Cetis Blogs - expert commentary on educational technology » eBooks

Initial thoughts on EPUB-WEB (Portable Documents for the Open Web Platform)

Phil Barker — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 09:42:14 +0000

In a W3C Unofficial Draft White Paper “Advancing Portable Documents for the Open Web Platform: EPUB-WEB” published 21 Nov 2014, Markus Gulling of IPDF (curators of the EPUB standards) and Ivan Herman of W3C (curators of web standards) have highlighted the potential of a specification that brings EPUB on to the Web. Informally known as EPUB-WEB, the vision is that this specification would make “EPUB a first-class citizen of the Open Web Platform and as a result significantly reduce the complexity of deploying EPUB content into browsers, for online as well as offline consumption”

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eBooks and libraries, the right to eRead? #ebooks14

Phil Barker — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 10:51:11 +0000

About once a year I go to some meeting or another on libraries and eBooks. I nearly always come back from it struck by the tension between libraries, as institutions of stability and the rapid pace at which technology companies are driving forward eBook technology. This year’s event of that type was the Scottish Library and Information Council’s 13th annual eBook conference. The keynote from Gerald Leitner, chair of the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations task force on eBooks was especially interesting to me in introducing the Right to eRead Campaign.

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When does a book become a web platform?

Wilbert Kraan — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:24:57 +0000

During last week’s CETIS conference I ran a session to assess how ebooks can function as an educational medium beyond the paper textbook.

After reminding ourselves that etextbooks are not yet as widespread as ebook novels, and that paper books generally are still most widely read, we examined what ebook features make a good educational experience.

Though many features could have been mentioned, the majority were still about the experience itself. Top of the bill: formative assessment at the end of a chapter. Either online or offline, it needs to be interactive, and there need to be a lot of items readily available. Other notable features in the area include a desire for contextualised discussion about a text. Global is good, but chats limited to other learners in a course is better. A way of asking for clarification of a teacher by highlighting text was another notable request.

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Embed innovation or implant potential?

Phil Barker — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 14:14:23 +0000

This thought on etextbooks is an overflow from a conversation I was having about a workshop aimed at scoping what we would like the etextbooks of the future to look like. By defining an area of interest as “etextbooks” we were implying a continuity with textbooks, the implication seems to be that etextbooks will pick up where paper text books leave off. That, I think is different from 20 or so years ago when we were talking about how computer based learning marked a step change in how education was delivered. In that case much of the talk was about how technology will radically change education. Even if my characterisation of the two cases as opposing is a bit crude (as it is), it’s worth comparing the two approaches. I’ll do that here, just briefly.

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ePub metadata what gets shown?

Phil Barker — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:54:06 +0000

One of the issues around eTextBooks is how to describe them, specifically by way of educational metadata in ePub. That’s something that on the face of it shouldn’t be too difficult to address (at least to the extent that we know how to describe any educational resource). One thing that would be useful in demonstrating different choices for educational metadata is an app or tool that will display any metadata found in the ePub package in a sensible way. As a bit of long shot I tried four eBook readers to see whether they would; they don’t. The details follow, if you’re interested, but do let me know if you know of any tool that might be useful.

The package metadata of an ePub can include a selection of Dublin Core elements and terms. These can be refined, for example you may have two dc:title elements with refinements to specify that one is the main title and the other the subtitle. You can also extend with elements from other XML namespaces, or if you prefer you can just link to a metadata record of your favourite flavour which can be either inside the ePub package or elsewhere on the web. Any of this metadata can relate to the eBook as a whole or some part of it, e.g. a single chapter or image. Without going into details there seems to be enough scope there to experiment with how educational characteristics of the eBook might be described. [..]

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