Most writers have one or two trusted readers-of-drafts, critical friends who are relied on to make suggestions and offer that gentle critique that we didn’t know we needed. And the closer we get to conventional publication, the more likely we are to find ourselves working with an editor who scrutinizes our text for errors, ambiguities, sloppiness and – horror of horrors – breaks with convention. With the publication of my essay on picnic and community, published using Bookleteer last month, I had the chance to reflect on the experience of ‘doing without’ an editor. It was stimulating but also a little scary.

In the summer of 2011, I needed to take a decision about finalising and publishing the work. Choosing Bookleteer presented me with a new option: it meant I could go all the way to publication without any editorial oversight.

Picnic was an unfunded project: no client, no defined audience, no expectations, no responsibilities. That may seem liberating but it also means no feedback, no reassurance, no confirmation. I kept the text to myself (apart from sharing it necessarily with my collaborator, the artist Gemma Orton) at the obvious risk of missing out on potentially valuable guidance, having mistakes spotted, and being seen as arrogant.

The key justification for me was that to submit to editorial control would have been a crass betrayal of one of the essay’s themes. The essay contrasts picnic with formal meals, it contrasts organisation with networking, and disorder with order, as a way of exploring our tendency to idealise community in structured, formal terms. I felt that by submitting to the convention of editing – a fundamentally conservative process – I would have contradicted that theme in a rather feeble way.

I was also aware that Picnic challenges people’s expectations, because it doesn’t fit easily into any recognised genre. An editor might have made valiant, corrosive efforts to turn it into this or that.

I don’t wish to imply that the editorial process is either redundant or pointless, but it may be that many writers come to be over-dependent on editors. Perhaps this is to do with perceived differences between non-fiction and fiction. Few musical composers or visual artists would expect to cede so much influence over what they do. On the whole, editing is a process for confirming convention and reinforcing norms, which may not always be what’s needed. By making the publication process realisable, it was Bookleteer that empowered me to remain consistent to the theme without compromise.

Young people working on ‘Project 18’ carried out and recorded 39 interviews in people’s homes, at Norwich Castle museum and in residential care homes. They amalgamated quotes from these interviews with photographs of selected museum objects to produce both a printed booklet and an e-reader version using Bookleteer.

The project is a partnership between Norwich Castle Museum and the Mancroft Advice Project (MAP), a charity that provides help, education and training for young people through advisors, counsellors, youth workers and a drop-in centre. Project 18 helps young people to learn more about themselves, others and their community through the creation of an accessible small archive of oral history testimony about being 18 in the past and today, inspired by the museum’s collections.

Some people might expect paper copies to be of low importance and relevance to young people who are already comfortably immersed and swimming in the cyber ocean. Conversely, paper copies could be seen as important tools to present to those people who have travelled to positions of influence and governance where a more traditional background might place greater value on well-trodden methods of communication.

We found the reality to be that the young participants placed great store in the tangible form of the printed items. They valued something they could actually hold, see, feel and smell. This multiply dimensioned tangibility was something they could experience wherever and whenever they chose, rather than only when in contact with a screen. Just having something physical to keep, share and treasure was hugely important. In addition young people expressed their gratification about something that was a token, a signifier of their achievement and enhanced status. Of course this enhanced status works both in the way in which others see the young person and in the way in which they see and value themselves.

This effect was re-enforced by the good physical standard of the booklets themselves. The cost of short-run printing was impressive. We were not forced to order a huge bulk run to achieve economy (with concomitant waste), nor did we have to be miserly in distributing the booklets to the young people and their friends, museum and MAP staff, stakeholders and supporters.

At the same time, having the e-booklet available has given an easy flavour of the project and its purpose to outsiders such as funders and government agencies, both national and local. We feel this kind of attention-catching and information giving is much more likely to lead to interaction and positive responses and outcomes than just a paper communication in the general wasteful paper blizzard. In this way, perhaps counter-intuitively, the e-booklet has provided us with a more permanent resource than traditional paper copies for those that we wish to inspire and involve in financially supporting future projects.

