of business.  My answer?  Yes and No (see the link above for more details).

Yes, Google and the internet (specifically Wikipedia) have already put libraries out of the business of providing basic reference material.

No, Google and the internet will not put libraries out of the business of lending books in the short run.  More importantly, Libraries for the foreseeable future will the the primary conduit for most people to access high quality and expensive research databases like Pub Med and other walled off online journals.

One interesting factoid from the presentation: The Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 100,000 articles and costs over $1,000 for a set of books. Wikipedia has over 3,000,000 articles and is completely free.  Wikipedia is 30 times larger than Britannica, and is widening it’s lead on a daily basis.

For now the Goliath vs. David battle is a draw ;-)

 
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Posted by on 2010.03.04 in education, Google, Open Source, Work

 

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Is This what Museums & Libraries will Look Like 20 Years from Now?

18 Jan

The British Museum and the BBC have teamed up to create a website that presents the world’s history via objects (in digital form of course) contained in the British Museum.  The site is called: A History of the World.  BBC Raido will be broadcasting shows that discuss items on the website and point people to the site in case they would like to explore further.  There will also be a CBBC 13 part series that will looks at relics that are part of the collection.

I’ve always thought that a big part of the future of both libraries and museums will be in digitizing the unique portions of their collections and then make those digital object available to the world.  What the BBC and the British museum have done, is create an excellent interface for people to browse their collection online, which make it much more accessible than it could ever be in a brick and mortar building.

I should probably get more involved in the digitization projects going on at the University of Victoria Libraries where I work!

 
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Posted by on 2010.01.18 in education

 

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How to get a Higher Google Ranking for my Website?

10 Jan

What follows is an email I sent to a friend hopefully helping him to better understand how Google’s Page Rank system works, and how he can get his website on the first page of Google search resluts:

I’m glad that the Google stats for your site are looking up.  There is one thing that I tried to explain to you on the phone before Christmas that I don’t think I explained very well.  Let me try explaining Google Page Rank again:

Q1. What determines which websites are put on the 1st page of Google search results?

  • The relevancy of the title and text on your web page to the search query.
  • The number and quality of other people’s websites linking to your website.  You can think of other websites linking to your site as a vote… The more votes your site has, the higher your websites ranking will be.
  • The best way to influence your page rank is to make sure you have good key words in the title of your page, the URL, and in the text on your page.  The other thing is to encourage quality websites to link to your site… These are the key things in your control (more info from Google).

Q2. What else can you do to monitor your website and find ways to improve it?

  • Update you  website with current relevant content.
  • Get a Gmail account so that you can access other Google resources to help your website.  http://gmail.com
  • You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google, so you can modify it to make it more “Googlefriendly”.
  • Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from geographically, and what other sites are forwarding users to your site.

I hope this helps!

 
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Posted by on 2010.01.10 in Google

 

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Commercial Screen Casting for Free – Camtasia

13 Dec

If anyone is interested in doing some screen casting, but do not like the free web based program Screencast-o-matic, Techsmith is now giving away an older version of Camtasia Studio (it is one of the better screen cast programs around, with plenty of bells and whistles). For the download links and information, please go to the Downloadsquad website. It’s fun to play with and they say you can upgrade to the latest version for half price.

 
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Posted by on 2007.12.13 in Other Stuff, Work

 

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