I was quite pleased to be asked to write a technical report for JISC. The paper provides background on the state of ebook publishing today, and concludes with a set of recommended projects that aim to improve digital scholarly publishing in the UK. The report is available online as Digital Monograph Technical Landscape: Exemplars [...]
I was thrilled to be able to contribute a chapter to Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, a compilation of essays edited by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary. (Incidently, it was great to see how much the text was improved by their editorial work.)
In the essay, I highlight some advantages and affordances unique to digital books. The [...]
IBM DeveloperWorks has published Data-driven interactive applications with HTML5 and Ajax, my short tutorial on writing offline-capable webapps for mobile devices. Many of these techniques were used when developing Ibis Reader (though Ibis Reader does not use the jQTouch framework).
Only indirectly related to ebooks, but a familiar problem for those who now juggle multiple ereaders and mobile devices:
I’ve got a quote further down the page:
Read the complete quote and also try some of the associated distraction tests.
My tutorial Build a digital book with EPUB, posted on IBM DeveloperWorks, has been out for some time (November 2008!) but it has recently been updated with some minor corrections. It also no longer requires registration thanks to a policy change at DeveloperWorks.
[Guest post by game designer and author Emily Short: see bio]
Authors and publishers alike are beginning to think more about the interactive possibilities of fiction.
The good news is that it’s not necessary to invent interactive storytelling from scratch. Computer games have been exploring this territory since the late 1970s; literary hypertext since the [...]
The second of two articles I wrote for IBM Developerworks: Doing More with the Django Admin (the first was Better Django Models).
The “Admin” is the administrative console that’s built into the Django application. It provides an easy way to administer content on any Django site. For developers who are tired of writing the [...]
The first of two articles I wrote about the Python web framework Django has been published by IBM Developerworks: Better Django Models.
Neither one is publishing-specific, but Django (like Rails and Drupal) is a great way to deploy a web application quickly and easily. (Bookworm runs on Django, as do many of my smaller projects.)