Thinking About Tomorrow

iBooks Author and the Coming eTextbook Revolution in Higher Education

2012-01-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

On January 19, 2012, Apple announced the availability of iBooks 2, an iOS app, and iBooks Author, a MacOS X application. These two free applications compliment one another. One creates interactive, rich media eTextbooks (iBooks Author) and the other enables those eTextbooks to be read on an iPad (iBooks 2). Actually, their repertoire goes well beyond eTextbooks to include picture books, art catalogs, cookbooks, travelogues and so on.

At first, there was a great hue and cry about constraints on the use of .ibooks files created with iBooks Author and the lack of constraint by the EPUB 3 eBook standard released last October. Now that the "barking dog syndrome" that fuels today's echo-blogging has spent itself and the bit stream is calmer, more thoughtful analyses are beginning to emerge. For example, this, from John Gruber regarding conformance to the EPUB 3 eBook standard.

The other big gripe had to do with the End User License Agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author. The part that irked most said that if you use iBooks Author to create an .ibooks file AND you set out to sell that .ibooks file, you can only do so through Apple's iBookstore. There are no restrictions if your eTextbook is free. Since I think that eTextbooks should be free to students and that textbook authors should be rewarded in new and better ways than the grossly inefficient and unfair systems inherited from the print era, Apple's EULA doesn't bother me a bit. But for those who do care, the salient fact is that the .ibooks format is unencumbered and quite transparent. Thus, it is entirely possible to understand this format and either hand code *.ibooks files or build tools that do exactly the same thing as the iBooks Author app does. As well, there is nothing to stop those who make other hardware and software eReaders from endeavoring to develop the ability to display .ibooks files just as well as iBooks 2 does.

We really have bigger and more important fish to fry here. There is a revolution coming and these apps and others that will follow are its harbingers.

For the first time in history, colleges and universities fully control the means of eTextbook production, start to finish, inception to delivery. They need no help in producing world class eTextbooks. The seeds of revolution are in hand.

The only imponderable is whether colleges and universities will sow those seeds and tend their gardens effectively. There are forces aligned against this so the outcome is not certain. Obviously, commercial textbook publishers will work very hard to avoid being dis-intermediated. Subject matter experts essential to the textbook creation process, such as faculty, will weigh their options carefully. The odds are, so far, with the status quo but that could change. Here's how that could happen. Here's how that revolution might occur.

iBooks Author (left) with iBooks on iPad (right)

Caveat: My focus here is on higher education. The K-12 eTextbook situation is so different that it will have to be dealt with separately and at a later time. However, it is worth noting there are some interesting interrelationships between K-12 and higher education such as the fact that many K-12 textbooks are written by college and university academics. How higher education responds to these new opportunities will also have a profound effect on K-12. My coming from a teacher education background means that I am vitally interested in both. So, on to the revolution in higher education. It's actually been a long time coming.

Not that long ago, publishing paper textbooks (pTextbooks) meant having to make large capital investments in paper, printing, binding, transportation, and storage. Additionally, one had to command a substantial corps of human talent in the form of editors, sales and marketing people. Textbooks were much more challenging than fiction due to the need for fact checking, illustrations, supplementary materials, exercises and so on. Fiction is composed primarily of linear text, all handled by a single author.

The desktop publishing revolution of the early 90s was significant in that it empowered anyone with a computer and laser printer to create documents with graphics and complex layouts that rivaled commercial pTextbook offerings. Any subject matter expert could create a small number of pTextbooks equal in quality and aesthetics to a commercial pTextbook. Of course the economics of paper still favored the commercial publisher and so, the commercial pTextbook publishers held on to their dominant position but the idea of independent textbook publishing was born.

Very little changed until the Internet of the late 90s made it possible to distribute digital documents far and wide, usually in the form of Adobe PDF files or as web sites that perform the same function as a pTextbook. The rise of web-based Learning Management Systems (LMS) brought all of these components together under a single roof adding things such as automated testing. However, the commercial pTextbook persisted throughout all of this and continues to do so up to and including the present day. Why?

Publishers saw this threat and took action. The pTextbook grew digital supplements such as CDs and even DVDs with both interactive and rich media content. A pTextbook adoption might also include access to a publisher-hosted LMS or a 'course pack' that populated an institution-hosted LMS. Instructors were happy to adopt these 'turn-key' courses-in-a-box because creating their own video and interactive supplements, test item banks and building their own LMS courses was both onerous and unrewarding or just downright impossible.

So here we are in the first part of the 21^st century. Made possible by the emergence of powerful mobile devices such as the Kindle, iPhone and iPad, the eBook is for the first time eclipsing pBook sales. Once again, commercial publishing is challenged as authors of fiction begin to succeed at self-publishing. The tools for doing this are all in hand: web sites with payment processing, the EPUB standard and applications that make EPUB-based eBook creation trivially easy. New intermediaries (e.g. Smashwords) and new outlets (Amazon Books, Google Books and Apple's iBookstore) with more favorable terms (viz. author gets up to 70% of sales instead of 25% royalties) have arisen to meet this new demand.

Textbooks, on the other hand, are a bit more involved than creating a linear stream of text as is the case with a typical work of fiction or non-fiction. Even more so the eTextbook because it can contain interactive elements and rich media such as audio and video. Layout and exercises to facilitate learning are also key elements. Given these requirements, one might think that eTextbooks are best left to the professionals who work in the commercial publishing industry. Perhaps but this is by no means foreordained, especially now that software such as iBooks Author and iBooks 2 for the iPad are freely available.

It is now possible for subject matter experts (SMEs) such as college and university professors to create and distribute world class eTextbooks for the iPad with iBooks Author. No doubt, these will be accompanied by competing applications and hardware platforms. Apple has set both a good example and a good pace. The Internet and all of its social networking and collaboration tools has also made it unnecessary for the all the work that an eTextbook requires be done by a single individual. The means with which to create eTextbooks that are pedagogically superior and significantly less expensive are in hand.

Having in hand the means of production is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for this revolution to actually occur. SMEs are essential to this process and have had opportunities to dis-intermediate the publishing industry before but didn't do it. Why didn't that happen and why might that not happen in the near future? The answer and therefore the enemy of this revolution, is institutional tradition. Let's take a look at that.

Academic institutions employ SMEs to teach classes, do research and perform community service. Above and beyond the contracted salary and benefits, they reward these activities with promotion (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor) and tenure. Promotion usually means a higher salary and tenure generally means greater job security where on e can only be denied a contract for cause which implies due process. Typically, committees are formed to examine records and determine whether an eligible academic is worthy of promotion and/or tenure. One of the things that these committees value highly and therefore look closely at are the candidates' record of publication which may include one or more textbooks. Traditionally, it is the esteem in which the journal or publisher is held that determines the value assigned to the work. A textbook published by one publisher may be rated lower than a textbook published by another recognized commercial publisher. A self-published textbook might well be deemed as worthless as something published by a known "vanity" publisher who will print (for a fee) anything sent to them. In other words, most institutions of higher education outsource the evaluation of faculty textbook production to commercial publishers.

Being such a key part of the academic food chain, commercial publishers have been virtually guaranteed to have the right of first refusal on any textbook that might be written by a university professor. Although they are no longer the only game in town, they are still quite important to SMEs desiring promotion, tenure and royalties to supplement their income. The new alternative of publishing an an eTextbook via Apple's iBookstore appears to have only one of these incentives, 70% of the income derived from sales which may well be confined to one's home institution.

I suspect that this is not sufficient to entice large numbers of academics to try their hand at self-publishing an eTextbook. The consequence of this would likely be a continuation of high prices for nationally distributed, one-size-fits-all eTextbooks. Obviously, this is bad for students but it's also bad for society in that fewer citizens will be able to afford completing a college degree and bad for institutions seeking to maintain enrollments. What can be done?

Given that institutions can tolerate more risk than individual employees, I propose that we add textbook creation to the list of responsibilities for college and university faculty. Include that activity in the definition of teaching and point out that this responsibility can be met in collaboration with others in your academic field. Institutional support for that objective should include items such as the following:

Add "teaching and learning materials creation" to the criteria for promotion and tenure decisions. Creating all or part of an eTextbook would be subsumed under this heading.
Invest in the development of assessment techniques to evaluate "teaching and learning materials creation" that does not involve commercial entities. A multi-institutional consortium might be a good way to approach this objectively.
Provide ways and means for faculty to be eligible to receive either released time (e.g. one less class to teach) or extra compensation for eTextbook creation work such that the resulting eTextbook is a "work for hire" giving the institution copyright. Note that faculty are still free to create and market eTextbooks on their own time.
Provide support for faculty collaborating with colleagues elsewhere on developing eTextbooks in their field. This is likely a simple matter of arranging access to collaboration software (Internet access assumed).
Where the copyright to an eTextbook is held by the institution, provide copies of that textbook to students needing it for the lowest possible price, including free.
Where the copyright to an eTextbook is held by the institution, provide copies of that textbook to other non-profit institutions at the least cost possible consistent with cost recovery principles.
Enter into collaborative agreements with other institutions to develop eTextbooks that are especially challenging such that the copyright to the resulting eTextbook is jointly held.

