Assisted digital – bringing it all together | Blog | New Zealand Government Web Toolkit. Since our Assisted Digital Summit in June 2014 some great work has been happening in the Assisted Digital space. We’ve held workshops, informal meetings and built a community around the common goal of helping people use, shift or stay in the digital channel. However, the continued challenge seems to be about how we all keep connected, learn from each other, join up where it makes sense, share information and better coordinate our efforts so that we’re making the most impact and putting our energies in the right places to make a difference. To help, we’re hosting a tradeshow event on 24 February at the National Library in Wellington (external site link)1. There’ll be information stalls from groups working in areas that relate to assisted digital, and a series of presentations to share experience and get us thinking on topics like: What examples can we share of initiatives across the sector that are helping people to use, shift to and stay in digital channels?
The complete guide to PDFs in iTunes. There are a small but growing number of PDFs appearing in iTunes, users can subscribe to podcasts to automatically receive audio and video – and recently – PDFs. At MAKE & CRAFT we have experimented with this from the start – we have also cataloged all the podcasts that send out PDFs we could find here. Eventually I think phones (including the iPhone) will be able to read PDFs via this method, perhaps a future iPod making it possible to easily distribute ebooks to these devices. For now, you can use a Mac, PC or even a Sony reader to sync to iTunes (using a hack) and read PDFs directly.
Any RSS reader that supports enclosures should download the PDFs as well, the RSS 2.0 feed is listed with each podcast. Last up, Amazon is said to be working on a wireless ebook reader, using e-ink like the Sony reader, but with an internet connection. It’s a good time to start thinking about this if you do anything with PDFs. Here they are – please feel free to post in the comments if we missed one. Creating books with Apple’s iBooks Author is a doddle. iBooks Author offers simple to use templates for making eBooks After yesterday’s announcement, I popped along to the MAc App Store to grab myself a copy of Apple’s new eBook authoring tool, iBooks Author. A free download, the Mac-only package feels very similar to Pages, Apple’s word processor and has the same ‘hand-holding’ feel as its Garageband music/podacast tool. Apple promises the software will allow budding authors to create “amazing Multi-touch books for iPad” by mixing text with audio, video, and images.
To test that claim I decided to make a book. But to make a book you need some content and I didn’t have time to write a novel or go on a trip to the Andes and take stunning images to share. So I cheated by using some content I already had – a collection of articles and essays marking the 10th anniversary of London’s government which I write about over here. Having found my various pieces of content I needed to assemble them into an exciting whole. Is iBooks Author a game changer? iTunes - Partner Programs - Book Publishers. Create EPUB eBooks with Adobe InDesign « Caveat Lector.