Maybe, too, by putting the booklet on the internet we will benefit from some degree of good fortune as people anywhere in the world stumble on the project. One person’s happy discovery could be promulgated world-wide with astonishing rapidity.

More about the project on the MAP site here.

As I watched her I realised how much more she could do with her invitations by creating them on Bookleteer! A more creative way to make an invitation. You can insert pictures, maybe one of the birthday girl/boy on the front or have different coloured invites by using different coloured printing paper!

I find this method fast and easy and I think it looks more professional than the conventional booklet making. Being able to upload your own pictures or even straight from html saves the hassle of downloading or saving a picture first!

This can be used for endless occasions, not just birthday parties, which then means anyone from kids to adults can be using this method to make invitations. Weddings, baby showers, hen parties..the list is endless.

Have a look at the mock up birthday invitation I have created.

Get creative, get Bookleteering!

We’d like to hear what sort of things you’d like help with: from basic level introduction to specific topics – such as designing project notebooks, embedding multimedia links via QR codes and preparing books for printing via our Short Run Printing Service. If there’s interest we can run specific workshops aimed at transferring our experiences of working with kids in schools to use bookleteer, or with other community groups.

Each workshop place will cost about £20 (UKP) and will include complimentary Alpha Club membership, discount on Short Run Printing Service orders and a free pack of new Medium size StoryCubes. You’ll be able to book places online via eventbrite.

We’d also like to hear whether people would prefer the sessions to be run during the day or evening – we may alternate if it helps more people take part.

Please contribute with your suggestions and requests – we’d like these sessions to be as useful and focused on your needs as possible. You can post comments here, or add them to the discussion on Facebook.

Going away this summer?? It’s a great feeling, once you’ve booked that holiday and start counting down the weeks to a get-a-way, somewhere beautiful, adventurous or even laid-back and relaxing.

Exploring the craziness of New York’s Time Square, the hustle and bustle of Abu Dhabi’s Souks, the calmness of Maldives serene beaches, the list goes on…

Coming back with all those memories and stories that you can’t wait to tell everybody! The only problem I have is remembering the name of that fantastic coffee shop I went to, or that busy vibrant market where I got my dazzling shawls from or even the restaurant where I tasted the delicious local food. So if someone asked me to recommend places to go and see or where to eat, sure I could get their mouth watering describing the succulent chicken and thirst quenching cocktails, but I couldn’t actually tell them the names of these places… because I had forgotten!

I’m always in need for a scrap piece of paper to jot things down. Having a book that can easily fit into a pocket or a handbag would be most ideal. Creating a book on Bookleteer gives me this exact opportunity, to easily print and assemble and take with me.

It’s also useful to jot down other little things you come across on holiday such as the local language. Maybe how to say ‘hello’ in Mandarin or ‘thank you’ in Greek.

Have a look at the mock up book I made, to give you an idea of what can be done…

A handy book that can easily fit into your back pocket or your handbag and taken with you everywhere on your holiday! Now you don’t have to struggle to remember everywhere you went, just scribble it down in your own Bookleteer book!

]]> http://bookleteer.com/blog/2011/02/holiday-memories-in-your-back-pocket/feed/ 0 http://bookleteer.com/blog/2011/01/bookleteer-api/ http://bookleteer.com/blog/2011/01/bookleteer-api/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:09:58 +0000 gileslane http://bookleteer.com/blog/?p=3419 Just before Christmas we implemented a major new feature on bookleteer – an API (application programming interface) enabling eBooks and StoryCubes to be generated by users direct from their own web applications and stored in or downloaded from their bookleteer accounts.

Realising Tangible Souvenirs
This has been a long-cherished ambition for us – harking back to plans we made for linking the earlier Diffusion Generator to our Urban Tapestries public authoring and mapping platform in 2004 – where we imagined people being able to select or collate material on Urban Tapestries by theme or around a geographic place and outputting it in different paper formats (Diffusion eBooks, postcards and posters). This was the origin of our concept for creating tangible souvenirs from digital experiences – bridging different media (online/offline, digital/analogue) with the different capabilities that people have. Our experiences of working with local communities in social housing and other contexts showed us how important it is not just to be able to share things in many ways, but to tailor a range of modes of interaction to the capabilities and capacities of the people who had the knowledge and experience to share, but not necessarily the familiarity with web and mobile technologies to be engaged by the opportunities we saw them offering.