With institutional support such as suggested in the list above, participating institutions would be able to take fuller responsibility for and exercise more effective control of the educational experiences enjoyed by their students. This would lower costs for students and help colleges and universities better recruit and retain students. Faculty participating in the effort would receive important scholarly recognition and credit toward promotion and tenure as well as released time or extra compensation. Their teaching would involve less compromise because they'd have had a hand in the making of the textbooks assigned. This is a revolution that ought to happen and could come with a strong commitment to forge new traditions in higher education, a bit of good fortune and a great deal of hard work.

Lastly, let's deal with that bugaboo called copyright. With so many textbooks already in existence won't it be hard or impossible not to violate someone's copyright? What institution can afford to discover what permissions are needed and then secure them? First of all, state institutions and their employees are shielded by the 11^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishing sovereign immunity for state governments. That doesn't cover all cases and isn't nearly as potent as the next point. Second and most importantly, there is very little in textbooks that is copyrightable. Specifically:

You cannot copyright a fact, concept or idea. You can only copyright the unique expression of an idea. Textbooks are primarily composed of facts, concepts and ideas.
The content of most academic subjects has been covered so many times in so many ways, it would be difficult to meet the uniqueness criterion. For example, how many World History textbooks have described Hannibal's crossing the Alps? Which of those descriptions is unique?

I really don't know whether todays higher education leadership is both willing and able to attempt this revolution or not. One could argue that tough economic times make leaders more timid. They don't want to loose what little they've got. On the other hand, one could argue that tough economic times mean that there is less to loose and more to gain. I am convinced that if there is a will, there is now a way.

Standard Definition Video in ePub Documents

2011-04-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

So far, we've been focused on the use of HD video in ePub documents but what about SD? Standard definition video is still quite common, especially for older works produced for television. Whereas HD has an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 or 16:9, SD has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 or 4:3. xxx

As we have seen, iOS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod touch), introduce black bars (letterbox, pillarbox and windowbox) and cropping/scaling in order to maintain the aspect ratio of the source video. Without these, the video we see on these devices would be stretched or squished which is not what the author intended. This is due to the fact that iOS devices do not have 16:9 screens. The iPad is 1024x768 which is 1:33:1 or 4:3. The iPhone and iPod touch are 480x320 (older) or 960x640 (newer, retina displays) which is 1.5:1 or 3:2. In other words, iOS devices have screens with aspect ratios that are the same as or very close to standard definition TV dimensions.

I've created the following screencast to illustrate the many ways that the iBooks application on these iOS devices will present Standard Definition (SD) video. There's a lot to account for with different orientations (portrait vs landscape) and whether the reader chooses to view video embedded in an EPUB-based eBook in situ, proportional full screen or non-proportional full screen. It's best to see all of this in action.

If your source is SD, QuickTime X Player will maintain that aspect ratio in all of its export options. This is ideal for video embedded in EPUB-based eBooks. Playback at 640x480 minimizes the use of black bars, cropping and scaling, the iPod bit rate keeps a good balance between file size and fidelity in most cases and the MPEG-4 Baseline Profile assures that the video will play wherever the iBooks.app is found.

Revisiting "Playable Audio and Video in ePub" (revised 4/3/2011)

2011-04-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

Last September, I looked at the need to make sure that video embedded in an ePub document would play and play well on all of the devices where the iBooks.app is found (iPhone, iPod touch and iPad). Since then, new developments not only make this topic more important but also warrant a review of the principles involved.

New developments include the fact that the ePub standard is now at version three and formally specifies the embedding of audio and video files in ePub documents using the same HTML 5 video and audio tags that the iBooks.app has long supported. Thus, there will likely be more eReaders supporting rich media beside iBooks. When those new eReaders do arrive, we'll need to look at them closely. For now, the iBooks.app is still the only game in town for rich media in ePub documents. As well, we have new hardware and operating systems to consider and that brings up "backward compatibility" as an increasingly important factor.

So, let's take another look at this topic and bring our earlier conclusions up to date.

Hardware Targeting The iBooks.app, now at version 1.2.1, requires iOS 4 or later so that reduces the range of hardware that it will run on to iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad plus the 2^nd or later generation iPod touch. The most recent of these (iPhone 4, iPad and 4G iPod touch) sport the significantly more powerful A4 processor and, thus, are capable of decoding more advanced versions of the MPEG-4 H.264 standard. Specifically, these newer models can handle H.264 Main Profile whereas the older models can only handle the Baseline Profile. Simply put, baseline will play everywhere iBooks runs whereas video encoded using the Main Profile will only play on newer iOS devices. Thus, aiming for the greatest reach means that we need to stick with Baseline Profile for maximum backward compatibility.

Viewport Targeting Thanks to an article by video wizard Jan Ozer entitled "Encoding for the iPad", I've learned that, thanks to the video scaling function on the iPad, encoding HD (16:9) video at 640x360 pixels looks great for most content regardless of viewport size. The exception to this is video with fine detail such as smallish text. That gets very blurry but since we're talking about ePub here, that shouldn't be a problem. Save the text for the body of your eBook and use static images for fine visual detail.

Bit-rate & File Size Targeting An ePub document is self-contained. Generally speaking, there are no external dependencies for video or audio. Thus, video, audio, image and text files are all found inside the ePub file. Actually, an ePub document is a special kind of Zip archive that eReader apps know how to handle. Because of this self-sufficiency, bit-rate is not as critical as it would be if ePub video required an Internet download as a web page does. On the other hand, video file size is a function of bit-rate and, so, has a lot to do with the file size of your ePub document, how long it takes to download and how long your audience will have to wait before they can start reading. A frame size of 640x360 and a bit-rate of 1.4 Mbps (mega-bits per second) using the MPEG-4 Baseline Profile should produce pristine video for most HD (16:9) sourced content.

The Golden Mean Of course there are good use cases that diverge from this golden mean. The iPad's 1024x768 screen, for example, will accommodate 720p (1280x720) by scaling it down to 1024x576. The iPad will also support MPEG-4 Main Profile and very high bit rates for optimal quality playback. However, unlike other media synched to iOS devices via the iTunes.app, the video content of self-contained ePub documents is not evaluated, Thus, it is quite possible to create an eBook containing video or audio that will not play properly or at all. It is critical that ePub documents be tested on the smallest, least capable iOS devices as well as the iPad and iPhone 4 if your goal is to have the video in your ePub documents accessible wherever iBooks is found.

Reviewing Our Recommended Methods Previously, I had recommended using the iPhone presets that are found in the output options of many applications such as QuickTime Player, Screenflow, Miro and Handbrake. This is still a viable strategy though it is not optimal. The iPhone preset in QuickTime Player, for example, currently encodes a 480x300 video at 880 Kbps using the Baseline Profile. It will scale and play everywhere that iBooks runs but its not the best that we can do. Actually, the iPod preset comes closer at: 1.463 Mbps, 640x360, Baseline@3.0 when the source is 1280x720. This is much better for 16:9 source.

Scalability Testing As mentioned above, testing is critical. Not only do we have to test on multiple devices but we also need to test using all of the orientation and scaling options. Here is an illustrated list to guide your testing:

The iPod touch and the iPhone all share the same screen size (viewport). Here is the portrait view:

Here, we see a proportional scaling of the video constrained by the width of the screen in this orientation. Note the "expander" button in the upper right corner of the center image. Tapping that button fills the screen without regard for aspect ratio (proportion) like this:

Notice that the expander button has now become a collapse button.

Next, we look at the landscape orientation where the same controls are operative but the visual effect is, of course, different.

Next, we look at the iPad where video can be played in-situ, full-screen (proportional) and full screen (non-proportional). We start with the portrait in-situ view.

Here, the iPad advantage is that video can be played in context with other book elements such as text. Tapping on the expander button will bring us to the proportional full screen view which looks like this:

Notice that the collapse button on the video control bar (bottom) is the same in both images. Tapping this element will return to the in-situ video where you may continue watching or stop the video and resume reading text. The expander buttons at the top have a different function. The one on the leftmost image expands to the non-proportional full-screen image on the right. The one on the rightmost image returns the full screen proportional video on the left.

All of these views need to be checked in order to assure that your audience is seeing the video as you intend. Fortunately, the algorithms that Apple uses to scale video in these widely different environments is very good. If you start with high quality source at 1280x720 and then export using the iPod preset, you will likely be satisfied with all of these views.

Influencing EPUB Version 3

2010-12-24T13:44:00.000-08:00

As we know, the EPUB standard is being revised to version 3. It's on a fast track (approval expected Q3 2011) and the 14 point charter is ambitious. In addition to danger, change also presents opportunity.

