The Ada Initiative is a nonprofit organization that works to support women in open culture (open source software, open standards, open content, etc.) Really great stuff. They have a new census that they are encouraging people to take. So please take it, and spread the word.
From the category archives:
Open Standards
As most of you know, I’m a writer. I write a fair bit of science fiction, and also write other stuff. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do to get my novels out in the world, and have been greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow in terms of copyright (or, more accurately, copyleft). Obviously for me, publishing eBooks is going to be something I do at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later.
I’m talking in this post about self-publishing eBooks. What are the options, and how do you go about doing it? Since this is a technology blog, and not a marketing blog, I won’t talk about the details of getting an ISBN number, or getting nice looking cover art, or getting the word out, etc. There are also avenues that will allow you to sell both your print book alongside your eBook. All of those issues I’ll leave to other folks. I’m going to talk here about mechanics of just eBook publishing.
Mechanics
If you want to put your book into formats that the widest variety of people will be able to read, think about these two important factors:
- Distribution avenues: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google and Apple, would be the ones I’d focus on, as well as whatever other avenues you want to use to get your electronic files out there.
- Devices: Kindle, iPad/iPhone, Android Tablets/Android Phones, Nook, Computer (in that vague order of preference)
This will define what steps you need to take to get your manuscript into eBook format.
Amazon has what’s called “Kindle Direct Publishing” – how you can self-publish your book on Amazon. There is a lot of information there on how to get going, including how to get your document into the right format. You can either upload a .doc or .docx file, or a mobipocket format file.
Unlike Amazon, which puts all self-published and publisher-published books into the same pot, Barnes and Noble has this thing called “PubIt!” It’s a bit segregated from the rest of the books in the Nook store. You need to jump through several hoops to get registered, etc. Once you do, your book can be uploaded either as a .doc or .docx, or you can make an ePub version to upload (more on that below.)
Apple also has a system by which you sign up to sell your books in their iBookstore. They also use ePub, so you’ll need to get your book into that format.
Google also makes you join a partner program to publish your book. “Google Editions” is the process by which you get Google to sell your book. In that case, you need to upload an ePub version. Nicely, Google allows you to distribute your eBook without DRM, an option no other vendors seem to have.
(This is sort of an off-topic digression, but it’s interesting, so I’ll insert it anyway. From what I can tell, Barnes and Noble is the only one of the list of these outlets that really distinguishes between self-publishers and regular publishers in the experience of customers viewing/searching for eBooks. In fact, Google and Apple seem to have the same exact back-end process to get books sold, whether you are a big regular publisher, or little ol’ me sitting in my living room…)
Formats
OK, so now that we’ve gotten the bureaucratic crap out of the way, how in the bleep do you get your book into the proper format(s)? I wrote a blog entry a bit ago on eBook formats. The distributors above (plus perhaps your own distribution process) necessitates moving your manuscript from the word processing format you wrote it in, to some other format. I’d say you eventually want it in three different formats:
- ePub
- MobiPocket
PDF is easy. MS Word, OpenOffice.org, and LibreOffice (a recent fork of OpenOffice.org – that’s another blog post) have PDF export facilities, so that job is easy. Make sure, of course, that your manuscript has the right types of cover pages, etc. that are standard for eBooks. (Here’s a nice, short guide.)
There are many methods for converting files to ePub and Mobi format. It depends on your platform, your budget, and your technology skillset:
- epub-tools: an open source, command line set of tools for conversion to epub format. (free)
- Calibre: a cross-platform suite of tools for ebook management, conversion, etc. I haven’t spent much time with it yet, but it’s free, and seems like it has a pretty nice feature set, including conversion to epub and Mobi. (free)
- Adobe InDesign: the rather expensive desktop publishing program includes, apparently, conversion to epub (but not to mobi.) ($$)
- ecub: a cross-platform program to convert files to epub and mobi. (free)
- Jutoh: another cross-platform program that does multiple format conversions. ($)
- odftoepub: an OpenOffice.org plug-in for conversion to epub format ($)
After you create your files, you’ll want to look at them, to see if they worked well. Obviously, checking them out on as many devices as you can would be good. You can sideload any of these files to different devices to test them out. You can also use the following tools to independently view your creations:
- Adobe Digital Editions (ePub)
- Mobipocket Reader (Mobi – nonDRM)
One small note: Unlike ePub, which is an open standard, Mobipocket was a company that had it’s own format, and was acquired by Amazon in 2005.
