I have just returned from being on workers compensation for almost three months and am surprised (putting it mildly) to learn the security hole that gives student assistants access to the e-mail of every student, counselor, faculty, staff and administrator at SJSU is apparently still open. I posted about this in early August and have spoken to management, and been speaking to management, about this since issue since about March.
Why is hole still open? [See related post]
I think a very useful case for the EPUB eBook format is for developing documentation. Documentation is more than telling people how to use computers.
PDF is good and useful, but one problem with PDF is that it is limited to a computer or paper and there are plenty of instances where that is less than ideal. For example, an owner's manual for a car. Who wants to carry around a huge book in their car or have to drag their laptop to their front seat to be able to figure out how to program their navigation system. With EPUB you could put your owner's manual in your smart phone in a way that has a table of contents and is searchable.
I just posted variations of this to the GoPro camera Facebook Group and have written GoPro and KGO about the following:
I am a road bicyclist and I am livid.
Tonight (11:00 pm Oct. 31) I saw the clip on Channel 7 featuring KGO TVs Richard Hart and GoPro founder Nick Woodman. Woodman was taking Hart on a high speed drive. They drove a Lotus Exige at very high speed around Half Moon Bay on some of the back roads we ride our bikes on. They were showing how the GoPro camera can be used to record such activities. They were driving like idiots and talking about the camera. Every time they raced around a curve I was cringing and thinking what if one of us had been around that curve!
That is not okay!
I told my wife and she said, if they had hit a bicyclist, at least they would have had good pictures of it!
We are GoPro's potential customers and KGO's audience and we deserve better.
In my opinion it is really bad for Woodman and Hart to have been smiling and driving like that and putting our lives, and the lives of others, at risk. Hart is a professional journalist and this was on a news program. In my opinion it was irresponsible for KGO to have handled this story this way.
Unless you are using an old computer that you are not planning on upgrading, it is time to bury XP. Even some enterprises are still loading XP images on new hardware, but in some cases it is just not working. For example; the Ati2dvag problem where some video ATI chipsets cause persistent blue screens in XP that cannot really be fixed in XP. The solution, upgrade your operating system. I have had good luck with the latest service pack of Vista, but I would also recommend Windows 7. It's good.
Last summer our university migrated its employee e-mail to Google. According to a post in the Science and Tech section of Mail Online by Vanessa Allen, "The internet search giant was forced to confess it had downloaded personal data during its controversial Street View project, when it photographed virtually every street in Britain." Allen said:
In an astonishing invasion of privacy, it admitted entire emails, web pages and even passwords were 'mistakenly collected' by antennae on its high-tech Street View cars. [Read More]
Because university e-mail between faculty, counselors and students is often very confidential this may be of concern to some university employees and students. According to Allen "Scotland Yard is already considering whether the company has broken the law."
Peachpit Press's eBook Deal of the Week, for this week, is EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders, by Elizabeth Castro. This book is recommended. It has a great introduction to EPUB as well as workflows for creating EPUBs from Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign.
Normally $23.99 it is on sale this week only for $9.99.
I strongly recommend checking this out if you are interested in producing books, documentation, course readers or other eBook type content in EPUB format. It does not cover the Sigil workflow, should you choose to go that route. But, there is still plenty of useful information here, especially at that price point.
Have the EPUB somewhere on your computer where you can navigate to it. This may require downloading it from an external source.
In iTunes, select the file menu, File > Add to Library
This then opens up the Add To Library navigation box:
Select and Choose the Title you wish to add.
Now be sure the Books > Sync Books setting for your iPhone / iPad is either set to All Books or Selected Books with the title you wish to have on that device selected.
Now, Sync your iPhone / iPad
According to a post written by Terri Stone on Creativepro.com, "you can go from InDesign to iPad using tools that are now available in beta form on Adobe Labs. The full suite will ship next year, but be warned -- it won't be cheap." Stone said:
It's no secret that the iPad versions of Wired and The New Yorker were created using private, prerelease versions of Adobe software. The prerelease program wasn't limited to big corporations; CreativePro.com's sister publication, InDesign Magazine, used the prerelease software for its iPad app, too. But details about the process have been sketchy -- until now. [Read More]
Adobe estimates that it will release the full Digital Publishing Suite sometime between April and July of next year.
The EPUB (short for electronic publication) format is evolving. The next iteration of EPUB is called EPUB3, by Liza Daly. Listen here to her presentation at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Frankfurt 2010 conference on October 5, 2010.
According to Daly, topics covered in the talk include:
Listen here to her presentation if you are interested in the direction this format is taking.
The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is a trade and standards organization dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing and content consumption. The IDPF develops and maintains the EPUB content publication standard that enables the creation and transport of reflowable digital books and other types of content as digital publications that are interoperable between disparate EPUB-compliant reading devices and applications. EPUB is a free and open e-book standard by the IDPF. Files have the extension .epub.
Liza Daly, of Threepress Consulting Inc., is a member of the IDPF Board of Directors.
Bookstores? I love bookstores, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Powell's in Portland, Elliott Bay Books in Seattle are all places I can get lost in.
But, let's not talk about paper books and bookstores; let's talk about film photography and camera stores. I love film photography. I have old press cameras that are older than I am. I love being in darkrooms and going to camera stores and talking about film and developers and photo techniques that do not involve computers. But, despite that passion; camera stores are almost gone. Film is not dead; but it is not mainstream either.
You could also say similar things about vinyl record stores. To be sure, vinyl records are not dead and there are still vendors that specialize in meeting the needs, wants and desires of those folks who prefer the old ways. But, to most people camera stores and records shops are just plain retro.
I prefer eBooks to printed books for technical publications. For reference books I find eBooks have it all over paper. I resent technical books that are not available electronically; I find them to be so inconvenient. I can have my whole technical library with me on my iPad, iPhone and all the computers I use; all at the same time. Paper technical books go out of date in two years and are virtually worthless. To me, that is really a waste of good trees.
So, in my opinion, for novels either paper or electronic is fine, for technical books I prefer electronic, for art "coffee table" books I prefer paper! I could go on. I think in ten years we will be looking at paper books like we now look at vinyl records and photo film. They will still be a passion for some; but for most they will just be a retro decorating accessory. Most folks who have them will have maybe a few around, just to impress our friends.
