I have been on this quest to offer a solution to teachers that would enable them to create a talking book. I had a few criteria though.

  • You had to be able to use free tools to do it.
  • It couldn’t be something that teachers thought was too difficult and not worth the effort
  • It had to play on the iPad
  • It had to play on other devices as well, including Windows
  • As the book was read, words would highlight. (Don’t get too excited by this – it is not there yet, but more on that later)
  • I also wanted teachers to be able to share the books with students and other teachers who had iPads without going through iTunes

I need to tell you that this has been a long time coming and I feel that out of our teaching community, about 90% would be able to create an eBook without audio after about ten minutes guidance (ie reading this blog entry) and of that group, half would be willing to have a go at adding audio and video to their book.

My nine year old son, Joe will be acting as crash test smarty. He has never created an eBook before, but he has created stories and projects in Microsoft Word which will form the editing cornerstone of our book.

Our topic, or rather my imposed topic is Joe’s recent trip to the HMB Endeavour which visited Darwin in August 2011. I say imposed as I think that Joe would much rather be creating a Harry Potter or Dr. Who eBook however we will have less issues with copyright and will be able to create a mini resource that others can use.

When you create an eBook to play back on the iPad, Nook or Kindle, it has to be created using a particular format called ePub. Until recently, that has been a bit of a black art. I have posted blog entries about sites like smashwords and epubbud which are great sites in their own right and you should have a look at them, not the least to take advantage of 5 dollar ISBNs if you plan on publishing your book online through iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Amazon and others.

But, before we get there, we need the basic ingredients… The what, why and how.

I will redirect a bit on the what and why as Google can a do a better job of supplying those answers, but the how is the bit that has been eluding me for a while.

What is an eBook?

For this question I will refer you to

An eBook should be readable on many devices and the experience will differ from device to device. I am espousing that our content should be platform agnostic and in fact I create on a windows PC and deliver to an iPad (because that is what I have) bypassing iTunes and hoping that the same eBook will play nicely on an Android device.

My intentions are pure, but proprietary standards may thwart this intention.

Why should we be interested in eBooks?

They take a word or PDF document to a new pleasurable level of reading. Don’t take my word for it. Have a look at the word version of what Joe and I created and then look at it in iBooks. Once we polish the words, link captions to photos, insert sound and video we will have a compelling piece – helped by the quality of the source – the HMB Endeavour and the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Think about your child or one of your students putting together a simple picture book about their trip to the Easter Show in Sydney or a visit to the Oil Tunnels in Darwin. 10 photos and a sentence for each wrapped in some context and you have content and the satisfaction that it is a personal published work that looks cool on the device.

Another “why” is that there is a new level of ePub – ePub 3.0 on the way that included interactivity, formalises the audio, video tags used in html 5.0 and also adds the ability to synchronise audio with highlighted text.

How do we make an eBook?

These are the steps… I will cover the detail of each, but the first two steps and the last are all you need to create and publish a book to your iPad.

My 5 steps are:

 

Create the basic book

 

  • Microsoft Word (get your free online copy at skydrive)
  • Image editor (picasa, gimp or similar)

 

Create the basic eBook

 

  • Aspose words express

 

Record edit produce and embed audio and video

 

  • Small video camera (Kodak, flip or similar) - tripod
  • Audacity or live movie maker or imovie
  • Format factory
  • Notepad

 

Add a book cover

 

  • Calibre or notepad

 

Distribute your eBook

 

  • Calibre or itunes
  • Computer connected to the internet

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Well here is one that we worked on today. Click on the attachment link below if you have an iPad to download the eBook. This was done in less than hour and involved Joe writing some notes based on his experience and then we prepared the document in MS Word.

It is still a work in progress and has no sound or video yet, but this is about showing how we whittle this into a professional eBook rather than just showing the final product.

The size differencebetween the word document and the ePub format is substantial - 800k for the ePub and 3,800k for the word document.

Stay tuned as we add sound and motion to this document.

This entry was posted on August 21, 2011 at 5:26 PM and has received 611 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.