We’ve continued to develop our tangible souvenir concept through other projects – such as the Sensory Threads prototype – but the bookleteer API now represents a crucial milestone for us in building the links between our earlier work on public authoring and media scavenging and the current ecosystem of web technologies and public/open data initiatives. We hope to see lots of exciting ideas building on the first experiments – bookcubes – we commissioned from James Bridle last spring. Look out too for some forthcoming experiments by Simon Pope & Gordon Joly.

Accessing the API
Access to the API is limited for the time being to Alpha Club members and guest testers whilst we put it through its paces and explore how it can be used (our resources are rather limited for supporting it). We’re hoping to organise some events in 2011 where people can come along and explore what they might do with the API. In the meantime, if you’re taking part in Culture Hack Day this weekend (January 15th & 16th) then you can ask to test it out using the special account we’ve created for participants (ask the organisers for access details on the day).

If you do have an exciting idea for mashing up the bookleteer API with your own web service or public data please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you and see how we can help.

Future Plans in 2011
This year we hope to take our Pitch in & Publish series of City As Material events outside of London to other towns and cities in the UK (or abroad). We’d love to hear from people or organisations interested in commissioning us to devise and run a one-day (or possibly longer) collaborative urban exploration and publishing event in their own town or city.

A typical event…
We’ll work with the local hosts to devise a topic, plan the exploration route and design customised notebooks. At the end of each walk we’ll need a space (with WiFi access and ideally a printer) to sit down with the participants as a group and work on planning/drafting the collaborative eBook that will be the record of the day. As before we’ll be using a range of online and social media to post up photos, audio, video etc taken during each event by all taking part – and we’ll be encouraging all the participants to sign up with bookleteer to create their own personal eBooks (and/or StoryCubes).

How to book an event
Please get in touch with us to plan an event in your town or city. Our basic fee for each event (payable by the host) will be £600 + VAT and travel expenses (and accommodation where needed). This fee covers pre-planning, facilitation by 2 members of Proboscis on the day and post-event coordination of the collaborative eBook (+ publication on diffusion.org.uk), as well as printing of a limited edition run (50 copies) of the eBook.
Local hosts will be responsible for recruiting the participants to each event. Proboscis will also help promote each event across our own networks to engage as broad a group of participants as possible.

After I was introduced to some of the teachers, a class of year 5 children quietly walked into the classroom where Giles would talk to them about how bookleteer and eBooks worked, and also how this would tie into their current project, a project based on Antarctica and the effects global warming. The children were curious about who we were and what we had to say, and as Giles began to explain that we were going to help publish their school project by turning them into eBooks, some of the children shouted ‘yay!’ and everyone seemed to became even more interested. After Giles demonstrated how eBooks were made, the children were more than ready to get going and make their own.

We then began to upload the children’s work onto bookleteer, with the children standing close-by, often asking us about how bookleteer worked and what they thought about their Antarctica project. After a few near glitches with the schools computers, we began to finish uploading and naming the year 5 eBooks. Almost immediately after we waved the children goodbye, year 6′s entered the classroom with the same amount of wonder as to why me and Giles were standing at the front of the classroom. This time around, however, uploading the children’s eBooks was much faster and easier to do after having uploaded year 5′s eBooks moments before. Then came the task of printing off and making up the children’s eBooks – (a skill that Giles was clearly much faster than me at!) After proudly handing all 32 eBooks to the children’s teachers, Claudia and Matt, our work at Soho Parish was done for the day.

some of the 32 eBooks created by Years 5 & 6, Soho Parish Primary

Following our work with with the children (and lots of help from the staff!) Giles and I had lunch with the head teacher, Rachel Earnshaw, discussing possible projects and ideas for the new term ahead. After how promising my first day was at the school, I can confidently say that I am looking forward to going back to the school after the Christmas holiday and collaborating on other creative projects with the children – and also exploring bookleteer in a school setting.

