Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Please read: Our ebook is PUBLISHED!!



Writing About Literature in the Digital Age is officially self-published. You can find all three versions the book (PDF, Mobi, and ePub) at Internet Archive's site for it here and at our Goodreads page for it (yes, you can download it there) here.

In addition, you are all now authors on Goodreads - congratulations! To edit your author page, go to the page for our book, click on the link with your name under authors, and click on the link that says "is this you?" and send goodreads an email asking for author status. You will have to be a member of goodreads to do this. I seriously recommend you do this and review our book on goodreads - it will only take a second, for real.

Also, for those who have kindles, please email Derrick (or check his upcoming blog post on how-to) to double check the process of downloading our ebook onto a kindle. I think there are also directions on how to access an ebook from Internet Archive on your kindle here.

Good job everyone!

Webinar Tomorrow

Our class is putting on a webinar tomorrow to talk about how we created an ebook about literature, learning, and technology (in 2 weeks, no less). Anyone is welcome to join. We'd love to see you there!

Monday, June 13, 2011

Learning Outcomes

 How did you meet the stated learning outcomes for the course?

Learning outcome #1: Consume:

I believe I demonstrated my ability to analyze literary texts in my final chapter for the ebook. I showed my ability to gather, search, filter, sample, bookmark, and research wtihin academic and general sources through the following posts:

Here is a list of sites I bookmarked and tagged and sorted relating to my literary research. It also shows my ability to gather a lot of general sources about Huckleberry Finn. I then created a google document that shows how I sampled and processed that information.

You can see how I used different places to search out much of this information when I narrate my process of searching: Twitter, Creative Commons Images on Flickr and Google, Google Blog Search, Open Educational Resources, and Goodreads.

As for doing research within Academia, I posted about learning about and exploring library tools, using these tools to complete research on my chosen literary work, compiling all my academic research with research found for me by fellow classmates, and finding more social research online through an academic article.

Learning outcome #2: Create

I posted about my process of creating an online persona here. That link will lead you to my many different profiles, content outlets, and social networks as would my google profile which I newly updated this semester.

I made a personal learning plan here, some of which I followed pretty closely as it fit the domains of the course. I have documented my learnign efforts throughout the semester on this blog and even my personal blog here and here. I created an attempt at a multimedia composition here. As for creating and publishing more formally developed work in a public and durable format, I contributed a chapter to our class ebook and published it online for the class at internet archive and goodreads.

Learning outcome #3: Connect


I felt I connected meaningfully outside of the class on several occasions which I have narrated on my blog here, here, and here. I also advertised our ebook and webinar to several people who I thought had a vested interest in the project. These individuals are listed at our class wiki under my name.

I also worked collaboratively with our class to create our ebook and in a team to publish our ebook. It was a lot of work but ended up being a very rewarding process.


The Class


I believe our class met these outcomes together by consuming materials related to our literature on the web, narrating our process, creating informal and formal writing about literature, and connecting with both each other and outside of the class. I believe we could have done better on a whole with the create portion. Though we created an ebook as a class collaboratively, we did not do much in creating multimedia which is a legitimate form to use to talk about literature in the digital age.

Publishing a FREE ebook: Narrative of a very frustrating process

The Publishing Team ran into a few glitches today that would be important for you to know:

Problem: little known fact: As an independent publisher, you cannot publish to the Kindle store via Kindle Direct Publishing KDP (as has been our plan since we conceived of publishing our little ebook) and put it out there as "free" (ie. using a Creative Commons License). You must charge at least $0.99 unless you are a small publishing company, so that the big bad Amazon Kindle Co can charge a royalty on your product. (grin)

Solution: We shall instead publish our book (I believe in w/e format we want but this is still to be experimented with as soon as I receive a copy of our ebook) at the less-well-known Internet Archive under their text archive page. I tested this out today by publishing a PDF version of a homework assignment I recently did on Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. Derrick will write a post about how to access these published versions of our ebook on a Kindle or an iPad at his blog.

Problem: Several of the sites we considered distributing our ebook through require an ISBN number. Did you know that you can only get an ISBN number through one of 160 publishing companies and that it takes 15 days to process your request as well as having a service fee?

Solution: We're just not gonna publish at those sites. :P so there.

So in the end our plan is to publish to the Internet Archive and possibly Goodreads.

---------
(added 6/13 4:38 pm)

Answers to Dr. Burton's questions:

What did your team do?

