I know LiveCode, being so powerful, can handle complex projects
involving lots of logic and structures, but is it suitable / practical
to use it for e-book production?
Saludos,
Javier Miranda V.
Like Jim said and Colin implied, "It depends on what you mean by eBook. "
We are deep into eBooks here. Probably more than you want to know here,
but here goes anyway:
What LiveCode can do or not do for you in the production process depends
both on your source content and target channels.
If you are "man in the middle" with a client shoving you MSWord docs,
images and files and they want to deliver to:
1) ePub for iBooks or Adobe Digital Editions
2) .mobi for Kindle or .epub for Nook
then you might find your best tools are to create the book in Adobe
indesign and then outsource the job to a company in India that
specializes in creating the above formats (for incredibly low prices,
e.g. 75 cents a page) Atritex in Chennai. (amazing team there) The above
formats are .xhtml files with some metadata files + CSS that all
conform to a relatively dumbed down html mark up but very precise.
(see our first offerings here: all free:
http://www.himalayanacademy.com/donations/ddd
LiveCode is really not the platform for creating ePub (mobi, nook)
because the html-text of fields is very limited. And to code all the
tools for that in LiveCode when InDesign does it for you automatically
(more or less) would be a bit insane.
That said, I use LiveCode for decades to drive in house publishing
production processes. e.g. for eBook i have a widget that can upzip the
epub, get an index of the files and pass off the launching to BBEdit,
save the .xhtml files, then launch them for preview in Safari (which let
's you see pretty much everything you will on the iPad except for page
breaks.)
i.e. Livecode is just acting as a file manager and GUI for work flows
and not really doing anything at all for the "product."
I was going to develop this even more, but then, thanks to someone here
on this list pointing out about getting artwork done on eLance, we
found this incredible company in Chennai and outsourced the work to
them... via eLance
I'm sooooo glad, because getting in the trenches with epub format felt
like horrible neanderthal regression to html circa 1998.
see latest releases here:
http://www.himalayanacademy.com/resources/ebooks/
Atritex turned and entire issue of Hinduism Today magazine into an ebook
in less than a week! We got back to them with a few refinement requests
and we had a finished product in under 3 weeks for less thatn $2.00 a
page... and here our team of 6 had been sweating out days and days of
learning curve learning how to dumb down complex publications to ebook
formats, going nuts over minute details of getting CSS to just deliver a
proper margin underneath and image on the iPad, "Oh Gawd Please!"
really, you don't want to go there if you don't have to... It was
painful but now we outsource it.
But frankly, even though we are focused now on moving *all* of our print
content in to the above epub formats, as a matter of course, so to speak
on our road map, all indications from early deployment are that while
you will always have a segment of people who just like to sit back and
"read stuff" in their old comfortable chair with a Kindle or at
breakfast with their iPad, the next generation really does not consume
information like that any more, even if you stick a SomeCoolNovel.epub
in their face in the iBook store, they necessarily won't go for it. Over
40 maybe... still like to read walls of type... And don't think they are
not smart and don't think "they don't read any more." both are
stereotypes that miss the truth, it's just that "walls of words." (Pages
and pages of type with occasional images) are no longer very magnetic
for many of them.
ON THE OTHER HAND
If you are not man in the middle and are also the "creative" you could
certainly create marvelous interactive LiveCode stacks, which would
include enough reading material and some kind of "pagination" model that
fit the old paradigm just enough for you to still call it a "book" and
deploy it as an application and then just label it "eBook" ... the young
generation (freshmen at college thru two-five years out from graduation)
won't care what you call it.
You can check out my still popular:
http://himalayanacademy.com/resources/children/dws_youth/
(made in 2002, still runs!)
get the stack if you want here:
go stack url
"http://himalayanacademy.com/resources/children/dws_youth/dwsYouthCourse.rev";
If I added a little sound and video to that thing it would be suddenly "hot"
But, it would not be accepted in iBooks or other eBook channels that
require the epub or mobi standard for content.
So, are these things really an "eBooks" or an "applications" with lots
of information and type?
So, even though we *are* going to get all publications dumbed down to
*.xhtml-epub... internally we probably will be moving in the other
direction, right now we are already taking edu KeyNotes, segmenting
these and putting up on YouTube.
I've been waiting for 2 years! for the RevWeb Plug in.. and then we can
leverage this new model for content delivery... but I don't think we can
call them eBooks. And, not to forget. even today, people are
downloading my few standalone stacks some made nearly 10 years ago for
delivery off line to kids classes (via PC and projectors) if we get a
revWeb plug in for browsers on Android and/or we can deliver standalone
apps to the new wave of tablets,
Much of whether we can do much in this direction (for those not really
focused on iOS) depends if LiveCode gets their web-multi-media end of
the product up enough, soon enough. They are 2-5 years behind the rest
of the digital world in this arena. And "iOS Fever" is only delaying it
even more....e.g. a a smart young newbie with the chops for coding,
buying this product for creative content delivery, will be shocked to
discover he cannot even play multiple sounds simultaneously. (oops,
don't get me going again -- on the multi-media issues...)
But I still keep hoping. Meanwhile for production-business tools
LiveCode is the best.
Aum Shanti,
Sivakatirswami
Kauai's Hindu Monastery
www.himalayanacademy.com
www.hinduismtoday.com
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