Whilst sitting in the Hermitage Pier House, then on Anne’s boat in the river the conversation flowed across these issues of liminality and tension – about how the city has slowly encroached on the river, fixing artificial banks where it previously had a wide flood plain, such that we are now concerned about that flood plain being at risk with rising sea levels. Ben, who also lives on the river, spoke of how his home is different every day, changing position with the tide and weather; he also talked of the enormous variation that the sky, light and weather has on the character of the water and its constantly changing surface.

From Hermitage we then walked west along the Thames Path via St Katherine Dock, the Tower of London, Customs House, Old Billingsgate to Queenhithe, where we turned north and cut through the City, St Pauls, St Barts and Smithfield to arrive at the studio.

We talked about how the city so often seems to turn its back on the river, to build buildings that look inward to the city, and how its is only recently, with the shift in the Port of London to Tilbury that Londoners have at last begun to reclaim access to the river from what were previously commercial wharves and stairs. As it was low tide at 12.30pm we were able to include some beachcombing/ mudlarking with our walk – finding the ubiquitous clay pipe stems and pottery shards from earlier centuries, as well as the ever present animal bones, tiles and chalk. we shared stories and bits of knowledge about these stairs, their uses, the hidden rivers flowing out into the Thames.

Arriving back at the studio we began collating the drawings, objects, ideas, writings and photographs that had been created along the way and started to sketch out the structure of the collaborative publication – Ebb and Flow – which is now available. There is also a City As Material group on Flickr, and a Twitter hashtags – #cityasmaterial – to continue the discussions.

The next City As Material event will be on Friday 12th November on the topic of “Skyline” with artist Simon Pope as our guest. Book a place here : cityasmaterial.eventbrite.com

Sample project: Melanesia Project

According to James, both Porer and Pinbin knew a lot about materials and the ways in which some of these objects were made which meant that the exchange could lead to some fascinating insights. Having worked with James in the past, they were also familiar with how to work with anthropologists.

As part of the exchange, James invited Giles Lane to drop by and demonstrate how to use the eBooks to record the event. Giles showed them all how to put the eBooks together and also brought a small portable Polaroid printer that could quickly and easily print digital pictures in a small format that could then be glued onto the eBook pages.

This was certainly a case of using the eBooks to capture information (see here for previous post where I introduce what I mean in by this) – in this case James described using the eBooks as a way to produce a realtime record that involved “capturing the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing”. Representatives of the BM were also recording the exchange but using the eBooks served as a complimentary archive of what had happened. While the exchange was taking place, James would write down some of what Porer and Pinbin were saying in both English and Tok Pisin next to the images glued down in the eBooks. The addition of the eBooks to the process was partly challenging for James because it involved an additional set of tasks in an already hectic and brief exchange. Nevertheless, James felt that it proved to be a positive addition to the session because it provided a better record of the process of the exchange itself. He felt that although other methods for collecting and presenting information were better suited to the documentation of the knowledge being imparted of the objects by his two friends, the way in which the eBooks were used provided a simple, quick and accessible way of sharing what had taken place during the meeting.

Later on, the eBooks were re-scanned and subsequently reprinted into the professionally printed and bound version of the eBooks. James then distributed copies of the new books in Reite as well as at the local University in Papua New Guinea, and other regional institutions who were interested in what they had been doing. The eBooks were useful for giving people a feel for what had taken place, particularly for people who were unfamiliar with anthropology as a discipline.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

James used a wonderful way of describing his work as an anthropologist as being comprised of “moments”. He felt that the eBooks were used at the right moment in the process of conducting this type of research. Although he was unsure as to how this type of practice could fit in other parts of his work, he could see how this process would be helpful in situations requiring the documentation of how people “respond to images or information for themselves”.

He also suggested that as objects in themselves, the professionally bound versions of the eBooks were useful as a way to disseminate general information about the exchange:

“[...] As something to give people, they’re an extremely nice thing. People are very keen. I also took some to an anthropology conference before I went [to Papua New Guinea] and would show them to people and they’d immediately say “Oh, is that for me?” People kind of like them. They’re nice little objects.”

