The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
The 2015 Open Source Yearbook is a community-contributed collection of the year’s top open source projects, people, tools, and stories. New articles are added as they are published here.
— 2015 Open Source Yearbook https://opensource.com/yearbook/2015
The yearbook highlights the best of open source in 2015 including hardware, software, and resources that made 2015 a great year for open source. There are 22 entries covering everything from the raspberry pi to Drupal to free ebooks.
Top open formats for eBooks | Opensource.com https://opensource.com/education/15/11/ebook-open-formats
A modern, publishing toolchain, simply taking you from ideas to finished, polished books.
GitBook · Write & Publish Books https://www.gitbook.com/
GitBook supports authoring in AsciiDoc as well as Markdown.
Grab 24 Free Ebooks to Learn a New Programming Language :: Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/grab-24-free-ebooks-to-learn-a-new-programming-language-1683499328?utm_campaign=socialflow_lifehacker_facebook&utm_source=lifehacker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Did you ever wanted to write and publish book? With GitBook you can create ebook using markdown syntax and with few clicks publish it in multiple formats such as PDF, EPUB, HTML or MOBI. GitBook also allows to split the workload among multiple contributors by using git distributed revision control. In this article we show how to run GitBook on Fedora and Ubuntu Linux.
via How to run GitBook Editor on Linux.
This is interesting. The meat of GitBook is at www.gitbook.io and the source is on GitHub at https://github.com/GitbookIO. Versions of the editor for Windows and Mac are available.
This is the README file for the Github repository that holds the files used and created in this experiment. I’m including the README in its entirety since it kills 2 birds with 1 stone.
This repo holds a set of files that I created as an experiment in getting old work out of proprietary formats. The idea is to take a MSFT Word file and convert it into something that is human readable, open formatted, and convertible.
To do this is I settled upon AsciiDoc to mark up the text of the paper. I chose AsciiDoc over Markdown because of the depth of features and availability of conversion tools.
I decided to use a local install of Etherpad Lite (EL) as my primary text editor for this project. I did this because of a few features including autosave, versioning, and the potential for real time collaboration. I hoped that these features would provide me with a useful editing tool.
Once EL setup and configured I was faced with the problem of how to get the text of the paper into the editor in the first place. My initial inclination was to retype the document, formating and editing as I went along. Faced with a 10,000 word doc and no appreciable typing skills, I was not happy with this option. After a bit of poking around in EL I found its import features. To get MSFT Word files imported required a bit more configuring, but it worked. I then imported the Word file into EL.
The import process added the text of the document to the editor. It stripped all of the formatting from the text and inserted the 112 footnotes in-line into the text. All of this was actually a good thing, making the process of marking up the doc with AsciiDoc easier. Using the original word processing file as a guide I worked through the document adding the necessary AsciiDoc markup to format the paper. The most tedious part was the 112 footnotes, but since AsciiDoc handles footnote with in-line markup it moved along as fast as could be expected.
In total I spent about 6 hours working on the AsciiDoc version of the document. The most time was spent tagging footnotes and figuring out the format for the bibliography
[I am still not really pleased with the way the biblio looks. I think I can fix though on a later iteration.]
The rest of the formating such as section titles, quotes, emphasis, and lists was straight forward though I did keep a copy of the AsciiDoc User Guide open in another tab to help out.
I found the Etherpad Lite interface easy to work with and really appreciated the autosave and versioning features. EL doesn’t know about AsciiDoc markup though so that presented a challenge. In order to preview the work I had to export the file as text and then do the basic AsciiDoc to HTML, opening the resulting file in another browser tab to see what was going on. As I became more confident of my work, I checked less often so this was not much of an issue. I marked major revisions as saved revisions at the end of section of the document to give me a nice clean revision history.
Once I had a nice clean version that produced good HTML, I exported a final copy to my local computer and set about using the AsciiDoc utility a2x to generate the document in various formats. For this particular experiment I went with XHTML, PDF, and EPUB. The generation/conversion process was marred only by my problems with understanding the format for the bibliography at the end of the document. Once I figure out just how to mark up the bibliography process was flawless. a2x first converts the AsciiDoc marked document into a DocBook XML file and then converts the DocBook file into other formats. The process uses the standard set of XML processing tools as well as CSS to generate the files. By using custom CSS files, the layout and formating of the various output files can be changed as needed.
The files included in this repo are the ones used and generated as part of the process described above.
| KELSOFIN20130111.docx | The MSFT Word file that was used for the starting point. This document began as a WordPerfect file in 1992 and was moved to Word in the mid-90’s. |
| KelsoPaper.txt | This is the AsciiDoc version of the file as created and edited in Etherpad Lite. This is the file used to generate the other formats. |
| KelsoPaper.pdf | PDF file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f pdf KelsoPaper.txt |
| KelsoPaper.html | XHTML file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f xhtml KelsoPaper.txt |
| docbook-xsl.css | CSS file used to style KelsoPaper.html |
| KelsoPaper.epub | EPUB file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f epub KelsoPaper.txt |
I am happy with the results of this experiment and hope to be able to further explore the use of Etherpad Lite and AsciiDoc as a tool set for creating free and open documents.
