Future Publishing: E-Book Builder Trials

I have been trying several e-book building tools at the EdLab this week, including formal online publishing tools and informal personalized tools.

I want to pull them out here to initiate some comparisons.

MagCloud -- The above four-page trial magazine was created via MagCloud, incorporating partial material from the TC Assets Project. It is actually an online magazine converter, via directly uploading your PDF documents to the website. The PDFs must be created according to certain page formats it requires (e.g., templates in Adobe InDesign). It costs nothing to publish a magazine on the website. It only charges for printing and delivery. It is a nice website to publish and promote a magazine. Potential readers/buyers can see a preview of the magazine on the website.

formatpixel -- It is a formal online publishing tool which enables users to design the book online from scratch compared with MagCloud. However, it only offers 512k to free users, so I am not able to further try it out after uploading two pictures.

Sophie -- As said in a previous post, it is a promising tool for publishing multimedia book, with the function of embedding audio and video files. Originally developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, the development of Sophie has been continued by University of Southern California which owns an avant-garde digital academic journal named VECTORS. Sophie currently is used by Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press and the Computers and Composition Digital Press at Utah State University. Sophie is not easy to use during my trial, because it is a relatively complex and professional tool which needs the devotion of time to get familiar with, like the Adobe design series. It is a free open software and Sophie 2.0 will be issued in mid-October! Currently, I am exploring how it can be embedded online.

SmileBox -- It is a popular tool suitable for informal personalized publishing. Its products include photo albums, crapbooks, calendars, and e-cards, with hundreds of templates. A lot of schools use it with lower graders to design school-life books with simple pictures and texts. This software is also completely free and can be posted online.

ComicLife -- It is also a popular tool, with users such as teachers and students. Compared with SmileBox, it is more like a book builder and it involves more design work without temples provided. Its focus is comic book. See here if interested in knowing more about what a comic book via ComicLife might look like. This tool is not free. It offers a one-month free trial.

Adobe InDesign -- This is probably the most commonly used book design tool known to the publishing field. Its functions are definitely more refined than any of the above tools. MagCloud, formatpixel, and Sophie all have the online publishing function. It seems to me so far that a book/magazine designed via InDesign can only be published via MagCloud.