Posts Tagged ‘software’

5 ways to create your own e-books

Did you know that online bookstore isn’t the only way to get digital content onto your iPad, Kindle, Nook, or other e-book reader? You can save your own documents to e-book formats to build your portable library more quickly. These are also good ways to share classroom materials with students and parents. Here are five tools to consider for your excursion into e-book publishing.

1. Make a PDF

PDF is arguably the most universally-compatible format for e-books. PDF files look great on an iPad, Kindle, and just about any reading or mobile device out there. (It also works on plain old computers.) To make a PDF e-book, just print your document to PDF the way you normally would. Here’s how to print to PDF in Windows using CutePDF, and how to do so on a Mac using built-in functionality. You can also use a commercial product like Adobe Acrobat or an online service like Zamzar or PDF Converter. (Note: Zamzar is supposed to convert to other formats, but I’ve had mixed results.)

I should mention that PDF-based e-books don’t let readers adjust fonts and colors like other formats, but if your publication relies on precise layout (other formats may vary from device to device) it might be your best bet.

2. Calibre

Calibre is a free tool for power e-book readers. It provides a built-in reader and converter that supports tons of e-book formats and, optionally, will even sync them to your reader. You can even download your favorite news feeds through a built-in RSS reader and convert them to an e-book format to read on your device later on. Calibre is available for Windows, Mac, and Unix.

3. eCub

eCub is another desktop e-book converter. It’s not as drag-and-drop as Calibre, but if you’ve already got content formatted into HTML (or several HTML pages) it’s worth a look. You can even give your e-book a custom cover. eCub is free and available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. The company that publishes eCub also sells Jutoh, a more advanced e-book builder, for $22.

4. Instapaper

Online bookmarking/readability tool Instapaper has a neat feature that lets you save your bookmarked, web-based reading material to a downloadable format you can copy over to your Kindle or iPad for easy offline reading. It’s a great way to catch up on your favorite blogs or online newspapers while on the plane.

5. Pages

Finally, if you use a Mac and have iWork ’09 installed on your computer, you have a built-in e-book creation tool! A few weeks ago Apple added the ability to export to EPUB from inside Pages. This is the format of choice for most non-Kindle e-book readers, including the iPad. Formatting can be a little persnickety, but Apple provides a style template (ZIP file) and support document to help make sure your e-book looks as nice as those you might buy from the iBookstore or elsewhere.

Photo: Andy Ihnatko on Flickr

By Aaron Sumner | September 10th, 2010 | View Comments

Manipulating PDFs in Preview

As you may know, PDF support is built into Mac OS X. This means you can accomplish a lot more than just reading PDF files, without having to invest in extra software. Here are a few resources to help you get more out of PDF files on your Mac:

Print, annotate, rearrange, bookmark, crop:

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (“TUAW”) listed five tips for working with PDF files in Mac OS X last week. If nothing else, become familiar with how to print directly to PDF–this is one of the most unsung features of the Macintosh operating system. If you’d like to see this broken down, check out Amber’s brief tutorial on printing to PDF from this past winter.

More on annotating:

If Preview’s annotation tools are too limited for you, or you don’t like the idea of having your annotations saved inside the PDF document, check out Skim, a PDF viewer written by and for the research community. We’ve written some advice on using Skim to annotate PDFs here in the past.

Merge PDFs:

If you’re sharing multiple PDF files, it might be useful to merge them into a single document before passing them along. This is easy to do with Preview–the following video tutorial shows how this works in Snow Leopard (version 10.6 of Mac OS X):

Delete pages:

Finally, a quick tip on deleting pages from your PDF. I find I have to use this more often than I think I would, when deleting intentionally blank pages from electronic books.

By Aaron Sumner | August 17th, 2010 | View Comments

What is a plug-in?

A plug-in, also known as an add-on in technology terms, is similar to a small piece of software. This is a download that adds to the functionality of a program you are already using. Plug-ins are most commonly used to customize Internet browsers and streamline what you accomplish while using a particular application. Firefox, for example, has a whole slew of plug-ins available to enhance your time spent using this browser.

By Amber Nutt | July 15th, 2010 | View Comments

Annotate PDFs on a Mac with Skim

As you may know, I’m a big fan of saving paper and use electronic formats instead of printed ones whenever possible. I often print to PDF, then either file that away or read the document on my screen. I’ve been using Preview, the built-in PDF reader in Mac OS X, to not only read PDF files but also mark them up with my own annotations and highlights. (You can also mark up PDF documents with the non-free version of Adobe Acrobat.) However, these markups get baked into my documents once I save them–so if I wind up sharing the PDF, or I need it for some other reason, I need to make sure I’ve kept a clean copy lest my notes and markings get passed along.

Last week, though, our student programmer Nate pointed out to me that an alternative PDF reader called Skim not only has better markup features, but also saves annotations separately. In other words, my original PDF is kept clean, and my notes are on a transparency sheet placed on top of the document. It works great! And if I do want to share my notes with someone else, I can save a Skim version of the PDF that contains the original PDF and the corresponding notes in one bundle.

