In my previous post I mentioned that eBooks can be published to a variety of platforms and for distribution purposes, the more devices that can read your books the better. An organisation that prepares and distributes your eBooks to channels like Amazon and ITunes store for free is Smashwords. Using their Microsoft Word template (actually a document I edited from one of their books) and AFTER reading and understanding the free how to guide on how to publish on Smashwords.com.

As I am writing this, I hope that smashwords is quietly working in the background converting my small two page book into an eBook. Don't forget that you will need to create a book cover. With the template above, you get a free Mark Christie chilli recipe thrown in - my TLC sauce.

I will digress a little here and talk about the ibook application which is a bookshelf and eBook reader available for the iPad and iPhone version 3 + 4. Although it reads books in the more formal epub format, it also reads pdf documents.

ibook application

So, the little voice in your head is asking "why don't we just publish in pdf format?". Well this is because you can only upload it into the iTunes library in your computer to share with devices attached to your machine. We could put it on our server and then folks would download it, put it in their iTunes library and then add it to their device. So formally publishing to the iTunes store via smashwords makes it easier for your eBook to be consumed and also provide a far wider distribution channel than you could hope for with pdf alone. That said, don't ignore the ease and power of simply converting to pdf.

We will be placing pdf versions of our course content into Moodle to augment the exercise/interactive components associated with that content.

Digression complete.

Just went back to check on the progress of my first eBook (I am excited!).

Oh no! I could release another 5 books before this one gets processed! Patience I say to myself. I am now hoping that the MS word wider hyphen that I left in the document purposely isn't going to have the book become like the one that John West rejected.

Anyway, another opportunity to explain some of the method behind the madness...

While we wait for that to cook, let's look at the relationship between producing content in an eBook format and integrating that with our learning environment.

I won't focus on the quiz creation side of things in this post, but I wanted to show that a relationship can exist between the anywhere/anyhow content delivery of eBooks on devices as small as an iPhone through to a smartboard and the fact that from an iPad up to a teacher facilitated learning intervention, we can practise, exercise, engage and enjoy our way through challenging their knowledge on the content in the eBooks. How many spoons of sugar for the TLC recipe? What size spoon was it?

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