However, since many people of Papua New Guinea don’t have access to Internet, resources like Bookleteer or the Diffusion website proved to be significantly less of an advantage for distributing this information (they obviously can’t download a copy of the eBook).

I want to come back to the way James used the idea of “moments” to describe his work and apply it to the way in which the eBook was designed and used. We could say that each project I have described to date was composed of a series of moments and that nested within these projects was the eBook component which in itself was composed of its own series of moments. In reference to my previous post on the distinction between capturing and publishing, the trajectory of how eBooks were designed and used in some of these projects was composed of both capturing and publishing moments. For example, the way in which the eBook was used on the Melanesia Project included both a capturing moment as part of the exchange with the British Museum and a publishing moment in which Giles and James printed-out scanned copies of the original eBooks and made them available online or passed hardcopies out to people who were interested in learning more about the project (or, in some cases, who just wanted to get their hands on a free neat little object).

These series of moments were significant because they each involved different challenges and successes. In James’ case, it seemed both the capturing and publishing moments proved valuable – in the case of the former as a way to capture “the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing” during the exchange, in the case of the latter as a way to distribute printed copies of the eBooks. But both capturing and publishing in this particular case also faced challenges that suggested there were some additional key moments that made-up an eBook’s trajectory as part of a project. Here are two moments that I want to add to describe an eBook’s trajectory:

Appropriation: James had only a cursory knowledge of how the eBooks worked before the exchange took place. In other cases, (for example see Ruth Sapsed’s work with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination) we saw how people had attended “Pitch-up and Publish” events as a way to test the eBooks and decide whether or not they could fit into the way these people executed their projects. For the Melanesia Project, James took the risk of adding the eBooks as an extra element to the project in part because he trusted Giles’ work and his abilities to adapt the eBooks to these particular circumstances. In this case, therefore, moments of appropriation and capturing took place at the same time. I will therefore use appropriation to describe how people decide the way in which eBooks relate to their pre-existing practices for capturing and publishing information.

Design and printing: It may seem that “design and printing” and “publishing” should be categorised as part of the same moment. The reason for making the distinction is that I want to highlight how the physical process of composing the eBook’s pages and physically making the eBook, whether it be printing it out or cutting and folding its pages into a notebook, are distinct from the publishing category I defined earlier. Both capturing and publishing necessarily involve designing and printing an eBook. But the way in which they are designed and printed and the way in which such a design will be evaluated as part of the project will likely be very different.

Of course, in making-up these four distinct analytical categories, I may be over-emphasising distinctions between moments that are in fact all bundled-up and confused in time and space. But the reason for making these distinctions is so that I can begin to develop a typology of how eBooks are part of all of these very different kinds of projects.

Next time, I’ll examine the Diffusion website in greater detail.

Sample project: Greenhill Digital Storytelling Guide

Her first project with the eBooks involved exploring how community residents talked about and engaged with the place they lived in from a historical and contemporary perspective. The eBooks were developed as a part of the process of collecting and disseminating information about what residents of the community of Greenhill – a historical village within Bonnybridge in Scotland. Gillian was able to recruit participants for the project either through the Greenhill Community Resource Centre or through her everyday encounters with local residents.

The eBooks served as a kind of “end point” to the project. They were used to summarise all of the information provided by the participants and subsequently presented to these same participants as a way for them to see their contributions to the research. You can find some examples of these eBooks here. Because of the limited resources available, she usually limits herself to printing batches of approximately 25 or 50 at a time.

“I think, for community work, it’s really important that you engage in much more unique and creative and interesting ways as a way of trying to spur some kind of interest and excitement in community work [...] The eBooks are such a lovely way for that to actually fit with that kind of notion.”