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Yesterday, I spent the day in Manhattan, at the UNICEF building, with a bunch of folks passionate about the technology in mobile phones, and the ways to use that technology for good. I’ve been a very long time cell phone user (had one since 1998), but I haven’t been involved in implementing a mobile system for an organization, so I had a lot to learn.
The place to find reports on what happend is on the wiki. Also, check out the twitter stream for the #omc09 hashtag.
I was especially interested in the issue of mobile data collection. (I was so interested, I facilitated a session.) And, even more specifically, I’m interested in how to leverage CiviCRM and mobile devices for a range of interesting applications. There are a number of ways to get data from mobile phones into a CRM – and all have advantages and disadvantages, depending on a lot of things.
- Globally, what you can basically depend on is SMS. Smartphones haven’t made it into most of the developing world, nor have 3G networks. So how do you get SMS data into a database system like CiviCRM? You need an SMS gateway, and systems such as RapidSMS to gather data
- Use J2ME to write applications for mobile phones, and send the data via SMS to a central database.
- A tool such as EpiCollect, which is an Android app.
- A slimmed-down, simplified webform to be used on mobile browsers.
One thing that would facilitate this would be a more robust API system in CiviCRM – access to the data via REST or JSON, which would allow CiviCRM to talk with some of the tools out there like Mesh4X.
I learned a ton. Thanks to MobileActive.org and the Open Mobile Consortium for a fabulous event.
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Songbird screen
I’ve known about Songbird for a long time. It’s a cross-platform music player based upon the Mozilla framework. I thought it was a brilliant idea years ago, but it was a buggy mess the last time I tried it (about a year ago.)
However, Songbird has emerged, like many open source projects do, as a mature, stable, and, in Songbird’s case, a truly awesome application, because of the incredible extensibility of the Mozilla framework (and the talent of the Songbird developer community.)
I’ve only been running Songbird for about 20 minutes, and already it’s linked with my last.fm account, is showing me a picture search based on the artist I’m playing, as well as showing me a list of all of the concerts happening in the Bay Area by artists in my library. I can read reviews, browse videos, and read the lyrics of the song playing. It’s happily notifying Growl when new songs play.
This qualifies as a killer app, and it will give iTunes a run for it’s money. I don’t really have a good reason to use iTunes anymore.
Between open standards that allow songbird to grab data from all sorts of places, as well as the open architecture of Mozilla, allowing hundreds or thousands of people to write their own cool plug ins that we all benefit from, this really does show the power of open.
Next question: can we get the nonprofit version of the killer open source and open platform app?
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I’m going to go out on a really thin limb here, and feel free to saw it off in the comments. :-)
If you haven’t been to change.gov yet, you need to go. Now. I’ll be here when you come back.
There is little question that Obama was Presidential Candidate 2.0. And it’s becoming increasigly clear that he’ll be President 2.0. What made this possible?
Of course, without his intelligence, and desire to be involving and inclusive, it wouldn’t have happened. But there is no question that there is a technical aspect to what made this possible. New technologies, the web, Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, text messaging, all of these made this possible. Plus some amazing underlying technical infrastructure. It engaged voters (largely young voters, but others as well.) It allowed people to get involved and helped motivate.
So, to go even deeper, what made all of this possible? Well, Web 2.0 depends largely on two things: open standards, and open source software. It is my arguement that without these two things, Obama would not have been able to harness the technology in the way that he did. He might have won anyway, but I think that these two factors made it a lot easier. And I think that they will be key to providing Government 2.0, which is as technically transparent and open as it hopefully will be in actuality.
Open Source software and open standards are the foundations of Web 2.0. Open standards are now becoming de-riguer for application developers, and even proprietary vendors are adopting longstanding ideas and methods from free and open source software.
I think the next 4-8 years are going to prove Yochai Benkler right.
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Here’s a few interesting tidbits gleaned from the net:
- It appears that Microsoft’s bid to get Office Open XML, their new office standard did get through ISO. Interestingly enough, lots of developing world countries voted against it. There’s lots of great details on Groklaw.
- Venture capitalists are liking open source more and more. Why do we nptechies care? More $ toward open source is a tide that lifts all boats.
- It’s still mighty small (still around 2%), but Linux Desktop market share grew from 40-60% (depending on who you ask) from last year.
- Adobe (yeah, Adobe) joined the Linux Foundation, and released a Linux alpha of Air, their new application platform.
If you’re not so connected either to the “twitterverse” or the web industry, you probably haven’t heard a lot about the buzz that is currently happening around the issue of data portability, and the dataportability.org organization and effort. I figured, since I’ve been getting a bit involved in the community, I’d give a bit of a summary of what’s going on, and what will possibly come from this effort.
