Aug 04 2011
An electronic edition is in press
“In press” as in “in the works” not in a printing press. We’re working on an electronic edition of Digital Habitats. Can’t say how long it will take, but we are working on it. It turns out that all those tables and pictures that make the book a useful handbook present some special challenges when publishing it in an electronic format.
One change that the electronic format will require is that the 40 illustrative stories or vignettes that are shown in the book as floating text boxes won’t float on a page but will show up between paragraphs. In this case, having to deal with that little detail means that we made a list of all of them. For some reason such a list was never part of the book the vignettes were not included in the index! Now here’s a list of them.
4 responses so far
A quick message to encourage you to persevere with this… I’ve got a copy of your book in front of my now, but I’m struggling to read it as I’ve a newly acquired sight impairment. What I’d like to be able to do is read using an ebook reader with larger font size and/ or have portions read aloud using text to speech when my vision tires.
Best wishes overcoming the hurdles you talk about.
Stephen
Thanks for that Stephen. It’s interesting to hear how the ebook will make it easier / more useful to you. When you’re working on getting it out the door as we are, you tend to focus on the possible deficiencies of the format, such as sidebars that don’t sit next to the main argument in the text but have to be interleaved (and don’t have a grey background, etc., etc.). As we say in the book somewhere, every technology both opens up new possibilities for access and also closes off others.
Once fully digitized, will Digital Habitats work like a wiki, or is that stretching the ideal of CoP too far?
The e-book will look like the printed book, with format changes necessary to be useful in Kindle / ePub readers. The nearest thing to a wiki is here: http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Technology_for_Communities_project . That’s very tool and platform oriented. It would be cool to hear what parts of the book you would rewrite, wiki-style.