The choice of authoring and publishing tool needs to be guided by a number of different factors, including the current capabilities and workflow of the known authors, the intended formats and uses of the textbook, and ideally choices that maximize the possibility for serendipitous reuses and collaborations. We are examining all of the following as possible tools and platforms
Existing Communities/Platforms
- Connexions
- Wikieducator (and/or Wikibooks)
Self-hosted Tools
- mediawiki (with Book extensions, cf http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Gadgets) (cf http://mediawiki.bccampus.ca)
- WordPress (with digress.it and/or Anthologize plugins)
- etherpad (cf http://abbott.bccampus.ca:9001/)
- booki (also available as free cloud service)
“Cloud”-based or ASP solutions
- Press Books
- LearnPub
- Universal Design for Learning Bookbuilder – K-12 focused, but interesting tool/community
- Bookriff
- Google Docs
- Zoho Docs
- PediaPress
- WriteBoard
- GlueJar – interesting model where authors and publishers choose a funding goal. Book lovers chip in to meet it, not unlike the idea of an Open Source “bounty”
- AcademicPub – not clear that it does allow you to publish your work for free, but interesting platform
- GrabMyBooks epub creator browser extension
Desktop eBook tools
Additional Background
- Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation
- What is a Booksprint?
- long list of eBook authoring tools
- A Study on 4 Textbook Distribution Models
- ONLINE TEXTBOOK COLLABORATION: STUDENT-AUTHORED ~ INSTRUCTOR-FACILITATED
Brian G. Mackie, Northern Illinois University, bmackie@niu.edu Wayne E. Mackie, Saginaw Valley State University, mackie@svsu.edu Sally Wakefield, Northern Illinois University, swakefield@niu.edu
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[...] on the funding, we’ve created a site to document the work and have been doing research on potential authoring models & platforms (see also the draft of my upcoming talk) as well as existing sources of open textbook [...]
[...] I still think that. But before we really got underway with our Open Textbook pilot, I kept scanning the horizon to see what other options might have come up since I found these. And boy am I glad I did, because [...]