Apple is among those who have an interest in shaping that change and they have been overtly busy with the iBooks.app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch as well as the iBookstore that supports that app. Apple has also been busy in the background. Among the many things that Apple is doing that are just out of view for most of the general public is what I believe can only be characterized as a concerted effort to influence the evolution of version three of the EPUB standard.

Although Apple claims to follow the EPUB standard, they have recently introduced features supported in the iBooks app that do not conform to the current standard. Conforming EPUB files play just fine in iBooks but these new, super, EPUBs do things in iBooks that haven't been possible before, especially on mobile devices.

Using the HTML 5 [video] and [audio] tag was the first, simple but dramatic move. This has been followed by other features that require rather sophisticated Javascript coding such as the recent implementation of "fully illustrated books" in iBooks 1.2 that open graphic and tabular information in a new window that overrides the conventional ePub "flowed" text format in favor of full-screen display, even in landscape mode.

Deconstructing these super ePub files reveals important insights into both the iBooks app and Apple's EPUB strategy. Standard ePub files are but Zip archives containing text and image files. Those contained files evidence a striking similarity with the code of the web. Thus, eReaders are akin to web browsers, albeit very specialized ones. Apple has simply added Javascript and new HTML 5 constructs to the CSS, XHTML and so on found in conventional ePub files and interpreted by conventional eReaders. Rather than web-like, Apple's ePub files are web files, period. Similarly, the iBooks app is more of a modern HTML 5 web browser than an ePub eBook reader.

It has been pointed out that Apple isn't currently sharing how-to information on these techniques with medium to small publishers and self-publishers. I suspect that there's more that's not being shared. It may well be that Apple isn't yet sharing the tools to easily implement these features except with the chosen few. Why do I think that? Here is why:

Apple developers have access to tools and documentation that others do not. One of the tools recently released to Apple developers is the iAd Producer application. It looks like this:

What iAd Producer does is provide one with a drag and drop UI to assemble an interactive, animated display, an iAd. This iAd is actually an HTML 5 mini-web site. That is, a folder containing HTML, CSS, images, media and Javascript that any modern web browser will display properly because it is standards-based. This tool is only available to Apple developers.

Might there be a similar tool that is only available to the larger publishers? I don't know for sure but confirmation of the existence of such a tool would be unsurprising to me. It would be trivial. I think, to adapt what we see as iAd developer to an application that could be called iBook Developer. Nowadays, web and mobile technology are all converging toward HTML 5.

So, why is Apple out in front on this? Alan Kay, former Apple Fellow, said it this way in 1971: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." By putting out living examples of EPUB that human readers respond positively to, Apple is inventing the future. It is, thereby, also influencing the development of this key standard. Those who are working on the standard simply cannot ignore these events.

Apple is engaged in a very smart campaign that will benefit all those who create and read digital books as well as benefit Apple. Yet another example of "doing well by doing good."

New eBook Reader for The Internet Archive

2010-12-12T07:55:00.000-08:00

The Internet Archive has a new online eBook Reader with some very nice features such as the ability to share eBooks on your web site or via your blog. Here's an example:

Of course you can also download the eBook in ePub and other formats for reading on mobile and other devices, Here's a screenshot:

Read more about this at The Open Library Blog.

More Details on iTunes U Support for EPUB

2010-10-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

I've started sampling some of the ePub eBooks available via iTunes U. One of the technically more interesting ones so far is "The Restless Universe" from The Open University. What caught my eye in this textbook was the implementation of a simple interactive Q&A which uses a hyperlink to show the answer, presumably after the learner has written down what they think the answer is, workbook style. Many would consider this to be essential for eTextbooks.

The following screen shot illustrates this feature:

I believe that this is easily implemented in the Pages application (part of Apple's iWork suite of applications c. $77 education price) and will attempt to test that in the coming days.

Here are three iTunes U sites that were ready with ePubs at launch:

- Connexions - Open Textbooks
- The Open University - OpenLearn Course Material
- Oxford - Shakespeare's First Folio

What is currently supported:

For content providers:
˜ Uploading ePub files to a hosted iTunes U site
˜ Adding ePub via RSS to a feed-based iTunes U site

NOTE: The latter option is the most commonly used method in the University System of Georgia. Content is uploaded to the USG Podcasting Server which generates an RSS feed that can be used to populate a collection (aka course or channel) in iTunes U. This method enables faculty to disseminate content in other venues.

Here is an examples page showing the various options for sharing an entire channel or a single episode (aka lecture, lesson or item).

For end-users:
˜ Downloading ePub files from iTunes U to an iTunes client on Mac and PC
˜ Syncing downloaded ePub files from iTunes to iBooks on an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad
˜ Downloading ePub files, over the air, from iTunes U to iBooks on an iPad

Coming soon:
˜ Downloading ePub files, over the air, from iTunes U to iBooks on an iPod touch or iPhone (this will come later with iOS 4.2)

New! Support for EPUB in iTunes U

2010-10-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

On October 29, 2010, iTunes U administrators received the message shown in the screen shot below. It announces the fact that ePub-based eBooks may now be included in iTunes U collections (aka courses or channels) and items (aka lessons or episodes).

This is a very significant development as I argued back in April 2010 that it would be. Support for ePub in iTunes U provides faculty with an excellent vehicle for disseminating instructional materials in the form of ePub documents. These can range in size from 300-400 page textbooks to much smaller documents such as handouts or even syllabi.

We should also expect to see an upsurge in interest in applications that facilitate the creation of ePub documents and there are already many options to choose from. Apple's pages application added support for ePub as reported here back in August 2010. Pages and the iWork suite of which it is a part will undoubtedly become must have software.

Screencast: Creating and Publishing eBooks Using the ePub Standard

2010-10-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

My presentation was very well received and we were able to capture both the slides and presenter audio/video to produce this 54 minute screencast. I hope that you find it interesting and useful. One of three versions will be auto-selected for you depending upon the device that you are using (computer or mobile device with a good web browser and MPEG-4 video capability). The desktop computer version is quite large (1.13 GB) so may take a while to load enough data to play without interruption to the end if your bandwidth is limited.

This is also a good example of screencasting using the terrific ScreenFlow application from Telestream. The slideshow was captured on the presenter's MacOS X 10.6.x MacBook Pro laptop and the presenter audio and video were captured by a Canon DV cam and wireless mic (thanks to Blake Bridges of the Georgia Digital Innovation Group).

Insuring Playable Audio and Video in ePub

2010-09-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

With the Pages application (part of Apple's iWork suite), we can now easily include audio and video in our ePub-based eBooks. These advanced eBooks are viewable only in the iBooks application on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch but these iOS devices are selling like hotcakes so that's OK for now. The others will catch up eventually.

However, easy as it is to include audio and video in an ePub using Pages, we still have to exercise care in preparing these media files for our eBooks. It's is quite easy to create a video file that won't play back properly or at all and we don't want to inflict that kind of experience on our readers.

Obviously, Flash is out so we are talking about files that are in an MPEG-4 or QuickTime container. But that's not all. We also have to make sure that the CODEC used for the video track is H.264 and the CODEC used for the audio track is AAC. In addition to that, we must take care to keep the data rate, expressed in bits per second, below certain threshold values. Here, for example, are the technical specifications for the iPad. Read the sections on "Audio playback" and "TV and video" to get the general idea. No need to study or memorize these, just get the flavor and we'll move on.

These specifications are all aimed at accommodating the requirements of the firmware chips in most mobile devices that decompress and display video. Using dedicated and specialized firmware is far more efficient than decompressing video in software. This yields superior performance and a good video experience.

So, with all of these specifications, it should be easy to get things wrong, right? No, that's not the case. There are lots of virtually foolproof ways to make sure that the audio and video you include in an ePub file will play back properly in iBooks on an iOS device, currently the only venue where this kind of media can be played back in an ePub file.

There are two general scenarios that will determine how best to proceed: whether we are creating the media from scratch or repurposing extant media. Let's examine both cases.

Creating and exporting media from scratch. This is easiest scenario but has the most variations. If you are creating video with or without an audio track, always export using the iPhone preset (480x360 ). This will usually keep the data rate below one megabit per second which will perform very well on any iOS device. There are many applications that create video. Similarly, audio-only applications have iPhone presets. Here's a screencast medley of popular MacOS X apps that export video and audio that will be playable in the iBooks app on iOS devices.