Gillian doesn’t see her use of the eBooks as something collaborative in the sense that she is the one doing most of the work of actually making the eBook with the Bookleteer platform. This is partly because she has found that information technologies can be a barrier to their engagement in these types of projects. She is, however, exploring ways to use the eBooks to collect information from participants as part of the research process. Nevertheless, she feels the eBooks are particularly well suited as a means of presenting research to people including stakeholders:

“As a community worker you obviously have to evaluate projects and you have to write long boring audit reports for management. For me the eBook is just my way of doing that. And I provide management – and always have done – with a printed-out eBook for them to put together themselves. They’re probably quite annoyed! [laughs]”

In fact, Gillian claims to have gotten some very positive responses from stakeholders on the eBooks, even though it seems they would prefer not to have to fold the eBooks themselves. Nevertheless, Gillian still finds it somewhat challenging to get more then anecdotal feedback from people who read the eBooks.

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

One of the main strengths of the eBooks for Gillian are the Bookleteer and Diffusion websites. She finds that eBook’s simple and effective templates work well with images and she enjoys perusing the website for new and unique ways of  using the eBooks. Another key strength for Gillian is the fact that it allows her to produce printed material that isn’t too involved or complicated.

Besides the challenge of feedback and the learning curve for people who are not familiar with digital platforms like Bookleteer, Gillian suggested in our conversation that she still had trouble with some of the formatting. Although she found that the new Bookleteer system’s way of enabling her to produce a PDF was quite useful, she still found that she had to go through five or six versions of the PDF before she had generated a version she was happy with.

Genuine Choose Your Own Adventure book covers from a fabulous collection at superduper.shapesofsweetness.com

In case you’ve never come across them, the premise is that you – the reader – take the role of protagonist in the books and at the end of each short section of narrative you are presented with a number of options representing your next actions. For example, in The Cave of Time, the first choice you are required to make is:

If you decide to start back home, turn to page 4.
If you decide to wait, turn to page 5.

Turning to the page for your chosen option the narrative continues, eventually leading to one of multiple different endings. Like I said, my brother and I read these a lot as kids and while the narratives tend to be quite similar and the range of options can be frustrating (“But why can’t I throw my frying pan at the King of the Ants?!”) they were also truly engaging as we tried to figure out the potential consequences of our actions.

More from superduper.shapesofsweetness.com

Of course, the branching structure and constrained options translate easily into computer programs and computer games might be seen as the multimedia, all-bells-and-whistles version of Choose Your Own Adventure. In my current reflection on the nature of books though I begin to wonder if the format of these books creates a different experience for maker/readers? For my brother and I these books were very definitely a collaborative experience – just as computer games can be – but they are also slower paced and with the opportunity to take a sneaky look ahead and see what happens if you choose a particular path. While I wouldn’t say that Choose Your Own Adventure books are more engaging than computer games (we gave them up around the time we got our first computer..) I think they might offer a unique type of reading – constructive, collaborative and accountable.

Earlier this year, in a Pitch Up & Publish event with We Are Words + Pictures, the eBooks were used by a couple of writers to create simple portfolios of their work to show prospective clients/commissioners. Over the years Proboscis has also used both the eBook and StoryCubes formats to create publications that present our work in a similar way. We’ve now come up with two ideas for using bookleteer to create highly personal eBooks about who people are and what they do, Pocketfolios and MeBooks.

Pocketfolios
We began by thinking about how we remember work by art, design and architecture students at graduate shows (often by collecting business or postcards) and how, looking back, sometimes it can be hard recalling why we might have collected someone’s details without a connection to what caught our interest in the first place. But what if there was a way for the students to give away something like a mini portfolio of their work? What if they could use bookleteer to create simple, yet beautiful, ‘pocketfolios’ with more details about them and their work?

Niharika has designed posters which we’re sending out to colleges to invite students to test out bookleteer for creating highly personal ‘pocketfolios’ – we’re also offering a 10% discount (using the discount codes on the physical posters) for students who want their pocketfolio(s) printed via our PPOD service. We have also developed another set of posters which we’ll be sending out to studios to invite makers of all descriptions to explore bookleteer and the Diffusion eBooks as a way to create personal or product-based pocketfolios.

