Author: gileslane

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events

PU&P 6 – at Brixton Village

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)

Categories
publishing on demand

Print On Demand StoryCubes

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.
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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:
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To create and order your own StoryCubes, contact us for details on prices and delivery options: sales at proboscis.org.uk

Categories
updates & improvements

more interface updating

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.

Categories
events

PU&P 5 – schools and learning

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

Categories
updates & improvements

Interface Updates for Authoring Pages

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.

create-storycube-update

create-eBook-update

Categories
publishing on demand

bookleteer test accounts – more invitations

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.

Categories
updates & improvements

Interface Tweak

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):

bookleteer_storyCube_interface

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).

Categories
events

PU&P with We Are Words + Pictures

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
eBooks by Matt, Tom & Mark
StoryCube by Anne
StoryCube by Anne
StoryCube by Julia
Categories
publishing on demand

Recent eBooks made with bookleteer

bookleteering

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…

Categories
publishing on demand

International languages & bookleteer

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.