Repurposing extant media. There are several good approaches to this task depending upon the characteristics of the source video. The general goal is to convert the source file into a 480x360 H.264/AAC file in an MPEG-4 or QuickTime container. Source files can be almost anything (Flash, DVD, Windows Media, AVI and so on) but you may need to extend your MacOS X system with extra QuickTime components in order to handle all of these. Here is a short list of the most important QuickTime components to add:

• Perian (free) Formats supported: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Flip4Mac WMV ($29) Formats supported: Windows Media video and audio

Here is a list of applications that are useful in repurposing non-MPEG-4 files to the proper iPhone specs:

Handbrake 0.9.4 (free) Converts DVDs to MPEG-4, including iPhone output.
Miro Video Converter 2.2 (free) Converts almost anything to MPEG-4, including iPhone output.
CosmoPod ($12) Downloads and converts YouTube and other Flash video to MPEG-4 iPhone output.
QuickTime X Player (free) Converts anything it can play (see components above) to iPhone format.
MacOS X Automator Movie Services (free) Converts andy QuickTime movie to iPhone format.

Here's a screencast medley of these applications at work repurposing video that will be playable in the iBooks app on iOS devices.

Rock Eagle Presentation: 39th University System Annual Computing Conference

2010-09-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

My proposal for a presentation to the 39th University System Annual Computing Conference entitled, "Creating and Publishing eBooks Using the EPUB Standard" has been accepted. This conference is not held in a hotel in some big city. Rather, it happens on the 1,452 acre Rock Eagle 4-H Center just outside Eatonton, Georgia. Here's the official site for the conference where you'll find all of the info on it that you might want.

Thus, I'll be holding forth on this topic for 45 minutes beginning at 8:30 AM on Thursday October 21 in the "International Paper 3" room. Not exactly the "Boom Boom" room but it will be a good experience I'm sure. Here is the abstract:

Creating eBooks using the EPUB standard is now within the grasp of faculty as well as any other subject matter expert with basic computer skills. Additionally, publishing eBooks for consumption by students and others on desktop. laptop and mobile devices will soon be a drag and drop operation. In addition to an overview of the eBook creation and publishing process, attendees will have access to a companion web site with links to in-depth information, tutorials and resources.

See you at the Rock!

Create ePub eBooks With the Pages Application (new feature)

2010-08-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

Apple's iWork Suite is composed of three applications: Pages, a word processor and page layout application, Keynote, a slide show app like Powerpoint and Numbers, a spreadsheet app like Excel. Microsoft Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc.) is also available to MacOS X users. The essential difference is that iWork is focused on elegance and ease-of-use whereas Microsoft Office is focused on power, cross-platform compatibility, feature parity and so on.

An update to the iWork suite late last week included a new export option for Pages. The Pages app can now export a document as an .epub file, the predominant standard for eBooks. While there have been other WYSIWYG editors for producing ePub documents such as Sigil and eCub, Pages is the first mainstream commercial application to support ePub export. What's more, Pages is somewhat ahead of the standard by enabling the inclusion of audio and video media in an ePub document.

In addition to the Pages update, Apple has provided this support page which describes a number of ePub best practices and includes a link to download a very helpful sample file that can be used as a template or a source from which the proper ePub styles may be imported. I used it as a template by saving that file with a different name and then replacing the content with my own.

The key to creating a properly formed ePub document is to select the appropriate Pages Section types (Title Page, TOC, Forward, Chapter, etc.) and use the appropriate Paragraph Styles as you insert the content.

Here's a brief tour of the Pages template showing how Sections and Paragraph Styles are used to define the structure (cover, TOC, chapters, etc.) of the exported ePub file. First, we look at the template as Apple provided it and then with a different file name and different content.

Publishing ePub-based eBooks via the iBookstore

2010-08-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

We've talked about publishing via RSS and via OPDS Catalogs but that is all about publishing unencumbered EPUB documents without payment to the author. While that may be your intent, there are other options. It is also possible to market an ePUb document and be compensated for that work. One attractive option is to use Apple's iBookstore which uses the agency model: you set the price and get 60% of all sales with Apple getting the remainder.

There are two basic approaches to using the iBookstore, doing all the work yourself or getting some help from an approved aggregator.

Your first step should be to acquaint yourself with the rules. They are simple and few in number. Go to iTunes Connect where you will see this :

... be sure to use the drop-down menu to choose "Books."
Here you'll see the requirements for submitting an eBook to the iBookstore.

The next two screenshots show the application and the info requested prior to uploading your .epub files. Of course it is essential that your book be exactly as you intend it to be. Involving an editor or at least other literate people as critical readers would be a wise move before uploading.

If this seems too much to bear, you always have that second option which is to involve an Apple-approved aggregator. For a small fee, these folks will handle most of what needs to be done. However, they generally do not support or market the book. That's your job and it can be a mighty challenge. There are lots of comments by other authors on this point so it's good to make an effort to find, read and consider the experience of others.

You'll want to investigate the requirements of each aggregator as they are not all the same. Smashbooks, for example, has a Style Guide that you should consult well ahead of time. Their style guide is an .epub file and they only accept manuscripts in the form of a Microsoft Word document. Smashwords also offers the option to publish via other venues in addition to the iBookstore.

Publishing ePub Documents via RSS

2010-08-09T05:47:00.000-07:00

An ePub document need not be a full length novel or textbook. It could well be a set of class notes, a handout, a monograph, or any other instructional support document. So, rapid and easy publishing of .epub files is of great interest to academics these days now that students have a wide variety of hardware and software that is optimized for reading the ePub format.

All one needs is access to a server with an RSS feed capability. In Georgia, all university system faculty have access to the USG Podcasting Server which is very easy to use and has the ability to dynamically generate RSS feeds. However, any standard web server can be used if you can create and maintain your own RSS feed, a simple text document that follows the RSS 2.0 Standard.

The following screencast will take you through the process of uploading an .epub file to the USG Podcasting Server, copying the subscription address to share with students and then follow the student path of subscribing to the RSS feed with the iTunes application and synchronizing those eBooks with a mobile device running Apple's iBooks application.

Note: If a student doesn't have an Apple device running the iBooks application, there are other options that we'll examine in an upcoming blog post covering the many ways there are to read an .epub file.

Publish ePub Documents From Your Desktop

2010-08-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Now that we can create ePub-based eBooks quickly and easily, our thoughts naturally turn to finding ways and means of publishing those digital books and other ePub documents. There are several options to consider so I'll take them on one at a time in successive blog posts. This post will deal with establishing an online catalog that enables remote access to your book collection. Depending upon who you share the address and optional password with, this could be just for your personal convenience or it could be where your students go to discover and acquire ePub documents (books, monographs, handouts, etc.) that you have made available to them.

A tool that can help us achieve this end is the free, cross-platform application called "Calibre." Calibre has many attributes such as managing your eBook library, converting eBooks, syncing to eBook reading devices, viewing eBooks and providing you with a content server for online access to your book collection. It is this last capability that we'll be focusing on here.

Calibre's content server is based upon the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS). Many eReader applications such as Stanza are capable of browsing an ODPS catalog by categories such as newest, title, ratings, publishers, series, authors, tags, etc. and then downloading selected items. The catalog can be password protected. Here's a screenshot of the server settings:

One thing that you'll want to be sure of is that you network administration has arranged for access via HTTP port 8080 or whatever other port you have configured the server to "listen" to for requests. There may be a firewall in place that would prevent that. If that is not possible, just use port 80 which is the default port for HTTP. If you can surf the web, port 80 is open and, so, this should work.

Here's a screen shot showing Stanza on iPad browsing an OPDS catalog:

It's also possible for Caliber to send eBooks and magazines via email. Here's the setup for that:

Create a Video eBook With MacOS X Services

2010-07-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

We continue our story of how a typical faculty person might create ePub documents with a more complex example. The screencast below will show and tell you how to create an ePub document with a video in it. Other media possibilities include static images and audio files.
Our example uses the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903). Not only do we have the text of the poem to share with students but we also have a video of the actor Sir Alan Bates reciting it. There is only one chapter in this example but there could just as well be any number of chapters, each with media and text.

You may want to download this ePub-based eBook, "side load" it into the iTunes application and synch to a device running the iBooks application (iPad, iPhone or iPod touch). If you find an eReader other than iBooks that will display this eBook properly, please let me know.

Create an ePub-based eBook Fast and Easy with MacOS X Services

2010-07-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

Following up on my last post, I wanted to talk about how a typical faculty person might quickly and easily create an ePub-based eBook just by selecting text and invoking an automated process on their desktop or laptop computer if that faculty person is fortunate enough to have a modern Macintosh computer.
I also wanted to show rather than describe how easy this can be so here's my first video screencast for this blog. I hope that each frame is worth 10,000 words to you.

You may want to download this ePub-based eBook, "side load" it into the iTunes application and synch to a device running the iBooks application (iPad, iPhone or iPod touch).

For the next episode, I'll try to show how a more complex eBook project would be done using this same Automator service so stay tuned.

iBooks.app Plays MPEG-4 Audio and Video Elements!