MeBooks
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a meeting at Islington Council for employers participating in the Future Jobs Fund where there was very positive feedback about the young participants gaining in skills and confidence. However the mentoring and follow-on advice being offered seemed to lack inspiration for much else beyond CV writing skills.

It occurred to me that bookleteer could offer something quite different – an adaptation of the Pocketfolio idea that could be made relevant to people from all walks of life and in different job types and sectors than the arts or design. A personal narrative about them – their story, or MeBook – that could act as a portfolio of their skills, experiences, ambitions, hobbies and interests, what they’ve achieved and what inspires them. Something that helps them describe and share what they feel is the best of themselves that a CV simply couldn’t cover.

We’ve been brainstorming how we might do this (also with input from Karen Martin, resident bookleteer and Proboscis associate) and hope to have a workshop piloted in the next few weeks. I’ve recently met with staff from Islington Council as well as Judith Hunt and her team from Get More Local to hear their feedback on how this could benefit other young people on the Future Jobs Fund and other schemes. Watch this space for further announcements!

We would love to hear from anyone else involved in similar schemes who’d like to offer the MeBook idea to their placements/interns/trainees. Please get in touch to find out more.

What are the page dimension for the different sizes?
– A4/US Letter eBook Portrait : 88mm by 133mm
– A4/US Letter eBook Landscape : 133mm by 88mm
– A4 StoryCube : 55mm by 55mm
*
– A3/Ledger eBook Portrait : 130mm by 193mm
– A3/Ledger eBook Landscape : 193mm by 130mm
– A3 StoryCube : 82mm by 82mm

Where can I download the content templates?
Proboscis have created some simple empty page templates for MS Word, OpenOffice and Adobe InDesign which can be downloaded here.

What dimensions should my cover image be?
Images should be saved as JPGs or PNGs at a minimum resolution of 72dpi at exact size or greater. For best results 150dpi is recommended.
Basic Design
– A4/US Letter eBook Portrait : 65mm by 90mm
– A4/US Letter eBook Landscape : 90mm by 65mm
– A3/Ledger eBook Portrait : 90mm by 135mm
– A3/Ledger eBook Landscape : 135mm by 90mm
Custom Cover Designs
– A4/US Letter eBook Portrait : 88mm by 133mm
– A4/US Letter eBook Landscape : 133mm by 88mm
– A3/Ledger eBook Portrait : 130mm by 193mm
– A3/Ledger eBook Landscape : 193mm by 130mm

What can I use the Logo images for?
The ‘Logo’ spaces allow users to add one or more logos to the covers of their eBooks. The Main Logo could, for instance, be the logo of the ‘publisher’ or author and the Secondary Logo might be used for credits, such as acknowledging sponsors/funders or for placing a Creative Commons-type image. However, they can also be used just as spaces for images on the front/back covers.

What happens when I order some POD eBooks or StoryCubes?
When you confirm your order an email is sent to Proboscis where one of us will calculate the cost and send you an invoice via Paypal. Once we receive payment we will send your item(s) to press and aim to have the finished products in your hands within 7 working days. StoryCubes will be printed on a regular basis – check here or on twitter for details of the next printing deadline.
The ordering system is very hands-on whilst we’re still developing the alpha version of bookleteer – please bear with us and forgive its manual shortcomings!

We’re very excited by what’s in store, it’s a big step forward in both the usefulness and ease of use of bookleter :

• new sizes : A3 & Ledger sizes will allow users to create larger eBooks and StoryCubes

• new designs : the new ‘Custom Cover’ design allows users to create their own customised cover design and upload as an image

• PPOD ordering system now integrated – users can order A6 or A5 eBooks, and StoryCubes from A4 or A3 sheets

• new user dashboard showing most recent publications and orders

More details once everything’s up and running.

We’ll be sending out some samples to various friends, colleagues and bookleteers, meanwhile we will start accepting orders for POD eBooks & StoryCubes from April 12th. See the prior post on POD for our initial prices.

Come and join us to publish your stories, pictures and ideas as Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes.

Date : Friday 26th March 2010
Time : 12pm to 4pm
Venue : 11 City Arcade, Coventry
Map

View bookleteer pitch up & publish in a larger map