blog.booki.cc

A few weeks ago I wrote about wanting to see students writing their own textbooks using Booki…well, crazily it seems this has just happened ‘all by itself”. I was watching the activity on Booki over some weeks (its building steadily) and I noticed a book appear that seemed to have a lot of activity immediately. As it happens it is a project lead by Kieran Nolan who teaches at DkIT in Ireland (http://www.dkit.ie/creativemedia).

Kieran has asked students to create a book together using Booki. The project is for a module called ‘User Theories’ which Kieran leads for 4th year students in the BA (Hons) in Communications and Creative Multimedia. The course looks at different interactive media types, different user groups and the creative ways in which people repurpose and reuse all the digital creation and distribution.

In Kierans words:

“The topic we had last week in class was ‘Emotive Design’ and trying to reduce user frustration with interactive media. In other words looking at ideas of giving interactive products personality (for instance, avatars) so that users feel some sort of connection and less alienated to the product. So the student’s are been asked to reflect on the readings and come up with their own idea for an ‘emotive interface’.”

Rather than create the content individually, Kieran has asked the students to create a book collaboratively and likes the idea of Booki because the class can share their ideas, learn from each other, and are practicing using a collaborative online tool. The fact that the students can produce a book from the result adds another dimension for Kieran:

“It bridges the gap between digital and print media and produces a tangible product.”

Kieran will utilise the history feature of Booki to track a student’s contribution to the project. The work will count towards 15% of the courses final mark.

ISBN stands for “International Standard Book Number”. It is a 13 digit number that identifies your book. No two ISBN numbers are the same ad they usually appear on your book in numeric form and as a bar code. Generally you buy ISBN numbers and each country manages this slightly differently. Some countries require you to be a publisher before you can order an ISBN. In the USA I believe you buy them in blocks of 10 whereas in new Zealand I believe they give them away.

If you wish to distribute a book through established book channels then you mostly need an ISBN. Book shops such as Barnes & Noble or your local book shop require ISBN so they can track, sell and order stock (books). Most online retailers of any size also require this – Amazon for example, require ISBN if you wish to sell through their channels. However some online channels do not require ISBN – lulu.com for example.

The big problem with ISBN is that you need a new ISBN for every new edition. So if you release a book and then edit it and re-release it you need 2 ISBN numbers. This can take a long time to order and process and it can be expensive (depending on how you get your ISBN).

However this is not the real issue. Admin takes a long time, we are all used to it. However sometimes an administrative system gets built to work for a certain model and when that model changes then things stop making sense.

ISBN works well in a publishing world where books take years to produce and the products are identifiable distinct bodies of work. However, in the world of Booki this is not the typical process. For example, when working with a Book Sprint team we typically write and release a book in 5 days. You can register the ISBN before the event, no problem. However quite often after the event we may ‘release’ a new version of the book 5,10, 15 times in one day. Some of these releases may be substantial revisions. This quite clearly does not sit neatly with the slow ISBN process. Even with a more conservative development cycle for a ‘Booki book’ the implication is clear – ISBN expects content to be static, it does not expect books to ‘live’.

Its a real problem for free content and content that exists in an environment where ongoing contributions to the source are encouraged. If you manage a book like this in Booki and you wish to distribute the book through traditional distribution channels then there is a point where you must ‘freeze’ the content and release the ‘snapshot’. This is not altogether satisfying since then you must either still the book – make it ‘die’ for a time so the printed work and the source remain equal, or you must acknowledge that the paper version is a quick to be outdated archive.

Letting content die or temporarily freezing contributions can kill a book, which is not a very desirable result considering it often takes a lot of work soliciting ongoing contributions in the first place. The alternative, accepting that the printed book is an archive is probably not going to make many distributors very happy since you are asking them to sell an out of date product (although this is conjecture since I have never tried this).

