We will be running a Pitch Up & Publish event with Artists & Makers in Shoreham-by-Sea on Friday 12th March 2010, from 12noon until 4pm as part of the Empty Shops Tour.
Come and join us to publish your stories, pictures and ideas as Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes.
Date : Friday 12th March 2010
Time : 2pm to 4pm
Venue : 1a New Road, Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex BN43 6RA
Map
View bookleteer places in a larger map
Tags: emptyshops · pitch up & publish · workshopNo Comments.
HTML content and page preview for eBooks has now been corrected to work properly. This means that content pasted or added directly into the HTML editing window in the eBook create/edit page will now flow into the eBook PDF file at the correct scale. The page preview function is also now working properly to help you see how content will flow across the eBook pages, so you can choose where to insert page breaks etc. To see how your content looks as landscape or portrait, change the ‘Orientation’ (from Landscape to Portrait etc), ‘Save Changes’ and click on ‘Preview Your HTML Content’.
Test it out and let us know your feedback!
Tags: feedback · updatesNo Comments.
We received an email yesterday from a user based in Epinay sur Seine, France describing how he’s used bookleteer with his students:
My name is J.-Thomas Maillioux, and I’ve been working as the librarian for the collège Evariste Galois middle school since 2005. I’ve recently started to use the bookleteers to create “adventure books” for our first-year pupils’ library orientation program in a format both convenient and original. The flexibility of the Bookleteer publishing platform has also allowed me to quickly and easily implement the modifications suggested by my own observations, or advice from the students and teachers involved in the orientation program.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 486Kb
I’ve also been able to sit down with small group of students to discuss what they would do with the Bookleteers : they suggested uses both for school (custom booklets for note taking on school trips, tutorials or HOWTOs for specific activities in sciences and technology classes, reminders while giving presentations in front of a class) and home (grocery shopping, tasks listing, books and stories writing or games) that make me think that, with the correct amount of support from their teachers in acquiring and supporting the necessary skills, they should be able to make the Bookleteers and the publishing platform their own relatively quickly : a good way to reconcile them not only with the printed word, but also with their printed word – that what they write, too, can be and deserves being made into a book with very little hassle.
We’d love to hear more testimonials of how bookleteer, the eBooks and StoryCubes are being used – please send your feedback to us at bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk
Tags: case studies · education · eNotebooks · evaluation · feedback · language · learning · librariesNo Comments.
Hot on the heels of PU&P5, we will be heading down to Brixton’s Granville Arcade and the Spacemaker’s Brixton Village project to run another special PU&P with the BrixVill tenants. The aim is to introduce bookleteer to the tenants to begin to record and document some of their experiences, stories, photos and artwork using Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes.
The event will be free to attend – participants are encouraged to bring a laptop or device with mobile internet access and some text/images/digital artwork etc to begin creating your own eBooks & StoryCubes.
Date : Wednesday 10th February 2010
Time : 2pm to 4.30pm
Venue : Etta’s Place, Unit 85-86, Brixton Village / Grandville Arcade, Brixton
Location : http://spacemakers.org.uk/brixton/location/
RSVP – we will only have limited internet access on site so it is important to send a request for a bookleteer account to bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk before Wednesday 10th (mentioning spacemakers or Brixton Village)
Tags: bookleteering · brixvill · creative writing · emptyshops · pitch up & publish · workshop · zines1 Comment
10 new StoryCubes created with bookleteer were printed (in varying quantities) and delivered to customers this week – 100 copies of 1 cube for our friends at We Are Words + Pictures for their Modern Romance events on Feb 14th; and 9 cubes as part of a commission by the Early Intervention project for Birmingham Total Place.
8 of the cubes formed a special set (in an edition of 75) of drawings inspired by the issues and challenges faced by parents and community workers in Birmingham. A further cube was created for the Birmingham Total Place conference which was designed to provoke questions about Early Intervention and what more can be done.
We also had some fun making up large exhibition versions of the BTP cubes:
To create and order your own StoryCubes, contact us for details on prices and delivery options: sales at proboscis.org.uk
So we continued with the tinkering yesterday – shifting some simple things like the login and main menu items to be consistent at the top of the page, made the library and my publication page lists of eBooks and StoryCubes behave more elegantly, and tidied up the home and help pages too. Links to create new eBooks and StoryCubes have also been shifted to the main menu items at the top so it should be simpler and more intuitive to create your shareables. We’ve also added in some more help notes related to making StoryCubes.
