Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Dead

I'll leave everyone to make their own zombie jokes.

Our group of four--Adena, Catherine, Eileen, and Shauntel--chose James Joyce's series of short stories Dubliners, which we got from Project Gutenberg. There are fifteen stories plus the table of contents, so we've split the stories up into four sections and are using Zoho to pool information and track our progress. We discovered by happy accident that you can edit .rtf or .doc files online without downloading, like Google docs. Each story has been given it's own html file and one of our week long tasks is making sure each file has the same opening and closing tags, and that all the files validate. We're also working on overall design and layout, our css file, and choosing our cover image.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Alice in Wonderland

For our Epub Infrastructure class, our group (comprised of myself, Randy, Yelba, Corey and Prateeksha), we chose a version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland that includes some very cool illustrations (courtesy of Authorama). Yelba set us up at Base Camp, and we have all been assigned various duties to complete by our next meeting on Tuesday. Prateeksha uploaded pdfs of the images, and we will each be adding the 12 chapters.  Corey is going to be putting together the Table of Contents as well as designing a cover, while Randy and I will  compile and validate the book to prepare for Yelba who will be taking on the duties of CSS.

So far, so good, and we are ready to fall further down the rabbit hole.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Amazon Strikes Again

So I saw this entry on one of my favorite author blogs.

It brings up an interesting question -- what happens to your marketing efforts when you don't really have a hard-and-fast "release date" anymore, if the eBook version suddenly drops unexpectedly early?

(N.B.: What I don't know is if this was in fact Baen's original plan, in which case it's likely more a matter of "it would have been nice to keep everyone in the loop" than anything else.)

Thoughts?

Monday, October 4, 2010

Sports Illustrated for iPad Demo

Demo

I saw this last spring at a meeting I was at, so this might be old news to everyone here, but I thought it's such a great illustration of what magazines can do with the iPad. Since I don't have an iPad, I am not even sure if this is what an actual SI iPad issue looks like. Anyone know?

New books jump off the page with digital enhancements

Article about enhanced books for children

An interesting way to enhance books for children. Also brings up the interesting issues of the whether or not the add-ons will have value over time, as they may not last forever and that the book must be able strong enough to stand on it's own over time.

AP Circular App Coming to Help Print Compete With Coupon Pure Plays

I am going to post a few things that I thought I had posted on Diigo, but they don't seem to be showing up. I apologize if these are repeats for anyone.

AP Circular App Coming to Help Print Compete With Coupon Pure Plays

Interesting in that it reminded me to think about circulars as part of the newspaper, and what is going to happen to coupons and such.