First, I created a diigo list of research I and fellow classmates had done about publishing our ebook. This list, all about publishing ebooks, might be useful to future classes or individuals who are concerned with this process.

Then, I read through and summarized this research for the class on my blog.

Next, I read through information on publishing via KDP and ran into quite a few glitches which are narrated here and here. You can also read through my notes that help you understand my process at a googledoc I kept open as I read to use to present about publishing later for our class.

What tools did you use? 

Diigo, google docs, google search, blog search, and eventually I will use Internet Archive and Goodreads to publish our ebook.

How did this coordinate with the overall effort?

Kept the class informed via posts on my blog and kept in touch with the editing and design team in order to make sure formating was correct for what we were publishing and getting a copy of our book. 

What went well or could go better?

See my the beginning of this post narrating the frustrating process of trying to publish an ebook and share it for free. 

Worries about Publishing

I've created a document of things we'll need to talk about with regard to publishing our ebook today. Too be honest, after reading the publishing handbook for Amazon KDP today, I'm a little concerned about whether we're able to publish our ebook as a free ebook. We'll need to discuss this and other issues today in class.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Places to Publish

We can publish to four different online publishers with our book in ePub format: 

  1. Kindle Direct Publishing - best option in my opinion, most readers. There is a GREAT how-to guide here.
  2. Barnes and Noble PubIt - We might actually have to have a "dumbed down format" like a Word, HTML, RTF, or TXT file, because this site's intention is to put it into ePub for you, but that would be easy with Calibre. Also I am not totally positive we can do it here because they take a 35% royalty so I'm not sure they'll take free ebooks
  3. iTunes connect - this requires an application process and may take a long time so doesn't really work too well for our class. 
  4. and Lulu which would get us into the iBookstore and Lulu's store which claims to have a large community of readers; I don't know how many of those readers will be our intended audience though.
Other options: 

Ashley Lewis also suggested we publish to Goodreads. I don't know what format Goodreads takes since they told her to contact them again "once the ebook is ready" before we could proceed, but it doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult a process. 

Ben had suggested we publish to Gutenberg but I don't think they'll take our book as it doesn't fit within their qualifications:

"Confirm the eBook has already been published by a bona-fide publisher (i.e., not self-published or unpublished). Project Gutenberg generally is not suitable for unpublished work. In cases where a work was published by a very small publisher or not widely distributed, Project Gutenberg might request copies of published literary reviews or similar documentation to demonstrate recognition of the work's literary value."  - Project Gutenberg publishing
 Publishing to Google books might also be a fairly easy option, but they will require both an ePub and a PDF version of the book. We would only have to follow steps 14 and 15 here after creating our book in both formats. This writer says it's a fairly simple process.

My suggestions: 

I think we should publish with Amazon Kindle, Goodreads, and Googlebooks. I believe this will reach the widest audience as a free ebook. Kindle will of course reach the most people, but those who don't use Amazon very frequently and want to read on their computers without an ereader will probably be able to just read it at googlebooks or if they're a big social reader, goodreads. Goodreads might take a little longer so we should have our book ready as soon as possible to complete the process.

If you didn't get the email

This job looks like perfect for someone from this class. I don't know if you all get the English dept emails or open them, but I had to post it in case you hadn't seen. Pretty awesome.

Company: CEO.com
Job Title: Associate Editor
Location: Lindon, UT

Work closely with the managing editor on site strategy, editorial voice, editorial calendar and overall digital initiatives for the CEO.com.

Helping to manage all content on our constantly updating Web site

Oversee selection, publication and promotion of articles and resources related to CEOs

Update CEO profile database and keep current information and news stories

Manage CEO.com social media accounts (twitter and facebook)



Skills:

Strong writing, editing, and copy editing skills

Strong organizational skills and solid work ethicKnowledge of Word Press, a plus

Knowledge of SEO best practices, a plus

Experience with Web site administration or publishing

Speedy decision-making and quick reactions to newsworthy topics

Great understanding of twitter and facebook

Bachelor's Degree (Journalism, English or Communications preferred)

Knowledge of current business news and technology trends



Contact
Greg Olson
Corporate Recruiter
Corda
Work: 801-805-9456
Cel: 801-319-0323
greg.olson@corda.com<mailto:greg.olson@corda.com>
www.corda.com<http://www.corda.com>