Starting today, I’m moving this blog from a daily to a weekly publication schedule. The immediate cause of this move was Apple’s January 19th release of iBook Author, an iPad application designed to make it easy for educators to publish textbooks and supplementary materials. Apple’s announcement clarified something for me: blogs are just one aspect of the revolution in publishing that is currently happening.
I love blogging — and over the past few years I’ve experimented with video blogging, photo blogging, audio blogging (podcasts), microblogging (Twitter), and of course text blogging — but I’ve been spending an average of two hours a day on my various blogging projects. I want to experiment with other kinds of new publishing methods as well: interactive textbooks, e-books, print on demand, and more. In order to carve out the time to experiment with other publishing methods, I unfortunately have to cut back on the time I spend blogging.
So I’ll be changing my publication schedule here to a new post every Monday. If something comes up in the middle of the week — e.g., if I’m at a conference — I may post on other days as well. But there will always be something new every Monday.
iBook Author also forks off an open standard for Apple’s benefit. It’s a very Microsoft thing to do.
I support you in any publication schedule you use, but I strongly encourage you to reconsider the tool.
I also strongly encourage you to choose another publication tool. Looks like poison to me.
http://venomousporridge.com/post/16126436616/ibooks-author-eula-audacity
John and Scott — Point taken. It’s a pretty bad EULA. I understand that Apple is aiming this at educators who are going to give this stuff away — but what I really don’t like is that the iBook format diverges from the epub standard format. Geez, I might as well publish in Kindle format.
I’m already using Lulu.com, a Web-based service, which will also publish in epub format, so I will start with that (in fact, I have already started with that, and am working on a field test of a middle school book designed to introduce liberal religious kids to principles of comparative religion and source criticism).
I’d also like to have software that’s resident on my computer — Web-based services like Lulu.com have definite limitations. Although Calibre looks good, I may have to bite the bullet and buy a copy of Quark Express or InDesign. I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience publishing in epub format.
Dan,
I have been doing a good bit with illustrator, Photoshop, and after effects for the past several years and finally snagged In Design several months ago. You can get it free for a month to try off the website. I highly recomend but like with so much in adobe they are so very professional and allow some of the widest room for creativity and original design that it can be a steeop learning curve. However as far as their products go thus far I am finding Indesign quite user friendly. Part of my chalenge is that I do not have a tablet, smart phone or ipad and so when I experiment with the interactivity features I build things as I believe one is enat to do but am on hold to see how they would actually operate on various devices. But in about a week of tinkering I was able to do a full collor illustrated lesson plan someone asked me for with diagrams and page turns and active links all in a PDF document that most people can access.
Ralph — Yes, there are some fabulous publishing tools out there. I live in a Quark Xpress household, so I’m unlikely to switch to Adobe InDesign, but your basic point is well taken: a good publishing program can produce very nice PDFs in full color.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard other educators talking about using Apple’s Pages — very inexpensive and user-friendly, speaks PDF — so I may check that out as well. I have also produced some good-looking documents (including a full book) in MS Word, though I don’t recommend using Word — it’s too clunky and buggy for use with long documents.