Alpha Group Meeting

Having decided to meet outside of class on Sunday morning at Starbucks, our caffeinated group plunged into work on our Mother Goose eBook project. Our outlined tasks for the day included adding the numerous illustrations that populated the original text, incorporating a CSS stylesheet into our otherwise plain text, finalizing our editorial decisions, and writing our forward for the eBook. At each step of our work, we planned to ensure that our eBook rendered correctly in the Calibre program.

In the midst of attempting to insert the CSS stylesheet, we encountered the major issue of our CSS stylesheet not linking appropriately to the eBook content. After pursuing several avenues of online inquiry, we contacted our professor, Arnie Grossblatt, through Skype. Ever helpful, Arnie promptly talked us through the process and assisted us in trouble shooting our project. We were also able to clarify several other issues such as the rendering of the Table of Contents, the cover page, and the Sigil recognition of the illustrations.

Inspired once more, our group began to fix the issues we had encountered. We inserted the Mother Goose coloring pages, wrote a new CSS sheet, formatted our table of contents, and decided upon the "look" that we wanted for each portion of the eBook. We also selected several devices profiles to test our eBook with through the Adobe Device Center program.  Arnie soon "called" us on Skype to further clarify the remedy for our illustration errors. 

While it seemed that our project was finally coming together smoothly, "Le Maitre Chat," the french version of the "Puss in Boots" tale, generated an error. The only viable solution to the error was the reinsertion and reformatting of the entire story. The "Le Maitre Chat" error transfered to a Table of Contents matter that was discovered and rectified. A small celebration ensued.

Moving once more to the editorial decisions, we explored methods to adjust our font style and color choices. Although we enjoyed the maroon we had originally selected for our chapter and section headings, we decided to experiment with replacing the maroon with green for the headings in an attempt to the eBook content to the cover page color scheme. Unfortunately, the green was hideous and the decision to keep the maroon was made.   

The testing phase of the project did not run very smoothly either.  The Adobe Device Center program does not like the ePub file format. The links to various testing websites also did not work.  The ePub file did render correctly in Firefox, however.  Through various family connections, we were able to attempt testing our ePub file on an iPod Touch. Unfortunately, the process did not work due to communication issues. A third Skype conversation with Arnie resulted in the realization that as our file is complete, including our metadata, that we can test our file in class on Thursday.

        

Alpha Group Work

This week, our group corresponded on BaseCamp to lay the groundwork for our project and discuss the concept of adding value to ebooks. After agreeing on the content we will use for our ebook, Mother Goose fairy tales, we discussed several editorial decisions. We decided to segment the ebook by fairy tale, making each story a new heading/chapter in our TOC. We will be adding images to accompany the text, and will be adding corresponding French translations for each tale. We decided not to delineate between pages in any way, as these do not translate to every ebook format, and embedded page numbers would be distracting and unnavigable.

During class tonight, we are uploading all our text content to Sigil and creating the different sections. Becky did a great job of playing with Sigil and figuring out how to drop content into the program. As we upload, we are reformatting the text (removing page numbers, unnecessary punctuation). Once we have the content uploaded, we will discuss placement of images. We briefly discussed adding coloring book images to the text. Right now, we're still getting a handle on the basic mechanics of Sigil and figuring out what our option are for taking the design of our book to a less basic level. We decided not to split up the content in order to complete the project, but rather to work on it as a group, on one computer. We found this method allows us to make faster, more collaborative editorial decisions.

As we uploaded the French translation, we noticed that it lacked the same neat formatting as the English version. Therefore, Andrea spearheaded the effort to ensure that the two French format matched the English as closely as possible (similar headings, indentations, removing hard returns). Fortunately, we have a French speaker, Erin, to help us understand what we're looking at!

The next step: deciding on a style sheet, images to incorporate in the text, and investigating other design options.