23 Things Week Two

I know, we are at the beginning of week 3, but I was trying to complete #6 before posting this. Oh well.

5) Download a free ebook or audiobook

I am a big fan of ebooks, and paper books, and audio books, in fact, I am tired of people saying one is better, or that ebooks will kill reading, or that audio books are not real. I would like to take a moment to celebrate books, all kinds of books, and maybe even agree that all of these formats are here to stay?

I like the long list of suggested places to find free ebooks, and I have used several of them. I found a new one this week, Baen, publishers of mostly science fiction and fantasy books, has a free ebook library https://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx  Many of these books are from their backlist, and I enjoyed looking at some old favorites.

 6) Checkout an ebook from your local library.

Still working on this, the tech is not hard, but I seem to have misplaced my library card. New to do item on my list: find library card or get a replacement.

7)iBooks Author

I have been working in iBooks author for two years, writing the History 8 textbook and delivering it to students one unit at a time.  When you look at the free books on the iTunes Store, you will start to recognize the templates in iBooks Author – they are lovely, but it might be time for Apple to develop a few more!  iBooks Author is a powerful publishing tool, but the best advice came from one of the workshops I went to several years ago (sorry, I don’t remember the name of the presenter). He said that the key to creating a great ebook in iBooks Author was having great content all written and collected before you start. iBooks Author is a publishing tool, not a writing tool, so just like Adobe InDesign or any other layout tool, the content comes first, and this is the place to put it all together and make it look awesome.

8)Try out Book Creator on your iPad

We have been using Book Creator in 8^th grade for DC Journals and a few other things. I like it, but it has a few quirks. The most annoying one is that every new books defaults to the title “A New Book” and the author “A. N. Author.” Which is cute the first time you see it, but when more than half of your students send you A New Book by A.N. Author, your list of books gets unusable very fast!

Of course students should remember to rename their file, but Book Creator goes out of its way to make this hard to find, rather than making it part of the setup screens where you select the size and orientation of the book. Bad coding choice!

Comments

[Book Creator Team]

The point about naming books is a very good one. Not something anyone else has ever mentioned to us but not everyone is as advanced as you in their lesson plans!

Don't think adding these details during the setup screen is the right idea, as we want the process towards creating the books to be as slick and speedy as possible.

But it might be a good idea to prompt for this information at the point when someone taps to send the book.

Certainly something for us to think about - thank you very much!

[Heather Allen Pang]

Thanks Book Creator Team! I think putting the prompt on the send page makes sense. I should have sent the issue right to you guys. My team of teachers was meeting last week to talk about some curriculum stuff, and everyone was impressed that you commented and would think about the issue, thanks!