2010-07-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

Now that the iBooks application is available on the iPhone and iPod touch under iOS4 as well as on the iPad, ePub has just become that much more important. Just as it did with RSS, Apple is finding and implementing ways to extend that standard. Including MPEG-4 audio and video in the text of an ePub document is a recent example. To be sure, these ePub documents won't play on very many devices other than iPad, iPhone and iPod touch via the iBooks application. At least not yet.

The technique employed by Apple is a straightforward one. Using the HTML 5 audio and video tags, these new elements appear and play as the following screen shot images illustrate. The first example involves adding audio to Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice in Wonderland" which is now in the public domain. Here, we see the table of contents:

Then, as we click on Chapter 2, we see the audio playback controller:

In another ePub title, we can see how video becomes a part of the ePub document. Here's the table of contents:

Clicking on Chapter 2, we see both chapters two and three, each with a video to accompany the text.

Clicking the "play" icon, the various control mechanisms appear. These quickly fade until a tap on the video brings them back.

Here's a closeup. Note the full screen option:

And here's the full screen view with controls visible. These controls also quickly fade until a tap on the video brings them back.

So there we are, audio and video in an ePub document and playing on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. We should note the fact that this is not necessarily exclusive to Apple products. HTML 5, MPEG-4 and ePub are all open standards. Anyone building an eReader device or application should be able to follow Apple's lead.

You can check this out yourself by subscribing to my eBooks test channel and downloading these two examples. Look for these titles: "Video in ePub" and "Audio in ePub." Using a desktop or laptop computer, click here to subscribe.

Using this method, the eBooks will show up in both the Podcast and Books libraries in the iTunes application. The Podcast Library listing will look something like this:

The Books Library will look something like this:

New eBooks should be selected for synchronization by default but it is a good idea to check. Here's what that should look like in the iTunes app:

Now that we know that it can be done and that broad audiences can actually experience what we create, the next question is, "How do I do that?" I'll cover that in a future blog so stay tuned and keep those cards and letters coming.

The Ibis Reader on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch) and Other Devices

2010-06-27T06:58:00.000-07:00

Ibis Reader is a very capable on-line eBook reader that uses HTML 5, an emerging new standard for web sites and web-based services. Thus, Ibis Reader requires an HTML 5-compliant web browser. Fortunately, most modern browsers on desktop, laptop and even "smart" mobile devices are largely HTML 5-compliant. HTML 5 enables the Ibis Reader to blur the distinction between cloud-based and native applications, especially on certain mobile devices where network connectivity may not always be fast enough or might not be available at all.

To follow along, point mobileSafari (or other webkit-based mobile browser) at: http://m.ibisreader.com and then, on Apple iOS devices, create a web clip so that this web app is presented in full screen mode (eliminates browser UI elements) and is easier to access later on. If you are using an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or an Android phone, you'll be asked to permit the creation of a local database of up to 50 MB in size. Desktop/laptop readers will want to use: http://ibisreader.com.

Ibis Reader provides an encouraging answer to those would-be eBook authors who ask, "If I create an eBook in ePub format, who will be able to read it?" That answer is, "Anyone with Internet access and an HTML 5 web browser." Of course, many will have other software and hardware options as well and they may well prefer them for one reason or another but Ibis Reader has the widest reach of all and that may be critical for many authors. Being a web application, Ibis Reader can be used on any desktop, laptop or netbook computer and on many mobile devices including the wildly popular Apple lineup of iPad, iPhone and iPod touch and any of the Android phones.

Among the many benefits of HTML 5 is Local Storage which benefits iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android phones by enabling the download of entire eBooks to a local SQL Lite database on the device. This makes it possible for these devices to retrieve and present the Ibis Reader web app plus the full text of one or more eBooks without being connected to a network at all. Previously, this is what differentiated native apps from web apps. The web app could not run without a network whereas the native app could. This is now no longer the case.

Native apps still have some advantages over web apps in the areas of rich media and interactivity. However, even these may go away as the work beginning the next iteration of the ePub standard gets underway. More on this in a later post.

Rapid Development of iPad-optimized Web Applications

2010-06-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Here's something that I picked up at Academix 2010. It's a way for for folks who have no coding chops whatsoever to quickly and easily build iPad-optimized web apps from text, images and video that they collect. The presentation I got this from was delivered by Sal Soghoian who is the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple, Inc. Fortunately for us, he's developed a companion web sited called Padilicious where you can read all about it and download all of the materials you'll need to learn how to generate iPad-optimized web applications in minutes.

This method takes advantage of several MacOS X technologies (AppleScript, Automator and Services) so you'll need a modern Mac running MacOS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) or later. What you'll be downloading from Padilicious and using is an automated workflow that requires zero HTML coding expertise. If you can select text and find/select files on your computer, you have all the necessary skills to create iPad web apps.

So what is a web app? A web app is a web site that looks and operates very much like a native application for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch). If you create a web clip of this site on your iPad (instructions here), it will operate in full screen mode so none of the usual web browser controls are seen making it look even more like a native application.

With these Automator Actions and Services installed, creating a web app is a simple matter of selecting text, optionally selecting an image, an audio file or a movie and then invoking the service and using a forms like interface to choose various options.

So far, there are two automated workflows:

1) Create Single-page Web App
EXAMPLES (click on thumbnail images in rightmost column)

2) Create iPad Photo Web App.
EXAMPLES (click on thumbnail images in rightmost column)

To fully appreciate the examples, use an iPad, load the web site, create a web clip for it and then revisit the site using the web clip icon.

Feel free to post your iPad web apps here in the comments. I'd love to see them.

Can eBooks be Podcast?

2010-05-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

The question of whether eBooks, eTexts, eHandouts and so on can be published as podcasts is an important one for educators, especially if their students are using the iTunes application, if they are using iTunes U to help deliver courseware or if they are involved at all in mLearning. Of course, we are talking about eBooks that are free because there are ample means for distributing eBooks that are not free. In the case of the new iPad, there is the iBookstore although I have not yet found a school textbook for sale there surely that's just a matter of time.

The iBookstore is currently only available via the iBooks.app on the iPad but we will see an iBooks.app for the iPhone and iPod touch as soon as iPhone OS 4.0 is released this summer. Then, too, there are many titles found in the iBookstore that are in the public domain and free. It appears that Apple has taken good advantage of the work of the Gutenberg project. All of these eBooks are in the ePub format which appears to be the de facto standard.

Thus, we're not so concerned about books that are free, in the public domain and have been digitized by Project Gutenberg or books that are not free. What we are concerned with are those free, ePub-based text books, handouts, reprints, and other documents that university faculty might want to assign to their students to read on one of these mobile devices or even on a larger, not-so-mobile computer.

Right now, we can give a qualified "yes" to this question. Here's how it works. Simply include .epub files in the RSS feed that you create for a podcast channel using same conventions that you've been using for .mp3, .mp4, mov, .m4a, .m4b, .m4v and .pdf files. The only thing that will be different is the suffix on attached files. That will be .epub.

Here's what will happen. When you subscribe to this channel using iTunes.app 9.1.1 or newer, the .epub files will become available for download according to the prefs that you've set in iTunes.app. Once downloaded, you will see these .epub files referenced in both the Podcast Library and the Books Library of the iTunes.app. Synchronizing with an iPad, those .epub documents will be placed on the shelf in the iBooks app and identified as a podcast in the list view. Ditto for iPhones and iPod touch devices with iPhone OS 4.0 (summer 2010). All of the features of the iBooks application such as bookmarking will be available as your students read these ePub-based documents.

Important caveat. Currently, iTunes U does not accept the .epub suffix in an RSS feed so if you try to subscribe to a podcast channel via the iTunes U RSS Tab feature, it will fail. However, I expect that this restriction will be lifted once all Apple mobile devices have their own iBooks application. That should be this summer.

To see this in action, subscribe to my eBook Test Channel.

Wither the Interactive eBook?

2010-05-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

With the ePub standard for eBooks rather firmly in place, the discussion has turned to what happens next. Many are curious about how interactive digital publications (eBook, eText, eMag, ePamphlet, etc.) might be implemented. Will they be implemented as iPhone OS applications that can only be experienced on Apple mobile devices (iPad, iPhone or iPod touch)? Will they be implemented with some future iteration of the ePub standard? Or will they be implemented in some other way?

The fact that the ePub standard really doesn't support interactivity leads some to settle upon applications as the way to go. Concerned with being restricted to Apple mobile devices and the much higher costs of participation of the app model, others have talked-up the possibilities of extending the ePub standard to include greater interactivity. DRM, by the way, can be applied to either of these options but experience has already shown that these protections can be defeated just as easily.

There is a third alternative that isn't getting much attention right now. I'll call it "Hyper Lit" for want of a better label. It's already here and living amongst us. We are not talking about this new alternative yet simply because we don't recognize it as a potential solution to this challenge. HyperLit is hidden in plain sight. That technology is nothing more than HTML 5 poured into new containers.

