ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE
Copyright © 2002, 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved; Brought to you by Peanut.org
Get E-booked for Next Christmas
This near to Christmas, have you reached such a stage of frustration about shopping that you are ready to give in to a little shopping cart rage and burn your credit cards? Well, maybe not that extreme, but what do you get for people who have everything, when it seems that more and more people have, if not everything, at least too much? While it's too late for any suggestions for this holiday season, now is a good time to start to think about creating some unique hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind, personalized gifts for next year. Now, let me assure you that I am as craftless as I am artless, and I wouldn't know what to do with a bag of sequins if Martha Stewart hit me over the head with one.
What I'm suggesting is that you start now assembling texts, pictures, web pages, and other goodies to create distinctive e-books for everyone on your list next year. The good news is, there is a variety of free software available on the Internet, as well as various on-line communities and libraries to give you ideas and support. The bad news is, the whole project could turn out to be an inflated version of the reviled Christmas form letter.
An e-book (eBook, Ebook--I'll try to use the spelling associated with each site) is a program that organizes and displays files-pictures, texts, even audio files-that you select. There really is no "book" involved, and most e-book programs are for viewing on your computer rather than for printing. So, you may still have to make some styrofoam trees for friends that still don't have computers.
Let me digress a minute to remind you that there are two different ways I can share links to other web pages with you. I can get fancy and refer you to eBooks N' Bytes or I can give you the complete URL, like this:
Since I hope you will find this article to be a reference to which you will return (maybe throughout the year, as you create your masterpieces?), I am going to give you the URL--maybe a little less elegant, but more useful.
And "eBooks N' Bytes: Your eBook & Software Resource Directory" to which those links will take you is a site both elegant and useful. It offers great reviews and comparisons of eBooks and the software you need to create them. Another guide to eBook software is on the About.com Publishing site:
http://publishing.about.com/arts/publishing/cs/ebooksoftware/index.htm
The best known e-publishing program, Adobe, is fairly pricey (although its Reader is available for free and shows up on most computers). You can subscribe to an online service to convert your documents to Adobe's PDF (portable document format) format, and you can get a document converted for free to try out the service:
http://cpdf1.adobe.com/index.pl?BP=IE
Even better, there are three e-book programs that you can download for free. All three have various communities, libraries, and support services for their product:
The first two, E-book Compiler and WinEbook, offer you the option of registering the program (for pay) and gaining even more features and flexibility. The third one, KeeBoo, as I write this, is available only as a free version, even if you request that the company send a CD-rom (which comes from Belgium, by the way, so be patient). KeeBoo is rated as difficult to use by eBooks N' Bytes, but I found that with a little trial and error, it is relatively easy. I would suggest printing the twelve pages of help to begin with.
KeeBoo, like the other two free programs, has a growing community of users from whom you can get lots of ideas and inspirations. Once you gather your materials, from your own computer or from the Internet, you can enhance your KeeBoo with personal notes and highlighting. KeeBoo allows you to build up libraries of your works, to post them to the Internet, and to send them in e-mail attachments that can be accessed by people who don't have the software.
The finished products are colorful, attractive, and easy to read (especially in the one-page view). You can either "turn the pages" of your KeeBoo, or you can click on titles in the "Table of Contents." You can even create and access an "Index." The format would be great for photo albums, yearbooks, baby books. Just add images from your scanner or digital camera to create the ideal gift for grandparents, or add family recipes and stories to create a perfect gift for grandchildren. By the way, to review how you can collect images from your scanner or digital camera or from the Internet itself, let me refer you to an earlier rave, "Giving Your Computer Eyes."
The KeeBoo web site is being revised, and I suspect that this program will soon be shifting to the registration-for-pay model of the other two free programs. Even if there is a price for it, I would say go ahead and pay it. As it now exists, KeeBoo is the best "buy" of any free software that I know of. [2002 update - You can now download the software for a fifteen day free trial. After that, you have to pay.]
My enthusiasm for KeeBoo, by the way, should not detract from the other two free programs, since KeeBoo is the only one of the three which I've taken for a test-drive. Once I tried it, I didn't need the other programs myself, but you might find them useful. I'm especially intrigued that WinEbooks offers a program option to hear its books read aloud. Any of these three programs would be a valuable addition to a teacher's bag of tricks. Teachers could create their own textbooks (annotated literary works, perhaps), while students could publish class magazines and multi-media term papers (e-papers?).
[2002 update - A program that I've discovered since originally writing this article has turned out to be my favorite e-book software of all, SbookBuilder 9. I have used it to create an e-book about dinosaurs. You can find the still free program at http://www.jansfreeware.com/jftools.htm.]
So far, aside from the libraries and communities of each program, we're considering simply creating e-books. Let's say that you've got something too good to limit to your family and friends. Now, you are getting into the realm of e-publishing. One of the best-known e-publishers, which offers a variety of publishing programs, is iUniverse:
While I'm dubious about any "pay-to-publish" programs, online or off, I enjoy iUniverse's themed communities, on topics from sports to medicine to religion:
http://communities.iuniverse.com/bin/default.asp
Besides creating and publishing e-books, you may want to acquire some e-books. Access Magazine, the Sunday supplement devoted to the Internet, recently provided a great list of sites for people interested in various aspects of e-publishing (one huge URL): [2002 update - Access Magazine has regrettably disappeared, so this URL has been deleted.]
One of the most intriguing is Mighty Words, which according to Access, does a good job of covering "both sides of the street" of publishing in its dealings with readers and writers (oops, content-providers): [2002 update - Mighty Words has also disappeared, so the URL has been deleted.] Mighty Words, by the way, used to be eMatter from Fatbrain.com, which is now devoted solely to hard copy.
The very great granddaddy of all Internet publishing is Project Gutenberg, which provides thousands of classic texts for download: http://promo.net/pg
You need to read and honor the restrictions on the use of texts that you download from the Project, but you can use their texts for personal projects. Imagine creating a poetry anthology illustrated with your photos… your imagination (perhaps the size of your hard drive) is the limit.
Despite my enthusiasm for e-books, if you have access to some free web space, I would suggest that you simply design web pages and send your friends and family the URLs. Remember, if you have "@peanut.org" in your e-mail address, you have some free web space waiting for your creativity. For more ideas about developing that web space (with free software, of course), review the three-part series of raves which begins with "Who Wants to Be a Web-master?":
http://www.peanut.org/users/mike/text/webmaster.htm
Keep your feet dry, your hearts and e-books full of noble thoughts, and if you want to give a (free) Christmas gift every day, log onto The Hunger Site:
[2002 update - The Hunger Site was offline for a while, but I am pleased to report that it is up and functioning again.]