Since Skim is built by and for power PDF note-takers, its annotation features are top-notch. One big feature improvement over Preview is the ability to search my notes, as well as to export just my notes. This could be very handy for quickly gathering notes taken in a PDF-formatted book. The Skim wiki lists a number of PDF-enhancing features to help you get more out of your electronic documents and give a reprieve to a tree or two.

Skim if open source and a free download for Macintosh computers only. Download Skim and see what you think.

By Aaron Sumner | May 11th, 2010 | View Comments

What is open source?

Open source is a term many educators have heard, but may not know exactly what it means. Essentially, open source is a practice that provides access to the source materials required to make a product. In most cases, that product is a piece of computer software, and the source is the programming code required to make that software do what it does. Some common examples of open source software include Firefox, the Linux operating system, the OpenOffice office application suite, and the Apache web server.

In legal terms, just posting something online, or even merely saying it is “open source,” is not sufficient. You need to provide an open source license to let others know what they may legally do with the material you’ve provided them. There are a number of open source licenses available to developers, each with varying rules on how materials may be used and redistributed. For example, some licenses require you to license any work of your own, that borrows from the source material in any way, using the same license. That could mean that you may be legally required to open source something you’ve developed with commercial intent. The Open Source Initiative has a list of guidelines to help determine whether a given license is suitable to your needs as a developer or end user of materials. Fun fact: If you find something posted online, and no license is provided, standard copyright law applies to the material.

Although open source is most common in software development, it is also increasingly applied in other fields, including education. MIT’s OpenCourseWare project provides instructional materials to anyone interested in learning–enrollment at MIT not required. (Of course, you also don’t get a degree from MIT or access to their other resources.) Wikipedia’s entry on open source provides some interesting history of the concept, including how it applied to the early days of the automobile industry.

Copyright is a complex matter, and this article by no means is a substitute for legal counsel. If you have questions about your legal rights to use materials you find online, or you are interested in ways to open access to materials you’ve developed, please do your homework and consult a real attorney when necessary.

Image: Wikipedia

By Aaron Sumner | April 22nd, 2010 | View Comments

FormatFactory: Video conversion tool for Windows

We love to talk up the dearly-departed VisualHub and its new, open source progeny Transcoder Redux around here. I’ve never seen a way to convert video from one format to another more quickly or easily–whenever you see a video clip anywhere on a Stratepedia-hosted site (or the handful of kucrl.org sites we handle), there’s a good chance VisualHub or Transcoder has touched it at some point.

One thing that’s not a problem for us, but may be a problem for you, is that these applications are Mac-only. Over the weekend I learned about a Windows program with similar features to VisualHub, called FormatFactory. I know absolutely nothing about this software other than that it exists and that it’s free. If you’re a Windows person and need to convert video, check out FormatFactory and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this post.

By Aaron Sumner | November 17th, 2008 | View Comments

Good news! VisualHub is back, sort of.

A few weeks ago Amber waxed rhapsodic about VisualHub, our go-to choice for quick and easy video conversion on the Mac. In a classic case of really unfortunate timing, between the times she began and finished her post, the software’s developer shut hit doors, effectively discontinuing the product.

All is not lost, however: The developer released his source code to the general public, meaning if you know a little bit about how to compile code on a Mac you can get VisualHub’s open source successor, FilmRedux, up and running on your Mac. It’s actually not very difficult–there’s a nice write-up on the process on WikiHow–but it does require some software for programmers that, more likely than not, isn’t on your computer. The good news is that software’s free as well–it’s just the developer tools that are included on the Mac OS installer DVD (you can also download these tools from Apple’s developers site, but it’s a pretty hefty download).

I just noticed a link to another article on the subject, with links to compiled versions of both FilmRedux and PunyVid (iSquint’s successor). It says they’re for Mac users who don’t have Leopard (OS X 10.5), but you might give them a shot as well if this whole compiling code thing is more than you want to deal with.

Thanks to thriftmac for pointing out this new development.

By Aaron Sumner | October 20th, 2008 | View Comments

RSS readers: What do you use?

So, you read Amber’s excellent introduction to RSS technology and would love to use it, but for whatever reason you and Google Reader aren’t clicking? That’s OK, I’m the same way. Luckily for us, Google Reader isn’t your only choice when it comes to RSS readers.

Lifehacker, and excellent blog about technology literacy (add it to your RSS feeds!) today has a write up on its readers’ choices for “best” RSS readers. Google Reader ranked at the top, but the article also shares a few other options, including NetNewsWire, a Mac-only reader that’s my personal favorite. So if you like the idea of RSS but are looking for an alternative to Google Reader, check out the article, try some of the options, and let us know what your favorite is via a comment below.

By Aaron Sumner | May 15th, 2008 | View Comments