Booki Blog

As of May 16th my book Make Your Own Sugar Activities! is available for purchase in the Kindle store.  You can also download the first few chapters for free.

My Author Page

Putting a book on the Kindle Store is something any Booki author should routinely do with finished books.  It is a lot less work than putting a book on Lulu and the Kindle store has a lot more visibility.  I’m not suggesting that you give up on Lulu, just that you add the Kindle store to the ways you distribute your book.

Booki already does most of what you need to make a Kindle-formatted book, and OBJAVI *could* be modified to do the rest.  Until then you’ll need to do some work by hand:

1).  Export the book as an EPUB.

2).  Run the kindlegen program (a free download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS) on your EPUB to create something that is readable on the Kindle.  This will NOT meet Amazon’s requirements for the Kindle Store, because it lacks a Table of Contents and a cover image, but the Kindle can use it.

3).  Using either the Kindle Previewer or a real Kindle look through the book for formatting errors and go back to Booki to fix them.  I found a problem with bullet points because I used Open Office to create the first few chapters of my book, then I pasted the chapters into Booki.  This caused my <li> tags to have <p> tags nested within them, a problem I would NOT have had if I had used Booki to write the chapters.  I was able to fix this in Booki by turning on HTML mode in the editor and getting rid of the <p> tags.  In the Kindle having the <p> tags in there makes the bullet appear on one line and the text appear on the following line.

Note that the docs on Amazon’s site say you can’t use <table> tags in your book.  That is wrong. The current Kindles display tables just fine.

Another thing you should do is add a section to your Introduction explaining how to get the book in various formats, including the website, Lulu, the Internet Archive, etc.  When people download the free sample of your book they will get this information.  If you’re writing a FLOSS Manual and have code samples in your book the Kindle will NOT render them well at all so you should direct your readers to the website so they can see the code properly formatted.  (Another possibility to suggest is the Kindle program running on a PC or Mac, which can take advantage of the wider screen).

The Kindle Previewer is available for Windows and Mac OS, but not Linux.  However, the Windows version runs under WINE.  It is too slow under WINE to be used to check every page for formatting errors, but it works well to verify that your cover image and Table of Contents are correct.

4).  Create a cover image and upload it to your book.  The cover image does not have to be linked to any page of your book, it just needs to be uploaded.  You can use the “Insert Picture” button in the editor, upload the image, then cancel out.  The image itself can start out as a white rectangle with a 5 pixel grey border.  I used a 600 x 800 canvas, but Amazon recommends something a bit larger.  You can easily create a usable cover image in The GIMP.  I put an orange rectangle with rounded corners at the bottom of the image which contains the same text that we put on the back covers of printed FLOSS Manuals.  I also put my name on the cover image as the author.  The printed book does not have that.  Amazon wants books to have authors.  You can have multiple contributors, including photographers, translators, etc. They will all be listed on the Kindle Store page.

5).  Re-export your book as an EPUB.

6).  Create a directory and unzip your EPUB into it.

7).  Make a copy of the XHTML file for your first chapter named something like ch000_table_of_contents.xhtml and use an HTML editor to make a Table of Contents out of it.  The free Seamonkey web browser from Mozilla has a perfectly adequate HTML editor that you can use for this.  Each chapter in the TOC must have a relative link to the chapter XHTML file that contains it.

8).  Use the same HTML editor to edit your Introduction chapter and put a centered <h1> entry with the title of your book at the top of the chapter.  Underneath it put a centered paragraph with “by Author Name”.  I chose to put this text in italics.

9).  Using a text editor edit the content.opf file.  You’ll need to fix the top of the file to be like this:

<metadata>
<dc:publisher>FLOSS Manuals http://flossmanuals.net</dc:publisher>
<dc:rights scheme=”License”>GPLv2+</dc:rights>

Aco (the lead booki developer) and I have been working hard the last 4 days promoting Booki at Transmediale. We had a stand and talked to many hundreds of people, telling them about Booki – how it works, how they can use it, why its necessary. The response from the people there was *amazing*. Its the first time we have really taken Booki ‘to the public’ like this. I have done it plenty of times for FLOSS Manuals (the org that created Booki) but not for Booki itself.

