Chip Kidd @ TED
\youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC0KxNeLp1E&w=500\ I've always been amazed by how easliy Chip Kidd has managed to weave the serious and the whimsical aspects of book design.
CSS regions, exclusions, shapes and new publishing paradigms
Introduction Smashing Magazine Newspaper Designshttp://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/11/award-winning-newspaper-designs/ article shows examples of what printed media can do. Having learned to use InDesign for ePub-based ebooks I've come to respect the power and flexibility of printed media… working primarily in web environments I've always wondered what it would take to do similar layouts. Over the last year at the two HTML5 Developer Conferenceshttp://html5devconf.com/ I've heard more and more about new CSS technologies that would make print-like layouts possible:Regions, Shapes and Exclusions. Adobehttp://html.adobe.com/ has been championing these technologies, not surprising since they also create DTP and Layout programs. While these technologies Exclusions, Shapes and Regions...
Craig Mod's Do Lecture
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SASS, SCSS, CSS and Modular Design
What is SASS? SASS, syntactically aware style sheet, is a CSS pre-processor and scripting language that allows you flexibility in creating your CSS rules. It provides several programmatic tools to make CSS creation easier. The language is a superset of CSS3, allowing you to create the same CSS that you do by hand but with many additional features. Install SASS SASS is a Ruby-based command line utility gem. As such it requires Ruby and the Ruby Gems to be installed on your system. Mac and most Linux distributions come with both programs already installed. Windows users can use the Ruby...
How Does Digital Affect Funding
Gone are the days where you had hoped that a big investor would see your project and hope that you'd make enough money to recoup the investors' money and maybe, if you're lucky, make some yourself. Music, books and games have benefited greatly for crowdfunding. Unlike traditional funding sources is the number of backers and the amounts that people have raised. They also provide with payment system where the money is held in escrow and, in the case of Kickstarter, only paid out if the process is successful in raising all its funds. > Crowdfunding alternately crowd financing, equity crowdfunding,...
Who is a publisher and How do you define publishing?
What happens when a publisher has a tight, direct connection with readers, is able to produce intellectual property that spreads, and can do both quickly and at low cost? Seth Godin About the Domino projecthttp://bit.ly/1eO1w1h !From western4ul @ Flickr/images/library.jpg Digital tools have expanded the definition of publishing to something I would have never thought possible 10 or even 5 years ago. For every author that makes a big publishing deal like those mentioned in this Mashable 2009 articlehttp://on.mash.to/1bO4hhE there are hundreds if not thousands of niche authors selling their books directly to interested audiences either through their websites, through an...
Docbook, XML and ebooks:Creating eBooks the old fashioned way
One of the most traditional ways to author content for multiple distribution channels is to roll up your sleeves, write XML and then convert it to your target format. For this exercise we will use Docbookhttp://www.docbook.org/. Without going into too much detail, Docbook was initially created in 1991 as a means to create computer software manuals and other technical documentation. Over the years Docbook has evolved into a general purpose XML authoring language. Along with the authoring standard, what structures we can use to author our content, the authors of the Docbook standard have also created a set of stylesheets...
Rethinking the future of books
With the introduction of all iPads and other tablet readers we are left with some big question: Are books still relevant? If they are still relevant, how do they need to change? Craig Mod has written and spoken about the future of books and what we can do with books online with the new technologies for both creating the content and financing the production of the content. Craig presented the Do Lecture below in 2011 and it caught my attention for a variety of reasons. How do we leverage the new technologies for books and the new devices we use...
Why ePub matters
eBooks are way more than text Currently eBooks are a combination of both images and text... except for the Apple iBook reader. iBook borrowed from the draft ePub 3 specification or was it the ePub standard group who simply adopted Apple's technology? and allowed for the inclusion of audio and video using HTML5 audio and video embedding technologies. As a result of this early adoption ePub-based ebooks for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch can view embedded audio and video content directly on the device. With the ePub standard now being considered a Proposed Specification See http://idpf.org/epub3\proposed\spec\releasedhttp://idpf.org/epub3proposedspecreleased For more information...