This collection of 50+ chapters showcases a sampling of academic technology projects underway across the University of Minnesota, projects that we hope inspire other faculty and staff to consider, utilize, or perhaps even develop new solutions that have the potential to make their efforts more responsive, nimble, efficient, effective, and far-reaching. Our hope is to stimulate discussion about what’s possible as well as generate new vision and academic technology direction. The work underway is most certainly innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative, and dynamic. This collection of innovative stories is a reminder that we are a collection of living people whose Land Grant values and ideas shape who we serve, what we do, and how we do it. Many of these projects engage others in discourse with the academy: obtaining opinion or feedback, taking the community pulse, allowing for an extended discourse, and engaging citizens in important issues. What better time to share 50+ stories about cultivating change than in 2012 – the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Land Grant Mission!
Produced in just 10 weeks, this book is a snapshot of academic technology projects and research underway at the University of Minnesota. Of more interest to me than the speed with which it was produced or the subject matter are the formats in which the book was released. First, it is a blog and a website. Each chapter is a post with the text of the chapter embedded as a PDF file. The blog has commenting enabled, RSS feeds and its own Twitter hashtag, #CC50, so that readers may engage the authors in ongoing discussion. Second, the work is available in EPUB, .mobi, and PDF formats so you can read it on the platform of your choice. The work carries a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
As I’ve stated in a prior post I think the future of books, especially textbooks and other educational materials lies on the web, not locked into some closed or crippled format. This book serves as an excellent example of the future of the book.
In February I wrote that every book is a website and we need to embrace the webiness of books. This led to some good discussion about the nature of books generally and casebooks in particular and about the nature of websites. The discussion helped clarify a couple of things in my mind.
First, though every book is a website not every website is a book. As I mentioned in the previous article, once a book is in an electronic form such as EPUB the process to make the book into a website is straight forward. That is not to say that it is easy, but that the path from EPUB to website is clearly marked. The reverse is not true. Moving a website to a book format such as EPUB is not straight forward and may even be impossible.
A website is a often a complex and carefully organized store of information. It may be fairly static, with a single information store arranged and hyperlinked for readers to discover. It may be interactive, drawing the the reader/visitor deeper into the site primarily through the use of hyperlinks to reveal or explain things. It may not even contain any text at all. The design of a website holds clues as to whether or not it can survive the transformation into a book.
Simple static websites are the best candidates for books. Information, often mostly text, is arranged in some sort of linear fashion. Links to outside sites are minimal. A single author or a small group of collaborators gives the site a particular voice. A blog is a good example of the sort of site that lends itself to being bookified.
Contrast this to a more complex and interactive site where the community contributes to the site or games are played or movies are watched. Information is arranged in a non-linear fashion. Links, both internal and external, abound. A multitude of authors, editors, and contributors all bring their voices to the site. Wrangling this into a book could not be done without destroying the value of the site.
This brings me to my second point, a book is a book. It does not matter if the medium is paper or bits, the form and structure of a book is still the same. Books have covers, title pages, tables of contents, chapters, notes (foot or end). The structure of a book is a known thing and the structure carries through all mediums. This is something that makes books unique. A book is a book in hard cover, paperback, on the Kindle, Nook and iPad, in the PDF file on your PC, and ultimately on the web.
Moving a book from print to electronic is not magic and it does not make the book better. The change in format just changes how readers access the book. If you want to make a “better” book, then build a website. Adding interaction and multimedia to a book are often valuable ways to enhance the information that is provided, but adding these enhancements are better done as website than a book.
Transforming a book into a website is the way to make a better book and destroy the book at the same time. Rather than spending time trying to shoehorn elements of a website into a book, we should let go of the book and embrace the web as the book of the future.
The forthcoming 0.6.0 version of Sigil, my favorite desktop EPUB editor, is going to have a WYSIWYG HTML editor in the BookView. This is a much needed addition to a great tool that will allow for greater control over the editing and creation of EPUBs.
From Making epub happen:
The next release of Sigil is shaping up nicely. There is so much going into it that the next release will be 0.6.0. Unfortunately, EPUB 3 will not be one of the features making it into 0.6.0. One major change coming will be a new BookView (BV) editor. Here is an unfished preview of what it might look like.
This is only a concept preview of the new editor. One issue that needs to be resolved is the double tool bar. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to use the one in the BV pane or the global one in the window itself
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2011/11/creative-commons-media-neutrality-and.html
Here’s where it gets complicated.
Not so long ago, book publishers had no idea that there would be such things as digital books. Publishing contracts mentioned nothing about ebooks. Literary agents made sure to keep derivative rights separate, so that translation rights, film rights, stage adaptation rights, etc. for a successful book could be separately monetized.
When ebooks started to become important, the digital publisher Rosetta Books took advantage of the situation, and started acquiring ebook rights to well-known books such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This did not please the print publishers at all. Random House, one of the “Big Six” US publishers, took Rosetta to court, saying that their publishing contracts gave them exclusive rights to distribute books, and ebooks were books.The coffee’s on, let’s get to work.