Next week, we should be pushing through some more fixes and improvements and testing the back end for a new print on demand capability for eBooks (similar to that which we currently offer for StoryCubes) which we’ve been working on for the past few months. Lastly, we’ll be working on new templates for making A3/Ledger sized eBooks, which will fold down to make A5/half-US Letter booklets.
Tags: updates · user guideNo Comments.
Our next Pitch Up & Publish – No. 5 – will focus on using http://bookleteer.com in learning and schools contexts. The evening is aimed at teachers/educationalists and others who work in schools and formal/informal learning contexts – exploring ideas for and uses of Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes as learning and teaching resources.
The evening will be co-hosted by Giles Lane (Proboscis) and Kati Rynne (writer and digital producer at Teachers TV) – Proboscis will provide test bookleteer accounts to attendees in advance, just bring a laptop and some content/ideas for content to make some eBooks or StoryCubes live in our studio.
For Inspiration, download Kati Rynne’s eBook, “8 Ideas for using bookleteer in schools“; see examples of eBooks and StoryCubes made with bookleteer and other examples of eBooks & StoryCubes in schools, learning and education.
Date : Tuesday 9th February 2010
Time : 6.30pm to 9pm
Venue : Proboscis Studio, 4th Floor, 101 Turnmill Street, London EC1M 5QP
Map : http://bit.ly/PEBbb
Cost : Free (donations towards refreshments gratefully received)
RSVP: space is limited, so please email us to confirm a place : bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk
Tags: pitch up & publish · workshop1 Comment
We’ve spent today making some further improvements to the user interface of the authoring pages for both eBooks and StoryCubes, reducing the screen clutter, grouping the choices of format etc to be made, and the content entering/uploading areas.
Principally we’ve added some diagrams to show the different options for eBooks (Classic and Book formats, Portrait and Landscape orientation) as well as StoryCubes (improving on the previous diagram added last week). We’ve also re-named some of the buttons to make the process of uploading content and then generating the PDFs clearer.
We’re looking into fixing some of the intermittent bugs and errors that have been reported over the next few weeks. A niggling issue with the HTML content editor where fonts and image were not flowing through into the eBook PDF at the correct sizes has now been isolated and will be fixed in the next week or so. At the same time we will fix the ‘preview HTML content’ functions to show how content added in the HTML editor will flow into actual eBook pages.
Tags: design · feedback · updatesNo Comments.
We’re accepting another 100 requests for bookleteer test accounts over the next few weeks. If you’d like to try your hand at bookleteering – creating your own shareables (Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes) then send us an email at bookleteer @ proboscis.org.uk with a sentence or two about what you’d like to do with it and why and we’ll set you up with a test account.
Tags: bookleteering1 Comment
Following feedback at this week’s PU&P we’ve made a small, but important tweak to the StoryCube create/edit page – a diagram showing the position and orientation of each image on the cube (front and back):
The exact dimensions of each StoryCube face are 55mm by 55mm and we recommend making images at no less than exact size at 72dpi (or 150dpi optimum).
Tags: design · feedback · StoryCubes · user guideNo Comments.
Yesterday we held the first Pitch Up & Publish of the year with seven of the members of We Are Word + Pictures, a “team running comic and ‘zine themed events throughout the UK” – Matt Sheret, Michael Leader, Mark Higgins, Anne Hollowday, Emilie Chalcraft, Tom Humberstone and Julia Scheele…
It was really inspiring for us (myself, Karen Martin & Stefan Kueppers representing the bookleteer team) to see just how enthusiastic they were about picking it up and using it for different purposes. In not time at all half a dozen eBooks and StoryCubes had been made with bookleteer as we talked about different contexts and types of use the Shareables could be put to.