Take a look at the developer docs for iTunes LP and iTunes Extras at: http://www.apple.com/itunes/lp-and-extras/ It's nothing more than HTML, CSS and Javascript in a folder that has been zipped and given a new suffix, either .itlp or .ite. The evidence that anyone can create this kind of interactive experience is here: http://ituneslp.net/ Note that .itlp and .ite files can be side-loaded into iTunes with drag & drop and that action totally circumvents the iTunes Store. No money changes hands.

Now imagine these containers holding interactive educational content. That package of content might have an identifying suffix such as .itlo (iTunes Learning Object) or .itlm (iTunes Learning Module). Further down the road, we can imagine these new media types being a part of an RSS feed (podcast channel episodes) handled by aggregators such as the iTunes application.

The application model will appeal to those who own or can rent the significant means of production required. It provides great flexibility in arranging interactive experiences and the illusion of protection from piracy. It also adds a measure of exclusivity which helps customers part with their money more easily. We can call this the monetized model for digital interactive reading experiences. Note that apps can be free to the consumer where the costs of production have been paid by some other, possibly eleemosynary, entity.

The ePub-based eBook model will appeal to those who concentrate upon providing a linear experience. Commercial interests will add DRM to "protect" the content from piracy and others will forego that option and rely instead on Creative Commons licensing or similar mechanisms. Depending upon the presence of DRM, we can call this either the monetized model for digital linear reading experiences or the open model for digital linear reading experiences. Since the cost of production using the ePub standard is very low, ePub-based models will be widely used.

The fledgeling HyperLit model will appeal to those who want to provide an open interactive reading experience. HyperLit documents will provide faculty and students with ways and means to talk about complex ideas with text, audio, video and animation, cite online sources and even initiate online dialog amongst the readers of a document. After all, a HyperLit document is basically a locally viewed web site using the file:/// scheme.

Thus, the digital reading experience will likely be available to us in several flavors, the traditional linear experience and new, interactive ways of engaging content. How these new interactive approaches to the reading experience get sorted out will be interesting to watch, especially in educational circles. There are lots of contenders. Not all will survive but it is equally likely that no one option will predominate. The need for open content on the one hand and the need for economic viability on the other are too great.

As for the reading experience itself, there are some interesting views already coming to the fore. Although focused exclusively on the novel, I found these two opinion pieces by Michael Grothaus to be interesting:

Dear John Makinson and Penguin, please don't "reinvent" books.

A tale of two mediums: Despite the iPad, traditional books aren't going anywhere.

Visualizing Apple's Mobile Devices

2010-05-02T15:39:00.000-07:00

It can be quite difficult to talk about what happens on a computer screen using words alone. Thus, many writers will use screenshots to help make a point. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Unfortunately, many of the things that happen on a computer screen are dynamic in nature and still images just don't capture that. Enter screencasting where we record what happens on a computer screen as a video file, often with audio narration. Thus, it has become standard practice to use screencasting as a way to talk about computer applications and share computer-based presentations. Running screencasting software on a mobile device is currently inadvisable because there simply isn't enough CPU power to do so.

Working around this limitation is possible and there are several approaches to consider. I've attempted to use most of them. Thus, the following is offered so that others won't have to start out at square one as I did.

There are many fine screencasting applications for desktop and laptop computers. I use ScreenFlow for all of my screencasting ($99). It requires MacOS X 10.5 or later. On Windows, you can do much the same thing using Camtasia ($299). Both of these vendors offer lots of helpful info on their web sites. ScreenFlow has a dedicated site for that called The Screening Room.

With either of these products, you can record anything that appears on screen and do a lot of fancy post-processing to zoom, pan, add text and graphic elements and so on. Thus, the challenge is to get an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to make an appearance on your screen. Here are several ways to do that, all require a MacOS X computer:

1) If all you need to do is show how the iPhone handles a web site or web application, iPhoney is hard to beat. This application reproduces the behavior of the Safari web browser on your laptop or desktop so you can use ScreenFlow to capture all the action and go from there.

2) The iPhone simulator in the iPhone SDK will provide you with an iPad simulator as well as an iPhone simulator. The SDK is free but you have to sign up as an Apple developer (also free) at:
http://developer.apple.com/programs/ To simulate more than what Safari does, you have to have the source code for each application and be able to use the XCode compiler. Apple doesn't provide the source code for the apps it develops so that's all beyond our reach.

3) The most flexible solution is to jailbreak your iPod touch or iPhone (difficult and bound to earn frowns from Steve Jobs). Here's where to get help in doing this: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/ Once your iPod touch or iPhone is opened up in this way, you'll have an app called Cydia for installing other apps. Then go here: http://screensplitr.com/demogod/ and learn how to download and use DemoGod for your Mac and ScreenSplitr for your iDevice.

This will get you the broadest, most flexible representation of your iDevice on your screen both for capture and for live demonstration. However, you'll find that the frame rate is not high enough for really smooth and realistic action. This is most noticeable when showing video playing on an iDevice.

The other thing that you won't see fully represented is an indication of the touch gestures. I am currently thinking through how best to handle this, with a literal image such as would be available with PhoneFinger or something less obscuring but still meaningful such as animated fingerprints.

Finally, I should mention what is probably the simplest and most effective approach, use a mid to high end document camera (c. $1200) with digital output to your computer and capture that. Other than the cost, this approach has the verisimilitude required for top notch educational visualizations.

Of course you could do what Apple does and use pro hand models and videographers who really know lighting and all that stuff. It will be expensive.

Why iTunes U Needs to Support the .epub file Format

2010-04-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

With the advent of the iPad and other mobile devices that support eBook readers, the eBook is enjoying a renaissance. The most widely adopted eBook format is the ePub open standard. There is now a well-established ePub eco-system comprised of software tools for creating and maintaining eBooks as well as a wide variety of devices for reading them. Of great interest in academia is the fact that much of the software needed to create, transform, convert and manage .epub files is free. This will become ever more important as educators rely more and more on digital content.

Thus, I can create .epub files using free, cross-platform software and students can consume that content using a variety of mobile and not-so-mobile devices. Using an iPad, for example, my students would simply drag the .epub files that I provide into the Books library of the iTunes application and then synch with the iPad. I could simply post those .epub files to my Faculty Web Server account for download.

However, as an academic using iTunes U, I am very eager to learn whether and how eBooks can be distributed using the same podcasting model as is now used by iTunes U to distribute audio, video and PDF files. The advantages of offering content via podcasting over simple file services are many, including being able to more easily restrict access, use subscription to schedule delivery of content over the semester timeline and extending the benefits of content aggregation (automated organization) to my students.

Although we frequently think about eBooks as novel-length tomes, the format will also support shorter works such as a textbook chapters, assignments, journal articles and the like. An eText and supplementary content could be delivered in serialized form throughout the semester. The problem, right now, is that neither the iTunes application nor iTunes U will handle files carrying the .epub suffix. This is a decision that only Apple can take but we can certainly lobby for it and I think that we should. I mention this to anyone at Apple who will listen and I have also signed up for a free developer account so that I can submit "enhancement requests" via bugreport.apple.com

The End of Free Ning -- What does it mean for other free services?

2010-04-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Ning is, or was, a free service that many interested in education have used to create social networks. From their web site:

Ning is the social platform for the world's interests and passions online. Millions of people every day are coming together across Ning to explore and express their interests, discover new passions, and meet new people around shared pursuits.

Ning's Jason Rosenthal, who has been their CEO for a month, announced the end of free services this week. The knee jerk response to this event is to say, "This is what you get when you place yourself in the hands of proprietary services."

Of course some will try to apply this generalization to iTunes U, the iTunes Store Podcast Directory and other free services painting them all with the same very wide brush. Is there a difference and, if so, what is it and why should we expect a different outcome?

I think that the difference is not simply the fact that Apple is profitable but that what Apple does for free actually generates income, albeit indirectly. The iTunes Store, the part where you pay for stuff, is not a big profit center. They do slightly better than break even. This is also true of the MacOS and application software such as iWork, Final Cut etc.

All of these free and low margin products generate sales of Apple hardware and that’s where the profit margins are very healthy. They are a hardware company. Apple dominates (90%) the market for computers that cost more than $1,000. They dominate the portable media player market with the iPod and are well on their way toward dominating the mobile phone and mobile computer markets with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

So “free” can be fraught with danger but that risk can also be managed by making intelligent and well informed choices about which free things you predicate your programs upon. I see iTunes U and the larger Apple ecosystem that makes it possible as a much lower risk than Ning and other services that have to stand on their own and deliver profits to shareholders.

The Ethicist on downloading a pirated eBook that you "own."

2010-04-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Responding to a reader question about the ethics of downloading a pirated eBook after having purchased the same title as a physical book, Randy Cohen, writing in the online New York Times Magazine, concludes that it is OK saying, "Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod." Entitled "E-Book Dodge," the author points out that although this behavior is ethical it is also illegal.