I learned a lot about how people see the project, how to best explain it, and what people consider to be important about it. The PR mission was not just about promoting Booki but we were also trying to gather votes for the Open Web Award. We gathered a lot and came in second to a very good and extremely popular project called “Graffitti Mark Up Language“. In the voting system (online) there was the possibility to leave comments so I just wanted to highlight some of the comments that illustrated to me that there are many people out there that have a deep understanding of what we are trying to do as this was a very rewarding part of the process:

• “bridge between the online and physical sustainability of sharing.”
• “an education and learning environment of the future commons!”
• “text books for education could be written collaboratively”
• “the ability to style the book using CSS is a really powerful feature”
• “restyle your book depending on the audience you are reaching but leave the book’s content completely untouched. “
• “a great idea to bring people and communities together to author books, engaging them with their subjects and empowering them in the process”
• “booki enables myriad projects”
• “the Web needs more coherent and longer texts to complement the proliferation of votes, status updates, news items and opinion pieces. “
• “Booki takes the familiar book format and makes it collaboratively written social media.”
• “for any kind of open content, whether it’s techniques of master woodworkers, or oral histories for a town or neighborhood, or any text where people want to collaborate to create it.”
• “Booki bakes in openness, so that sharing is the default.”
• “enables and empowers people to publish and disseminate knowledge and to adapt, remix, and augment the knowledge produced by others.”
• “books and printing are natural allies of the open web, enabling a cool transition between screen information and offline format. “
• “anyone can easily do it”
• “booki represents a powerful tool for education, literature, guides, and open knowledge in general,”

Thats a selection of some of the best comments.

Although I *profoundly* dislike competitions I think the process was very much worth it, not only for the attention it brought us but because it was a good moment to see the existing support for the project articulated. It is also worth noting that the winners (Graffitti Mark Up language) shared the 5000 euro prize with Booki and the other finalist Thimbl. Hats off to both projects for being excellent proponents of openness and collaboration.

Help us win the Drumbeat Open Web Awards… Please vote for us BEFORE FRIDAY NIGHT!

To vote go here: http://vote.booki.cc

and tell the world!

thanks!

Check it out:

http://wall.fabricatorz.com/

Fabricatorz Visualisation

Its a visualisation of the RSS feed coming from the Open Web Book Sprint RSS. It is also projected on the side of the Hungarian Embassy in Berlin…pictures coming!

adam

We are in Berlin with a room of Open Web thinkers including Jon Phillips, Chris Adams, Michelle Thorne, Mick Fuzz, Alejandra Perez, and some remote friends such as Bassel Safadi. You can check out some of their thoughts about the sprint too. You can also see the 0.1 Book Sprint visualizor they developed (taken from the books rss feed).

The Open Web Team Working on Booki

The book is the second Book Sprint hosted by Transmediale and the topic is the Open Web. We are 4 days into the sprint, one day to go and about 60% through the content – we need your help. To contribute register and contribute!

Jump in anywhere but we particularity need help in writing these chapters:
You have the Freedom to Enter
You have the Freedom to Participate
You have the Right to Privacy

As well as cleaning (editing/proofing) and tightening up chapters and arguments. Any illustrators wanting to help us are more that welcome too!

Sprint finsihes 1800 CET Friday…so we are hoping to get as much support as we can in the next 12 hours…

irc:freenode
#booksprint

or we are in the chat window of the book

adam

We are trying to drum up votes for the Drumbeat Open Web Awards…vote for us! The process is simple:

1. register :
   http://www.drumbeat.org/user/register
2. and vote for us by clicking on the ‘vote’ link on the top right of this page:
   http://www.drumbeat.org/project/open-web-publishing

If you want to help more put this badge on your web page with a link to this page :

Make sure you tell others about this and encourage them to vote!

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!!!!  :)