Dataportability.org – the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others.
So first, what is data portability? Basically, it means that the data that you put into social networking sites, like profiles, social graph (those who you are connected to,) media, etc. are *yours* to do whatever you want with. In addition, they are portable – you can move your data from place to place. And you have control over who can see what. There is a good blog article, which, in some regards, might be seen as a criticism of the dataportability.org group, but which, to my mind, actually defines quite well what I’ve thought data portability means. He talks about data “accessibility”, “visibility”, “removal” and “ownership” – all things that, to my mind, are components of data portability.
I’m involved in the evangelism action group. So, I’m evangelizing. I’ll be doing an entry soon, sort of “how social networks could use open standards 101.” I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 tools, they need to understand the implications of what they do, and demand that the tools use open standards.
Last week, I covered the Richard Scoble dust-up. Thanks to twitter (hat tip to marshallk), I learned about today’s big news: Google, Plaxo and Facebook joined the Data Portability working group. This, of course, doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, everyone’s social graph and data will become portable, but it’s a very good sign that perhaps, after all, things are moving in that direction.
I think that people are getting wary of social networks where they have no control over their own data. And, of course, nonprofits should be especially keen on being able to keep control of their data. This is a good sign that things are going in the right direction. I’ll keep you posted, for sure.
Read/Write Web and TechCruch have good coverage of this.
Update: LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter have now joined Dataportability.org. This is, of course, great news. But the real question is: will this actually result in data portability?
It’s been mostly fun so far at the Open Translation event here in Zagreb. I’ll leave the complaining about Croatian food and other things to my personal blog, when I get the time. The event itself has been fab.
As one of those monolingual American types, I’m learning a huge amount about what it takes to create open content in different languages. It is actually pretty mind-boggling. There are issues that relate to encoding, fonts, and character sets, machine translation, interfaces to facilitate human translation, issues of workflow, volunteer and project management, and a whole host of other issues.
It’s also really interesting to see how free and open source fits into all of this. What are the tools like? How do we replace proprietary tools? How does this all get paid for?
My role has been to gather up the use cases (specific examples of translation processes). That’s been a very interesting process, and we have been generating some good examples that will be really helpful in the process of figuring out what tools are present that can do what’s needed, and what gaps exist.
Check out the wiki. Lots of food for thought for NOSI and the future.
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The buzz of the blogosphere is the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial. I thought that it would be a good idea to describe what it is, and what it might mean for the nonprofit sector. Marc Andreessen, who is, of late, connected to Ning, has a great blog entry with details.
OpenSocial is a set of APIs. It’s aimed primarily at developers. Google has a number of partners, including social network sites like LinkedIn, Friendster and Ning, as well as Salesforce, which does have very interesting implications given the increasing use of Salesforce in the nonprofit sector.
OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network – any OpenSocial “container”. That means developers need only write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved, like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets.
One of the big issues about social network platforms was that once Facebook made its platform available, and MySpace and LinkedIn followed, it looked like developers would have to port their apps to each social network. OpenSocial means, basically, they can port to a whole lot fewer of them. Hopefully, eventually, they can write their apps just once. Facebook has quite the motivation to keep people on Facebook, and keep the eyeballs there, because of their revenue model, which is ad-based. This breaks the whole thing open.
I’m not so clear about how this helps users. I expect, that because the APIs allow connections to profile, social graph, and activity data of users, that portability and permeability between social networks is bound to happen. But the path to truly portable (with adequate privacy controls) profile, social graph and activity data is still not entirely clear.
What does this mean for the nonprofit sector? Allan, in his inimitable style, talks about how most nonprofit organizations will not be able to take advantage of OpenSocial. No question about that. Most nonprofits haven’t even begun to take advantage of the Web 2.0 world in general, let alone the bleeding edge of OpenSocial. And I’m not entirely clear yet how many should be jumping on this bandwagon to either do fundraising or community-building. Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and LinkedIn have very different demographic and geographic reaches. Ning, which is the social network of social networks, could end up being a very important player here.
I think that the inclusion of Salesforce in the mix will be very interesting for web-savvy nonprofits who are thinking about, or have started writing apps for social networks. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out – what kinds of integration will be possible between social network data and CRM data?
Anyway, OpenSocial is something I’ll be watching, playing with, and writing about as time goes on, and considering what it means for those of us in this sector.
Update: MySpace, SixApart (LiveJournal, Typepad and the newish social networking blog platform Vox), and Bebo have now all joined OpenSocial. This is getting really interesting!
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