Matthew Sheret has posted some pictures from the evening on his Flickr site:
Here are some other images of the things they made:
StoryCube by Emilie
eBooks by Matt, Tom & Mark
StoryCube by Anne
StoryCube by Julia
Tags: bookleteering · cartoons · comics · creative writing · drawing · pitch up & publish · zines2 Comments
Happy 2010 to all bookleteers and others out there! We start the year with a case study written by Kati Rynne who was one of our first alpha testers and took part in the initial Pitch Up & Publish event in October:
Ideal for Creative Writers
Bookleteer could prove ideal for creative writers who want to share a selection of poems, a short story or novel extract.
I’m writing a teenage novel and regularly send chapters to teenage and adult readers in order to get feedback. In the past, I’ve emailed out my work as a Word document with a portrait layout, and have found that 15% of people don’t download and read the email attachment. However, this Autumn I used Bookleteer to produce a miniature hard-copy booklet of the first three chapters, added a Creative Commons illustration to the front cover, printed and folded the copies, and distributed them to readers.
The response has been terrific. 100% of targeted people were motivated to read my work.
My teenage readers reported that the miniature size of the book made it portable; they stuffed the booklets into their schoolbags and read them on the bus or tube. Some of the girls noted that the booklet had the feel of ‘a personal possession’; it seemed to tap into teenage girls’ lust for secrets.
The adult readers were keen on the format too; they felt they’d been sent ‘a real book’, rather than a document that closely resembled their office paperwork. Readers had to turn the page every couple of hundred words, which kept them engaged with the story.
My writing sample was 40 pages long, the maximum length recommended by Proboscis, so the folding and scissor-snipping were fairly labour-intensive. Having said that, the product is robust enough to withstand some wear and tear; a third of my readers have successfully circulated the writing sample among colleagues and friends.
The Bookleteer format would be suitable for writers who want to send a writing sample to a publisher. Creative writing students at the University of London are enthusiastic about using the format to workshop their writing. The .pdf that is produced would also make a valuable download on a writer’s personal website.
Kati Rynne
www.katirynne.wordpress.com
Tags: case studies · creative writing · evaluation · feedback1 Comment
We now have over 70 registered users of bookleteer and the number of eBooks and StoryCubes being created and published is growing by the week. We’ve recently published new Transformations series commissions by Linda Carroli, Julie Myers and Will Davies with forthcoming works in the pipeline by Rita J. King, Ghislaine Boddington and Andrew Kötting. There are eBooks created by users such as Tim Wright and Matthew Sheret (made during the first Pitch Up & Publish event), Lorraine Warren & Ted Fuller, as well as myself. The students on our City as Material course have created a series of eBooks documenting their urban interventions and the previous post describes the Hindi/English eNotebooks created by Niharika Hariharan for her Articulating Futures education workshops. We’re currently working with several partners to help them use bookleteer as part of their activities including DodoLab, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Architecture Centre Network, Year Zero One and others in the new year.
We’ve also created a bookleteer tag on Diffusion to make it easy to follow the latest publications.
Let us know what you think of them and what you’d do with a bookleteer account…
Tags: bookleteering · eBooks · eNotebooks · pitch up & publish · StoryCubesNo Comments.
One of the most important decisions we took with planning bookleteer was to integrate support for languages other than English from the very start – not just ones which use the European Latin character set (ABC etc), but languages that use non-Latin characters and those which read from Right-to-Left. We’ve done initial tests with languages such as Chinese (traditional & simplified), Japanese, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Vietnamese and Arabic; we’ve also tested it with major Latin alphabet languages such as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, where the use of diacritics is important.
Support for these languages is via a specialised Unicode font set – Code2000 – which enables titles, author names and the colophon to be written in any language supported by the fontset (full list of supported scripts here). As yet this doesn’t extend to the HTML content input (though we will enable this for the beta version) so the best way to create eBooks in different languages is to create content in offline applications, export as PDF (with the font used embedded in the file) and upload to bookleteer.
Last week we published Niharika Hariharan’s Hindi/English eBooks for the Articulating Futures project on Diffusion – they are a great example of what can be done to make the uses of eBooks we’ve made in education and public engagement projects relevant to communities outside the English-speaking world – we’d like to see many more examples of this kind of creative use of bookleteer and the Diffusion formats that can benefit people all over the world.
We’d love to hear from others who’d like to use bookleteer to create eBooks & StoryCubes in different languages – please contact us (bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk) for a test account or (if you are in London) come along to one of our Pitch Up & Publish events.
