James, Thank you very much for your work. It is very useful for my current projects. I put my notes on my blog: <a href="http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/ebook_enlightenment/">http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/ebook_enlightenment/</a> Here is what I wrote. <h1 class="title">Book review: “E-Book Enlightenment” by James Simmons</h1> <a href="http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/">http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/</a> <img class="alignleft" title="OLPCbookmode" src="http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/OLPCbookmode-300x287.jpg" alt="" height="287" width="300"> James Simmons set out to write about One Laptop Per Child e-books, but decided to go more general. I appreciate the clear and concise categories of information by chapters and within the chapters – it’s a big service to the reader, and it takes a lot of thought and work for the writer. Moreover, each piece of data tells a story with a strong exegesis in the area of open and free – meaning, it’s interesting to read, at least for someone who cares. I thought I would skip the first chapters, on finding e-books, but I learned much I did not know – for example, the story of this touching projects: <blockquote> The Rural Design Collective (<a href="http://twitter.com/rdcHQ">@rdcHQ</a>) is a not-for-profit professional mentoring organization which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects. They devote a portion of their program to continued exploration of technology surrounding digital books. In 2009, they built an interface for approximately 2000 digital books using a subset from the Internet Archive Children’s Library. </blockquote> It was easy for me to skim the chapter comparing different formats, because of the clear structure, but the tone is human and personal (“Advantages: I can’t think of any.” on RTF). <img class="alignright size-full wp-image-329" title="LivingBooks" src="http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/LivingBooks.jpg" alt="" height="300" width="300"> The Sugar activities and architecture for discovering and sharing books looks like something all children’s environments should be adopting (I am looking at you, Club Penguin). My daughter is probably older than the intended audience – she uses Shellfari for the purpose. I don’t know if there are tools like this beyond Sugar, for young kids. With one click, you can share books with a person or your neighborhood. And, it has text to speech. Remember the lovely Living Books from the 90s, with text-to-speech (and animations) done via recordings, rather than generated? That was hugely useful for literacy, but not sustainable, and only a few were made. James describes wiki-software for making books, called <a href="http://www.booki.cc/">booki</a>. I am looking at it for next book projects of Math Future (we are using Google Docs at the moment). I think I will wait for versions beyond alpha; meanwhile, James’ adventures with collaborating are illuminating, and echo my experiences: <blockquote> Starting a book from nothing is intimidating. However, once the book reaches a critical mass and there is no doubt that there will be a finished book you’ll find that getting help and feedback is easier, almost inevitable …If we didn’t start with the awful machine translated version we would never have gotten the good one. </blockquote> <blockquote> The first thing is that there are good reasons to collaborate and not so good. A good one is that your collaborator can bring expertise to the book that you don’t have. A bad one is that you think there will be less work for you if you have a collaborator. There are many human activities where “Many hands make light labor”. Writing a book isn’t one of them. </blockquote> Mokurai’s Replacing Textbook project involves several Math Future people such Don “The Mathman” Cohen, and uses <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks">booki</a>, which James mentions. My materials about fractions may go there, as well. An obligatory Russian proverb: “The world isn’t small, but the stratum is thin.” I would appreciate if the book compared booki with Google Docs, rather than Microsoft Word (which isn’t a wiki technology). <img class="size-medium wp-image-330 alignleft" title="SimonsHomeBookScannerMarkI" src="http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/SimonsHomeBookScannerMarkI-300x225.jpg" alt="" height="225" width="300"> For scanning books, I may consider building a Simmons Home Book Scanner Mark I. It looks quite easy and the name is fun to say. However, my new flatbed scanner is fast enough, and I have kid interns who think it’s fun to scan – at least a few pages at a time. James recommend the batch image editor <a href="http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php">Image Magic</a>, which can apply the same operation to multiple images. This will save me a lot of time when I next scan a book! And for Windows, <a href="http://www.albert.nu/programs/renamer/main.htm">the mass renamer</a> for files will come in handy. And looks like <a href="http://scantailor.sourceforge.net/">Scan Tailor</a> software is even more powerful, so I will give it a try as well. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/sigil/">Sigil</a> is the free EPUB editor James recommends. And <a href="http://calibre-ebook.com/">calibre</a> is the software for managing and distributing collections of e-books. Overall, the Publishing section of “E-Book Enlightenment” deals with the technical side of making the book available, and not with the social aspects of “making the book public” (Doctorow). I would like to see a chapter on how to connect creators with readers, post-production. I will go back to “E-Book Enlightenment” for step-by-step guides to software and hardware for making books. Screenshots and photos of key steps make guides quick and easy to use. Thank you, James! Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math. <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:05 AM, James Simmons <<a href="mailto:nicestep@gmail.com">nicestep@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> I think I have the book "E-Book Enlightenment" in a pretty good place to think about publishing it on the Internet Archive and on the Kindle Store. </blockquote></div>