Jul 24, 2013

Authoring your own electronic textbook for you class

Many teachers use their own collection of materials for their classes, rather than a single textbook. In this day and age, creating an electronic version of such materials should be painless. In this post, we find out otherwise.

Requirements


The first step in our process is to choose a format for our electronic end product. We want a widely-used multimedia-enabled ebook format that the students can view and annotate/highlight on any platform, including mobile devices.  Apple's iBook format is proprietary and only works on Apple devices. Adobe's PDF format can be viewed and annotated on all platforms, but it is still a proprietary format. The only viable remaining choice is the EPUB format (short for electronic publication). There are many apps on all platform that can view and annotate EPUB files, and the most recent version of this format, EPUB3, allows embedding of audio and video files.

Now all we need is an authoring software or platform that can package our materials into an EPUB book. Here are the features that I think a teacher-author would want from an ebook authoring software:
  1. Easy to use ... a teacher should not need to be a techie to create an EPUB book
  2. Imports standard documents ... a teacher needs the ability to include their existing documents, such as Word files, PDF files, HTML (web pages), etc 
  3. Incorporates multimedia ... a teacher should be able to include multimedia materials, such as images, audio, video, links, and these materials should be embedded within the ebook so that they "play" within the ebook app
  4. Update-able end product ... a teacher must be able to make changes and distribute the updated version to students
Requirement 3 needs clarification. Many authoring platforms incorporate audio and video multimedia by putting a link to the multimedia file, rather than embedding it within the ebook. It seems a minor point, but the continuity of the "reading" experience for the user is compromised if, in order to play every media clip, the user must switch between the ebook app and a different app capable of playing the media. The user may have to download this other app, it may have a completely different user interface, and on many mobile devices, there is no simple way to return back to the previous app (i.e. the ebook). This makes the in-app playing of media files a "must" for the authoring platform output. 
With these requirements in mind, I went e'hunting (if it's not a dictionary verb yet, it should be). To my great surprise, I could not find any software that meets all these requirements satisfactorily. It is a very rapidly changing landscape and many software/platforms claim to fulfill the requirements above. While many satisfy requirements 1 and 4 reasonably well, incorporation of existing materials and of multimedia are inconsistent and spotty.  

One particularly glaring omission in all the candidates is the ability to include an existing PDF document. 

[ Technical aside: this is surprising because a crude version of this task is easy to do -- just convert each page of the PDF document into an image and import this collection of images as pages in to the ebook. While properly extracting content from a PDF file produces much more useful results (e.g. text that can be searched), the method above is a simple way of getting PDF materials in to the ebook. ] 
After a month of testing and playing around with over a dozen products, here are my results. 

The closest to what we need


Jutoh  jutoh.com ($40)
- a software download for Windows or Mac
- can import HTML, Word, EPUB; cannot import PDF documents 
- audio and video are embedded in the ebook and play within the ebook 

Jutoh provides a good resource on how to create ebooks: jutoh.com/book.

Online apps for viewing EPUB books


Chrome browser extension: Readium
Firefox browser add-on: EPUBReader
Booki.sh -- this online ePUB reader platform may be on its way out (see here)

My main sources


http://www.indoition.com/ebook-editors-converters-tools.htm
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Book_authoring_software
http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/the-basics-of-diy-e-book-publishing (2013-02)
http://sites.udel.edu/ibooks-authors/epub-software/ and http://sites.udel.edu/ibooks-authors/ebook-images-video-and-audio-files/ (2012-2013)
http://epubtest.com/resources.php (2013-03)

Other authoring tools I evaluated


Here are other tools that I evaluated (June-July 2013) and in what ways they fail the above requirements:

Creatavist  creatavist.com 
- allows user to embed images, audio and video but! the media is not included when the ebook is saved as an EPUB book

Scrivener  literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php ($40)
 does not embed audio/video

CK-12 Flexbook  ck12.org
- does not embed audio/video
- ebook must be released under Creative Commons license
[I am not sure how actively this platform is being maintained since many images under Help are missing and the site frequently hangs on loading content]

HelpNDoc helpndoc.com
- does not embed audio; embedded video does not play in EPUB apps

Scribus scribus.net
- does not import audio/video

Namo eBookEditor   namo.com  ($30)
- does not embed audio/video

Articulate Storyline   articulate.com ($1,400)
- does not output EPUB format
- ebook based on slides (i.e. need to do the pagination yourself)
- expensive and huge (220MB download!) - hangs when I try to "publish" the book

PressBooks pressbooks.com 
- does not embed audio/video
- does not accept mp4 files!
- uploaded audio files are behind PressBooks firewall and are available only to registered users

Calibre calibre-ebook.com/
- tool for ebook format conversion and organization
- limited EPUB authoring features; can only import HTML, not Word 

UDL Studio udlstudio.cast.org
- does not export in EPUB format

- limited EPUB authoring features
- can import HTML and text files, but not Word

BlueGriffin (195€)
- no trial version to test on without paying for the full license
- does not export in EPUB format

eBookBurn ebookburn.com
- does not import audio/video

Udutu udutu.com
- in-browser authoring; focused on corporate training

Connexions cnx.org/
- content authored by their system must be stored in their repository
- content must be under Open Content license (others canuse, distribute, and create derivative works)

OER commons oercommons.org
- limited authoring features -- Word and PDF files appear as attachments, not embedded as part of the text

- does not export to EPUB format
- charges a "platform fee" of $7 per book download

Publiwide publiwide.com
- commercial publishing platform, not geared at individual authors

Moglue  moglue.com
- output is an iOS or Android app, not an EPUB book
- focused on children's picture books

- only imports XHTML files
- focused on publishers, not individual authors

Kitaboo kitaboo.com
- focused on publishers, not individual teachers

Koobits koobits.com
- focused on animation for younger students

Other tools I did not evaluate


Symtext symtext.com
eCub - not wysiwyg
ePUB readers - mobile platform(s) only
Megareader - authoring on iOS
BlueFire - authoring on iOS, Android
EPUBReader - in-browser authoring
magicscroll.net - in-browser authoring