Tags: languageNo Comments.
The next PU&P will be on Thursday 26th November:
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: Proboscis Studio, 4th Floor, 101 Turnmill Street, London EC1M 5QP (map)
Join us for an evening of exploring bookleteer and creating/publishing your own Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes.
Please email us to reserve a place: diffusion (at) proboscis.org.uk or sign up via our Facebook Event Page.
Participants will be asked to make small donation to cover materials (paper/printing ink etc) and refreshments (beer).
Future PU&P dates are:
#4 – Thursday 17th December 2009
From January 2010 the PU&P events will be held at the Free Word Centre, just up the road from us.
Giles asked me to help put together some user guides for bookleteer so I took the opportunity of the first Pitch Up and Publish event to see how people went about using bookleteer and to ask them the kinds of problems they encountered. Having worked with the original Diffusion Generator it was really satisfying to see how far the new bookleteer version has come in making the process of creating an eBook or StoryCube an intuitive one.
During the event I took notes on Giles’ introduction on how to use bookleteer and noted down the questions asked by participants. These are the basis of the help guide and faq on bookleteer that you can see when you login to bookleteer.com.
Currently, the user guide describes how to create an eBook in one of the four available formats (shown below). A guide to making StoryCubes will be added soon.
eBook formats Classic Portrait and Classic Landscape
eBook formats Book Portrait and Book Landscape
In the future we plan to add more detail to the help section and divide the user guides and faq into separate pages. If you have any comments on the usefulness of these guides, or how we could make them more relevant to you, or if you’ve had any difficulties in using bookleteer that we haven’t covered, please do get in touch and let us know..
And don’t forget Pitch Up & Publish 2 tomorrow night!
Tags: bookleteer · help · pitch up & publish · user guideNo Comments.
The next PU&P will be on Thursday 5th November:
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: Proboscis Studio, 4th Floor, 101 Turnmill Street, London EC1M 5QP (map)
Join us for an evening of exploring bookleteer and creating/publishing your own Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes.
Please email us to reserve a place: diffusion (at) proboscis.org.uk or sign up via our Facebook Event Page.
Participants will be asked to make small donation to cover materials (paper/printing ink etc) and refreshments (beer).
Future PU&P dates are:
#3 – Thursday 26th November 2009
#4 – Thursday 17th December 2009
The first event was a fun evening and everyone who attended created at least 1 eBook each, with the exception of Matthew who managed to create two lovely examples. Thanks to everyone who came (Christopher, Fred, Kati, Matthew & Sara), and the team (Karen, John & Stefan).
The next Pitch Up & Publish will be on Thursday 5th November 2009 at our studio in Clerkenwell.
Tags: bookleteering · pitch up & publish · workshop1 Comment
As part of our thinking into new business and revenue models for Proboscis’ projects and practice, we’ve come up with a different approach (to relying on grants) for the next stage of bookleteer’s development.
To progress bookleteer to a public ‘beta’ version in early 2010 we’re looking for friends and supporters (initially organisations but also individuals) to join bookleteer’s Alpha Club. The club is an alternative support/fundraising initiative, aimed at partners, friends, colleagues and sponsors who share in our ethos of ‘public authoring’, providing public access to tools of creation, production and distribution and who, as members of the Alpha Club, would like to be at the core of the emerging bookleteer community. For a modest, one-off contribution (at least £250) we hope Alpha Club members will help us raise our target of around £25k for the next critical phase of bookleteer’s development.
Membership of the Alpha Club will be exclusive to those who join during the ‘alpha’ stage of bookleteer’s development, establishing a founder group of friends, supporters and sponsors.
Benefits include:
If you’d like to support bookleteer and become an Alpha Club member, please contact us at bookleteer (at) proboscis.org.uk or donate now via Paypal:
Update 1/11/09: We’re pleased to announce our first two members: DodoLab (Canada) & Architecture Centre Network (UK).
Tags: alpha club3 Comments
We’re continuing to make small changes and improvements to the design of the eBooks and StoryCubes – the most recent of which has been to make the way proboscis and bookleteer are credited on the back cover of eBooks more discreet:
Tags: designNo Comments.