This piece was widely quoted in online blogs and elsewhere but few commenters seemed troubled about the idea that something can be both ethical and illegal at the same time. I'm not questioning whether this is the case because obviously it is if you agree with Cohen's reasoning. My question is whether both assertions should be true. When the law condemns ethical behavior, something is wrong with the law and that should be changed.

Commercial entities are simply acting normally when they seek to leverage any and all means to maximize profit. Thus, it is quite natural for them to seize upon copyright law as one way to achieve this end. They will interpret copyright law in self-serving fashion, they will attempt to convince law enforcement and the general public of the correctness of their position and they will lobby for statutes that further reinforce their interpretation. This is the nature of the beast.

There are countervailing forces. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation draw upon the support of those who understand that society in general and they in particular would be harmed if commercial interpretations of copyright law were not challenged at every opportunity. The larger question, then, is whether the ratio favors the whole of society or some oligopoly or another. As the Internet becomes more and more central to the lives and fortunes of more people, the importance of this question will rise.

Scholarship and the DRM'd eTextBook

2010-04-08T10:09:00.000-07:00

With the discovery that DRM'd ePub volumes attempt to disallow quoting via copy and paste, one hoped-for advantage of eTextbooks over their physical cousins seems to be in doubt, at least for commercially published eTextBooks that are sure to be 'protected' with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. On the recently released iPad, text copied from a DRM's ePub volume cannot be copied and pasted directly into a writing application such as Pages.

Of course, innovative folks have already conjured up a workaround.reported here

... that kinda, sorta works. But why should this be necessary? Whose priorities trump all others?

Traditionally, writing a paper and quoting from various sources inevitably involved transcription, just like Monks of old. There simply wasn’t another way.

With the dawn of the digital era, it became possible to use a digital scanner and Optical Scanning Recognition (OCR) software to produce machine readable text and illustrations that could be re-purposed in academic and other writing. Better but still not a boon to students without access to expensive gear. They were still mired in ancient scholarly bogs.

Now that we have eBooks and eTexts and eJournals and wonderful, magical devices to read them on, one would think that the scholarly life would ease-up a bit but noooooooo, the commercial interests will have none of that. The doctrine of presumptive guilt means that scholars will continue to be consigned to ancient monastic transcription rather than the liberation of copy and paste. That, of course, will come at the cost of less time invested in developing their higher order thinking skills.

Quoting excerpts from a book for the purpose of criticism or for scholarly purposes has long been protected as a fair use in US and international law. DRM places an unnecessary and unwarranted tax upon the exercise of these rights, especially in this digital era where there are better options than tedious and error-prone transcription.

The tragedy here is that DRM doesn't prevent the kind of copyright infringement that threatens a publisher's profitability. Those wholesale pirates will have their way regardless. Only scholarship will suffer.

The iPad: Could this be important to education?

2010-04-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

I've been researching the iPad since before it was announced (talk about faith or blind hope). I've read all the speculation that came out prior to the announcement. I've read all the analysis and commentary that came out after the announcement but before the release on 4/3/2010. I'm still pedaling as fast as I can. Version 3.3 of the iPhone OS, the one the iPad uses, is downloading as I type this. That will provide me with the iPad simulator. Yeah, that's right, I don't yet have one in my hands.

When I do get my hands on one I'll be like the fellow who jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions. WaaaaHoooooo !

I suspect that the iPad will be pointed to by future historians as a watershed event in educational computing. How this will play out is less clear. A few of the things I'll be looking closely at are:

o The replacement of physical textbooks with eTexts. If the commercial interests have their way which seems likely. we'll have old wine in new bottles (yawn). On the other hand, there will be the opportunity to radically change the cost, content and logistics of textbooks in K-12 and higher education. That would be exciting.

o The challenge to institutionalized education where the proposition that one could learn all they need to know in grades K-(some number less that 12) in order to become a fully independent learner. Will higher education become irrelevant as David Wiley recently predicted or will it rise to the occasion and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? HINT: Credentialing won't save higher education, Microsoft and Cisco are already doing that quite well, thank you very much.

Stay tuned for future thoughts on these themes.

Language from Letters to Video, Patent Pending

2010-03-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

It used to be that human communication was limited to the range of one's voice. Writing changed that and the ripples of this innovation are still expanding outward. Initially, any literate person could write to others using paper and pen. Transcending death itself, these letters could be quite persistent but were still limited in range. Gutenberg's press and its successors extended the range of human communication to potentially include all other literate persons on planet Earth. However, the ability to print words and distribute them in the form of books, magazines etc. was in the hands of only a few and subject to various limitations ranging from qualitative filtering to outright censorship. Finally, the desktop (computer) publishing and Internet revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s made it possible for anyone to print and distribute their words on a worldwide basis. The constraints upon written communication may have been minimized as much as they possibly can.

Still, the audience had to be somewhat literate. Without universal literacy, written communications may have reached their limit.

Enter video. Thanks again to the computer and internet revolutions, we have a method of communication that is not constrained by literacy. Some video doesn't even require spoken language to make a point. Where spoken language is required, the fact that video can have multiple, selectable language tracks seems a better, less costly solution than printing books in multiple languages. Not even Esperanto could save us from the Tower of Babel incident but perhaps some day we will have a universal spoken language.

So video may be seen as a more powerful and more universal medium of communication. That's the good part. The bad part is that, unlike our written and spoken languages, video may not be entirely unencumbered. I'm ignoring the fact that some font faces are encumbered by copyright because there are plenty that are not and there is no compelling reason to choose one over the other in written communications.

The composition and publishing of video necessarily entails compression and decompression and that requires software called a CODEC. Video also requires a container format examples of which include MPEG-4, Ogg, QuickTime, Flash, Silverlight and so on. Thus, all Internet video is some combination of container and CODEC(s). It's mostly the CODECs that are encumbered by patents and this is the focus of our concern about open and unfettered communication in the Internet video age.

Recognizing the fact that using video was a complicated process involving web browser plug-ins that present stability and security hazards as well as multiple lines of complex code, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sought to make video as simple to use as including a still image. The first major upgrade to the HTML standard in more than ten years, HTML 5, presented the perfect opportunity to do just that.

Not only does the HTML 5 video element simplify including video in a web page, it also eliminates the need for video plug-in or 'helper' applications such as Flash, the QuickTime Plug-in and Silverlight. Web browser plug-ins are a continuing source of performance issues(slowdowns and even crashing) and security threats. The HTML 5 video element promised to make it possible for more people to use video to communicate and to help their audiences as well.

However, the key piece to this scheme involved web browsers standardizing on a single video CODEC and container. The two main contenders for this were and still are: a) MPEG-4/H.264 (video)/AAC (audio) and b) Ogg/Theora (video) /Vorbis (audio). Unfortunately, the W3C group working on the video element, unable to agree on one, specified neither. The unresolved issue was not about open standards. Both options are open standards. The unresolved issue was about patents. No one argues that H.264 is patent-free, not even in the face of MPEGLA's recent announcement that it would not charge royalties for Internet video that is free to end users through 2016. Proponents of Ogg claim that it is patent-free. However, there is significant skepticism surrounding that claim.

Work-arounds have been developed such as the Google code cited below but the originally intended simplicity and elegance have eluded us. Worse, there is the prospect of having to pay directly or indirectly for the privilege of communicating with video. Imagine if we faced that prospect with words in the form of text on a web page? The time for governments to review and rescind copyright and patents for software may be at hand. What do you think?

References:
Dive Into HTML 5: Video on the Web
Daring Fireball (John Gruber): Why the HTML 5 'Video' Element is Effectively Unusable, Even in Browsers that Support It.
Brian Crescimanno: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML 5 Video!
MPEGLA: MPEG LAs AVC License Will Continue Not to Charge Royalties for Internet Video that is Free to End Users
WC3: HTML5 Video Element
Daring Fireball (John Gruber): GIF, H.264 and Patents
Daring Fireball (John Gruber): On Submarine Patents vis-a-vis H.264 and Ogg Theora
Google: HTML Video and Audio for Everyone

Disincentives to Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

2010-03-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

There is a symbiotic relationship between use and availability, a cycle than tends up or down depending upon the inputs to both of those variables.

In higher education, we have long seen use by faculty who find educational technologies inherently interesting and are not hampered by worries about maintaing artificial scarcity of knowledge (the DeBeers model). That has spurred some increases in availability of open learning resources.

However, the problem is that these faculty are a small proportion of the cadre of instruction in higher education. What keeps the majority from getting more involved? It's a failure of leadership in higher education that is at the root of this stagnation. There are two things that HE administrators and faculty (via shared governance) should be doing that most of them are not:

1) Making sure that reaching out is not only permitted but rewarded. Here, the focus is on P&T (promotion and tenure) but there are other factors such as an institutional mindset that its survival is somehow linked to maintaining a false sense of scarcity. Credentialing is a part of this.