My answer to this dilemma is to actually walk away from traditional distribution channels. Free content should travel freely across media and infront of the eyes (and ears in the case of audio books) of whoever wants it and in whatever form they want it. Let the content go, don’t constrain it to these traditional channels.

Typically these channels are pursued however for ‘legacy’ reasons. Some you can’t escape – if you are an academic you live off ISBN and the education system will be slow to change that. However, if its a business model you are after then don’t make the mistake to think that selling books is the only way to go…new models are emerging – get people to pay you to write the content, for example. One such successful example of this is the Rural Design Collective who successfully raised $2000 (US) via kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/ & http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rdcHQ/rural-design-collective-2010-summer-mentoring-prog).

So there are alternatives. ISBN is blocking the way, but its probably about time to start believing there are better ways….

If you need to monitor the growth of a book in Booki you can see the entire book on one page by adding ‘/_full’ to the end of the URL of the book. For example you can look at his book in ‘read only mode’ :

http://www.booki.cc/betahaus-ein-coworking-handbuch/

and compare it to this :

http://www.booki.cc/betahaus-ein-coworking-handbuch/_full/

betahaus (http://www.betahaus.de) is a co-working space first established in Berlin and now also existing in Hamburg and soon a few other cities in Germany (and perhaps the world). Today a group of the founders and active participants met in Berlin to begin writing a book on setting up a co-working space with a special emphasis on how betahaus does it. The book is being written in German but translations will soon follow.

The Book Sprint group spent 3 hours (facilitated by me – Adam Hyde) creating the outline for the book in Booki (http://www.booki.cc/betahaus-ein-coworking-handbuch/) and they are now writing the book over the next 3 days. The first steps in the process was to first write all the ideas on what the book should be on sticky notes, group them on a wall, organise them, and then create a table of contents in Booki that reflected that structure.

All content is created under the open content license CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/).

Vote for Booki in the Open Web Awards! Booki is in the final of the Open Web Awards We are 1 of 3 projects and if we win we get 5000 euro which we will use to do a code sprint on a tropical island somewhere ;)

please please please register :

http://www.drumbeat.org/user/register

and vote for us:

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/open-web-publishing

and pass this around!!!!  :)

Last week the new Booki Mobile took to the road. Its a van that has everything inside to produce books, a mobile book production lab and powered by Booki!

Booki Mobile in Barcelona

The van is a VW T4 and has the following equipment:

Fastback 15XS Binder
Ideal electric paper guillotine
Samsung 2851 ND duplex black and white laser printer + ink
IP4000 color inkjet
Heaps of paper (A4)
Card for covers
Scissors, rulers, paper knifes, cutting boards etc
Power cables, extension boards etc

With all this you can make books!

The idea is based on the Internet Archives Book Mobile. We pretty much stole the idea from them (we asked first ;) and loaded the van with everything needed to make books and drove it on its first outing 2000km from Berlin to Barcelona. It was a long haul.

The process of making the books takes some time to refine but we learned a tremendous amount. In short the process runs like this:

1. create a book in Booki (we used existing books)
2. output a5 book formatted PDF from Booki
3. print the PDF as a ‘booklet’ using the duplex (for double sided printing) printer
4. cut the book to size using the paper cutter
5. bind the spine using the Fastback 15XS
6. print the cover
7. work out where to crease the spine to wrap nicely around the contents
8. add the cover to the contents (it adheres with the binding spines we use for the fastback)
9. trim the book nice and tight with the cutter

Thats it! Once printed the procedure takes about 5 minutes and the total cost for a 100 page book is less than a euro. The books look great!

Freshly cut book

The Booki Mobile is designed to take book production to the world. With booki and the equipment its possible to go to schools, events, festivals, streets and make free books…

Booki User Guide

We will document more of this shortly in the blog and talk more about the Booki Mobile and the process of producing books. We will also work on Booki to help the production of books using home or office duplex printers.

The Booki Mobile is sponsored by Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, Mozilla, iCommons, CiviCRM and the Internet Archive. Many thanks to these organisations for making this possible.