My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

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daniel_reetz
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E-book readers owned: Used to have a PRS-500
Number of books owned: 600
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Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by daniel_reetz »

Thanks, James! I saw your question on the mailing list today. :) Haven't yet had time to dive into Booki, but I am really looking forward to it.
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daniel_reetz
Posts: 2812
Joined: 03 Jun 2009, 13:56
E-book readers owned: Used to have a PRS-500
Number of books owned: 600
Country: United States
Contact:

Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by daniel_reetz »

Hey everyone, Booki (which is a fantastic ebook publishing platform, and the source of ALL THESE BOOKS, including one using DIY Book Scanning technology) is up for a web award. If you have time, throw a vote their way!
Vote for booki in the Open Web Awards!

Booki (the latest FM project - http://www.booki.cc - a collaborative
publishing platform) is in the final of the Open Web Awards.
Great! We are 1 of 3 projects. If we win we get 5000 which we will use
to do a code sprint on a tropical island somewhere ;)

please please please register :
http://www.drumbeat.org/user/register

and vote for us:
http://www.drumbeat.org/project/open-web-publishing

and pass this around!!!! :)

Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals &
Booki Project Manager
JDSimmons

Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by JDSimmons »

daniel_reetz wrote:Hey everyone, Booki (which is a fantastic ebook publishing platform, and the source of ALL THESE BOOKS, including one using DIY Book Scanning technology) is up for a web award. If you have time, throw a vote their way!
Booki will be used for a couple of important things:

1). FLOSS Manuals: free books for free software. This includes manuals on CiviCRM, Circumventing censorship on the Internet, Sugar (OLPC) development and other important topics. Booki lets you create a manual that can be read online, downloaded as a PDF or EPUB, or used the create a bound and printed book in a variety of formats.

2). It will also be a platform for proofing and correcting EPUBs made by the Internet Archive. IA is one of the best sources of free books on the Internet, providing two million titles as PDFs, DjVus, and EPUBs. These are all produced automatically from scanned page images like we make, but the EPUB's need proofing and correcting and Booki is the software that will make that happen.

Everyone interested in the future of books (everyone on this site) has a stake in the success of Booki!
JDSimmons

Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by JDSimmons »

I'd like to post some links where you can check out how Booki can be used to create printed books. First, my book on E-Books, prepared by the Rural Design Collective:

http://sixes.net/rdcHQ/ebook-enlightenm ... published/

Second, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte posing (sort of) with my first Booki-produced book:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/5078796472/

Booki can create E-Books in PDF and EPUB formats, as well as printed books in standard sizes (like Crown Quarto) and "newspaper" format. So not only can you convert printed books into E-Books, you can also use free EPUBs from the Internet Archive to reissue an out of print book.
spamsickle
Posts: 596
Joined: 06 Jun 2009, 23:57

Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by spamsickle »

Really great resource. I've only read through page 20 so far, but I had to pause to say I've already learned a lot I didn't know. Thanks for making it available.
JDSimmons

Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by JDSimmons »

I finally got "E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per Child" in good enough shape to publish, and this morning it is available on the Kindle Store. The price is higher for this book than it was for my previous one because Amazon has minimum prices based on file sizes. Where the earlier book was mostly code listings, the new one contains lots of screen shots, sample page images, etc.

You can see out the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005BYST5I

As with my other books, I put it on the Kindle Store to expose it to an audience that would not normally look at archive.org. The book is available for free at archive.org, in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. The PDF is suitable for printing as a Crown Quarto sized book. The EPUB has extra artwork and fancy dropcaps that are not supported well on the Kindle.

The link for archive.org is:

http://www.archive.org/details/EBookEnlightenment

If you'd like to check out all my donations to archive.org you may do so here:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query ... pe%3Atexts

Most of these books were created using a book scanner like the one described on this site.
LHemphillix

Re: My FLOSS Manual On E-Books

Post by LHemphillix »

Tim wrote: I can't say that Mediawiki (the Wiki engine behind Wikipedia) is better than OBJAVI, but it certainly does table of contents and has the ability to facilitate printed pdf books. I don't know about other formats. I really like the idea of putting together and selling an ebook that consolidates the best advice from these forums. It could pay for the webhosting at least. The advantage of Mediawiki is that many people are familiar with its syntax from Wikipedia.

This is interesting. To be honest I never heard about OBJAVI but I know Mediawiki and I really like the syntax of Mediawiki. At the moment I am looking for a good website hosting and I just wanted to ask if someone of you has any recommendations regarding a good web host. I would love to have a website which I can use for writing about different ebooks and maybe sell some via affiliate links.
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