OpenSource solution for digital Magazine publishing on Tablets. Laker compendium – Designing digital publications in HTML5. Baker Ebook Framework 3.2. Friar eBook Framework 1.0. Treesaver.js. Leanpub. From Book Oven to PressBooks, Hugh McGuire Shares His Startup Story. Hugh McGuire is a well known Montreal entrepreneur.
In fact, he’s known all over the world. Hugh is the founder of LibriVox, the largest catalog of audio books from the public domain. It’s a great service and continues to grow. A few years ago, Hugh decided to take a crack at building a “for-profit” company called Book Oven. The goal was to build a platform for book publishing. Like with most startups, things at Book Oven didn’t go as planned.
Hugh’s story is a testament to perseverance, learning, pivoting and just how hard it is to build a successful startup. NextMontreal: What is PressBooks? Hugh: PressBooks is a simple book production tool. PressBooks is a reinvention and focusing of some of the ideas that went into BookOven.com, which we started building in late 2008 (!). NextMontreal: Are you the only founder? Hugh: Yes.
NextMontreal: How did you get from Book Oven to PressBooks? Bookoven.com was getting no traction, and we were burning too much money. Building from Scratch. Simple book production. Ibis Reader ™ Threepress Consulting Inc. 24symbols. Specification - Open Format for Interactive Publications. Infographic: The Affordable Future of College Textbooks - Nicholas Jackson - Technology.
The average college student spends about $900 every year just on textbooks.
That, in addition to rising tuition costs, boarding costs and activity fees, is making college more expensive than it's ever been. Publishing pioneers and textbook innovators are pushing open textbooks, or works that students can read digitally, print out on their own or buy in a more traditional format. With reduced distribution costs, open source textbooks should save students some money while also allowing them to digest new information in their chosen format.
OnlineSchools.org put together an infographic that covers the movement to get more open textbooks on the market. Infographics are always a bit of a hodgepodge of statistics culled from a variety of sources. It is estimated that the average college student spends $900 every year on new textbooks. Check out more Infographics on the Technology Channel. Hyphenation in NOOK Color. What I really wanted to be writing about today was my new miniguide about, uh, well I'll tell you soon, which is all ready to go, but unfortunately not yet available on my shopping cart site.
As soon as it is, I'll announce it here. (It's pretty cool :) Meanwhile, I've been working a lot with the NOOK Color and noticed that it was mangling my headlines, putting hyphens in even though I don't want them, and even cutting off the end of words sometimes. This despite using the standard CSS hyphen controls that I explained in this article here in February. The standard CSS for controlling hyphens is not currently supported by NOOK Color, but thankfully, there was a guy from B&N on Mobile Read who offered a solution. Adobe-text-layout: optimizeSpeed; in order to force NOOK Color to use an older RMSDK which has a text engine which doesn't do hyphenation. I added it to the rules for the headers in my book and it worked like a charm: El eDescontrol. Google Ducks y la OCA. ¿Sueñan los libros digitales con números reales?