Creating eBooks from Wikipedia Articles

Amit Labnol has written a great post explaining how to create eBooks from Wikipedia pages.

The PDF format has been around for awhile but the new addition of the EPUB format is great news for mobile device users.

You can download your eBook in several formats including:

• PDF
• OpenDocument
• OpenZim
• EPUB

A very handy way to collect relevent articles in one location and access them offline!

---

Share

Google Docs Viewer Rocks!

Google Docs Viewer is very useful for displaying any doc, pdf, tiff or presentation files that are saved online.

You don't have to worry about loading your files onto any third party server and although it is a basic version, no bells and whistles, it does the job that it is meant to do very well.

You can move forwards and backwards through the document, zoom in and out and show one page or four pages at a time. You can also choose a full screen mode where you can then select to download the file.

And, of course, you can also embed the viewer. Here is a little introduction to Google Docs in the classroom!

---

Share

Open Access Scholarly Press

AU Press is "dedicated to open access and digital publishing in order to serve the needs of a global community of adult learners and researchers" and to this end provides freely available eBooks, eJournals and websites.

You can browse for eBooks by author, title, series or subject as well as searching by keyword. Over 20 different categories are included ranging from Anthropology to Women's Studies.

The technology section has two very interesting publications

• Emerging Technologies in Distance Education (pdf) and
• Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training (pdf)

A range of open access electronic journals in various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities are also provided.

Interestingly, AU Press indicate that "much evidence demonstrates that in practice, academic presses sell more books by making their content freely available on the web". It would be great to see more adopting this approach!

---

Share

Great Links to Open Textbooks

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a combined effort to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and in particular open textbooks in community college courses. An open textbook is defined as:

a body of educational content that is openly available over the web, by mail, or in a book store with a copyright that allows copying and distribution or, with the most open copyrights, allows modification of the content and even sale.

CCCOER Open Textbooks provides a growing list of links, covering a wide range of subject areas, to "OPEN and free textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses". In some cases, the links also lead to useful podcasts and videos.

This is a great resource. On my first quick look, I found a comprehensive guide to using OpenOffice 3.o!

---

Share

Create Impressive Interactive Pageflip Books

MegaZine 3 is a powerful pageflip engine, which allows you to create striking interactive pageflip books. Include text, images, videos and background sounds.

You can also add a 'zoom' function to your image by including a link to a high resolution version of the same image.

A certain knowledge about HTML and/or XML is needed in order to use MegaZine 3 but if you have the basics then setting up a book is extremely simple as an intuitive XML structure is used to control the content of a book. But, even if you do not know any HTML there are a couple of tutorials provided in the forum, which will help you to get started.

Creating books with MegaZine 3 could prove to be a nice incentive for those students needing to learn HTML.

Check out the demo book to see all the features in action!!

---

Share

Free iTunes Manual

Thanks to Pat, I learnt about the Big Book of iTunes from Makeuseof.com.

The Big Book of iTunes is a great little manual which introduces iTunes to beginners and provides basic information and instructions about performing various tasks when using iTunes (for both Mac and Windows).

The manual also explains how iTunes can actually be more than just a music player and it introduces some interesting software to complement and extend the functionality of iTunes.

The Big Book of iTunes also covers some more advanced topics such as integrating Last.fm and using Applescripts.

With the great iTunes U freely available, there really is no excuse for not being able to use iTunes!!

Makeuseof.com have also produced some other useful free pdf books:
* The Idiot’s Ultimate Guide To Building Your Own Computer
* The Laptop Buying Guide For 2009
* PSP Downgrading and Upgrading Guide

---

Technorati Tags: itunes, makeuseof

---

Share

Promoting Female Writers

Girlebooks provides a collection of ebooks, written by women, with the intention of making "classic and lesser-known works by female writers available to a large audience through the ebook medium".

The texts are gathered from Manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg and then "professionally formatted" providing a table of contents and text reflow for small reading devices. In fact, Girlebooks offers the ebooks in several different formats accommodating most ebook readers.

Girlebooks also includes contemporary female authors, who submit their work for inclusion.

Thanks Pilar for finding this one!

---

Technorati Tags: girlebooks, manybooks, project gutenberg

---

Share

The Photoshop Anthology - Free Download

Sitepoint are offering a time limited free PDF download of 'The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques.

The book, written by Corrie Haffly, is very comprehensive offering 9 complete chapters covering everything from the basics to advanced techniques. I particularly like the chapter that is devoted to designing a website.

Don't miss out. The offer ends in 25 days from now.........

---

Technorati Tags: pdf, photoshop, the photoshop anthology

---

Share

Neat Reader for Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the largest online repository of free eBooks, presently containing over 20,000 titles.

In fact, the stated mission of Project Gutenberg is "to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks".

You can search the catalog using author, title word/s or etext number. It is also possible to simply browse through the titles or choose one from the latest top 100 downloads.

The downloaded eBooks are limited to text, html or audio format and this is where NetBook comes in.

NetBook is an eBook reader/listener for Project Gutenberg, which lets you easily search the database, download and read/listen to the eBooks and store them in cache for offline use.

NetBook also automatically downloads the "new books" and adds them to the catalog list.

---

Technorati Tags: ebook, netbook, project gutenberg

---

Share