2) Making sure that reaching out is possible. Here, we are talking about helping faculty garner the skills necessary to developing and publishing content in an open and unfettered fashion, collaborating and cooperating with others on content projects that are beyond the abilities of solitary work.

Whether or when that will happen is well beyond my ken but I do believe that these steps are essential prerequisites.

Is the iPhone OS closed? (Part Two)

2010-03-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

I think that it's way too soon to evaluate the content creation capability of the iPad. Already, we've seen amazing creations from iPhone users in the arts. As for letters, I was impressed to see this video showing how one person has achieved 90 WPM with just two thumbs.

Certainly, creating content on touch-oriented devices will be different and possibly better, especially for non-professional content creators, aka the average learner. We should keep our minds open at least until these things are actually in the wild and applications for them are in use, getting reviewed, etc.

The assumption that LMS use will be tied to "native" iPhone OS apps is clearly wrong in the case of the recently announced Moodle iPhone app. That is a web app, not a native app. Native apps are good for two things: monetizing a product or service and, with native apps that are free, providing a richer feature set than is currently possible with web apps. With an LMS, lock-in has already occurred (even with free, open source LMSs) so that's not very relevant in this case.

A more accurate view is to look at the iPhone OS as having attributes that are attuned to commercial models and attributes that are or could be attuned to non-commercial models (web apps, ePub support, and podcasting). How teachers and learners mix and match these will be interesting to observe.

That Apple is just another corporation seeking to maximize profits should not be a surprise to anyone. In the underfunded world of education, we are, as we must be, pragmatically opportunistic and take advantage of what is within reach. Given that decentralized learning is unlikely to be fully funded by any mixture of learner and government payments, we must deal with the commercial world making every effort to convince them that they can "do well by doing good." Apple seems to understand that and has long offered more support to education than their low margin competitors.

Even if decentralized learning were fully funded by governments and learners themselves, we have to ask what kind of systems would that bring forth. Too bad the Soviet Union is no longer existing. They would certainly make the answer to that question quite plain to see. Just imagine a Soviet-engineered mobile learning device and supporting infrastructure

Is the iPhone OS closed? (Part One)

2010-03-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

Many in the edublogosphere have dismissed the iPad as being "closed" and therefore not suitable for the pursuit of open educational objectives such as creating a Personal Learning Space (PLS) on the internet made from Open Educational Resources (OERs). Thus, the question becomes, "Is the iPhone OS so closed as to be incompatible with the ideals and goals of open education?"

The main complaint appears to be about the closed nature of the iPhoneOS ecosystem where devices such as the iPhone, iPod touch and, now, the iPad are fed by the iTunes Content Management System which includes the iTunes Store for Music and Video, the iTunes App Store and, now, the iTunes Book Store.

Since Apple is not an eleemosynary concern, we should expect an emphasis on the commercial aspects of all this. Making life and consumption safe and easy for customers is certainly consistent with that status. Equally unsurprising is that geeks who like to tinker with everything, Libertarians and other kindred spirits are rankled by all of these constraints. Which camp is the more numerous and profitable? But is that all there is to it?

Smart capitalists also understand the "economics of free" and how "doing well by doing good" can improve the bottom line. Apple gets these concepts very well and that is why Apple has maintained non-commercial avenues for content production, discovery and distribution. Hundreds of thousands of podcasts are free via the iTunes Store podcast directory. Apple supports iTunes U which is free to any higher education institution and many other public information sources. Apple has a long history of supporting educators in their work with sites such as the Apple Learning Interchange.

Thus, I expect that these kinds of things from Apple will continue and expand. It's good business for them.

Unlike the iPhone, the iPad is aimed at a new category and Apple hasn't revealed to the world everything that we need to know in order to properly assess its importance or irrelevance to teaching, learning and other things. Right now, we know more about the iPad commercial model than we know about its corresponding non-commercial model and it's the latter that will likely be more important in education.

We know that the iBooks app and iTunes Book Store will be based upon the open ePub standard. What we don't know is how much of that standard will be supported. There's a lot to ePub beyond plain text. We also don't know whether there will be free books in the iTunes Book Store or not or whether books will be reviewed by Apple, someone else or not at all. Although eTexts will probably also be done with ePub, we don't yet have confirmation of that nor do we know how eZines and eNews will be done though I suspect that these will be apps that use in-app purchasing to acquire single issues or commit to multi-issue subscriptions.

The big unknown, IMO, is what the non-commercial counterparts of eBooks, eTexts, eZines and eNews will be like. How will they be produced, discovered and consumed? The podcasting model would seem to me to be a natural fit. If they were all done as ePub documents, these would be just one more new podcast media type. There are other possibilities, especially for eZines and eNews (including newsletters) that I would like better than ePub but this is hard to discuss when we don’t know how Apple will address these things.

The fact is that we know too little about how new content for iPhoneOS devices will be created, discovered and consumed, especially the non-commercial varieties that are so important to educators. Thus, our assessments are premature and sorely lacking.

Can iPads in K-12 be Self-financing?

2010-03-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

The question is whether and how the iPad might be funded by shifting the cost of things like textbooks and computer labs.

Textbooks. If eTexts were available for free or at very low cost, could the money saved be used to maintain a program that provides teachers and students with mobile devices such as the iPod touch and iPad loaded with equivalent eTexts and free eText readers such as Stanza and iBooks? This raises a few related questions:

Where would free and very inexpensive eTexts come from? There is a standard called ePub that is widely accepted and supported by free readers such as Stanza and iBooks. As well, there are free software apps that make authoring, converting and even serving ePub documents very easy such as Sigil and Calibre. So, could classroom teachers write eTexts that could replace the physical textbooks now in common use? What institutional support would be required? Release time? Extra compensation? Royalties?

How do we identify the classroom teachers that have the content expertise and writing skills necessary to create eTexts? Could a group of teachers collaboratively write an eText? Presumably, all experienced classroom teachers have the appropriate content expertise. As well, those same teachers are probably well grounded in the state standards that guide the curriculum throughout. So, the major variable is writing skill. Can that be taught and learned? Do we need editors and, if so, where do they come from? Are we talking about establishing a guild of teacher/writers?

Some will worry, "What about copyrights?" So, what is it about textbooks that is copyrightable? As it turns out, not much. Facts and ideas are NOT copyrightable. It's only the unique expression of an idea that is copyrightable. Illustrations, audio and video clips? There's tons of stuff in the public domain and in various open content archives under Creative Commons licensing. The Internet Archive is but one example. However, the nagging question of whether educators are too self-censoring to venture forth may be important. If it is a factor, how can it be overcome?

Now, assuming we still want to move in this direction, what technologies might help individual and collaborative groups of teachers writing and editing eTexts? Is this a Web 2.0 opportunity?

On to computer labs. Most of the ideas behind computer labs in schools are focused on addressing economic issues having to do with the fact that not all students can afford a computer and not all schools can afford a 1:1 program issuing a laptop to every student. Is it time to rethink this? If we could provide every student with an iPad or iPod touch, would we still need as many or even any computer labs. What does the cloud computing model offer us in this quest?

Finally, what is the average annual cost of textbooks and computer labs on a per student basis? If foregoing that cost enough to support an eText project, 1:1 mobile device program and requisite professional development? Is it more than enough, just enough, almost enough? If there is an anticipated shortfall, how might the difference be made up?

The ePub standard and the iPad

2010-03-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

Certainly, there's much more info to come on ePub for the iPad. Here are the questions that are important to me as an academic researching emerging educational technologies:

1) While it's nice to know that I can bring .epub volumes into iTunes and subsequently synch them to an iPad, I'd really like to know about all the options for getting them into the iTunes.app. Drag and drop into a yet-to-be-seen "Books" Library in the iTunes.app seems minimal. So, what else? How about podcasting? I can already podcast audio, enhanced audio, video and PDF files so why not simply add .epub to the list of podcastable file types? This would make sense because podcasting is the mechanism for resource discovery and distribution used by Apple's iTunes U. An iTunes course containing eBooks or eTexts in the ePub format seems quite natural to me.

2) Will Apple enhance the ePub standard? They did this with RSS for the iTunes app and iTunes U, so why not here as well? Extensions to the ePub standard would only work on iPad and be ignored elsewhere. Extensions would add functionality such as bookmarking, marginal notes and so on. Is Apple planning to do this? It would make sense if they are as that would be a boon to self-publishing teachers and learners.

3) Yes, there's more to this than simply tapping into the Gutenberg Project and reading books in the public domain. The ePub standard makes it possible for anyone to publish without the intermediation of commercial publishers. This completes the revolution begun in the 90s with desktop publishing and laser printers. Today, anyone can create a digital novel, collection of short stories, textbook, magazine, newsletter, newspaper, etc. and publish it worldwide. The iPad and other devices capable of rendering .epub completes the circuit.