Month: January 2012

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iBooks Author Gives You the Power to Design Your Own Book, Here

http://lifehacker.com/5878373/ibooks-author-gives-you-the-power-to-design-your-own-book-heres-what-you-should-know

Last week Apple released iBooks Author as a free tool to create and design books for the iPad. But is this just a niche tool for creating textbooks or is there something useful you can do with it? The niche factor is going to depend on what type of creative person you are.

This article provides a balanced review of iBooks Author.

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Twitter Updates for 2012-01-21

  • @tomboonedotcom I hope the whole iBooks Author thing brings more attention to more flexible tools like Sigil and open education resources. #
  • @bjchapm iBooks Author requires complete buy-in to the Apple stack. You need a Mac and an iPad2 to create books. Still see Sigil as better. #
  • @bjchapm As #elangdell redefines the casebook in legal ed, interactivity will increase, but it needs to be open. HTML5 is great on the iPad. #
  • @rleiter What's the link for today's Law Librarian Conversations podcast? #
  • @KenHirsh @rleiter Thanks. I'll be there! #
  • @tomboonedotcom Why certainly. Perhaps a day long workshop. I did a session last year: http://t.co/hiV6dMxd #CALIcon12 #
  • TR selling Legal Publishing not surprising. TR is about information and analysis, not printing textbooks. Printing law may go to #lawlibcon #
  • Apple Pages has had an export to EPUB feature for over a year. But .epub is an open format and .ibooks is not. #lawlibcon #
  • From what I've seen stuff produced using bells and whistles of iBooks Author cannot be reproduced on other platforms. #lawlibcon #
  • Apple e-textbook tools to jack up education and hardware costs ultimately? | TeleRead: News and views on e-books, l… http://t.co/39GrM4Cg #

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Twitter Updates for 2012-01-20

  • Firing up iBooks Author to see what it might mean for the #elangdell project. #
  • First, iBooks Author (let's call it iAuthor) doesn't open existing .epub files. #
  • @johnpmayer And then there's that. #
  • Imported a large Word file into iAuthor. It did a good job of removing all of the formatting and inserting breaks here and there. #
  • iAuthor "exports" to an .ibooks file? What's that? And it's huge. Blew a 1.2 meg word doc up to 17 megs. Why? #
  • @johnpmayer iBooks Author is not another Sigil. Like comparing Word and emacs. 2 very different tools. #
  • In a world hungry for WYSIWYG ebook tools, iBooks Author is an all you can eat buffet. So long as don't mind being chained to the table. #
  • I see nothing in iAuthor that is going to cause me to change the #elangdell workflow. Still like Sigil for the work we do. #
  • And with that I'm going to an early lunch so I can get back to real work this afternoon. #
  • One more thing, the .ibooks format that iAuthor exports appears to be a slightly modified EPUB file. So you can unzip and peer inside. #
  • @richmccue It's all about the Apple Stack. The exports from iAuthor can be renamed to .epub and will open in some readers but w/o features. #
  • @sglassmeyer Plenty of stuff about the transitions at Harvard: http://t.co/GZhXRjWk Get it straight from the horses mouth. #
  • @johnpmayer That section (b) is not a change. Apple has always reserved the right not to accept stuff in iTunes, iBooks, App Store. #
  • @sglassmeyer Or like watching one of those reality TV shows. Harvard + iBooks2 has made for an interesting Twittery sort of day. #
  • @kaiyen iAuthor lets you do HTML5 and JS stuff that won't work on any other platform. You can always suck out just text, but why bother? #
  • @sglassmeyer Well, you could start injecting LoLcats into the stream. It might help. #
  • @johnpmayer Why is the definition of a book murky? Because Apple released a new toaster? #
  • Great thing about doing a large migration of stuff: keeping an eye on it leaves the other eye to follow twitter fun. And a fun day it is! #
  • Nothing uglier than a macbook outta memory. At least windows gave me the three finger salute. #
  • “@RWW: Why Apple Won't Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon http://t.co/aBUyi9R6” [Couldn't agree more.] #
  • @elizabethf I saw that coming. TR is in the information business, not publishing. It makes sense to sell it off to one of the textbook pubs. #

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AWS Adds MSFT Windows Server 2K8 to Free Tier, Now Everyone Can Give Cloud a Whirl!

The AWS Free Usage Tier now allows you to run Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 on an EC2 t1.micro instance for up to 750 hours per month. This benefit is open to new AWS customers and to those who are already participating in the Free Usage Tier, and is available in all AWS Regions with the exception of GovCloud. This is an easy way for Windows users to start learning about and enjoying the benefits of cloud computing with AWS.

Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Free Usage Tier now Includes Microsoft Windows on EC2

This addition means there is no reason not to try out AWS now. Even those steadfast MSFT admins with no interest in Linux can give the cloud a whirl for free for a year. Go ahead, you know you’ve been dying to find out what all the fuss is about.