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The Promise and Peril of ePubA Case Study from The University of South FloridaDepartment of English & RhetoricFirst-Year Composition Program

+Hello. My name is... Sarah Beth Hopton

Ph.D. student at the University of South Florida in Tampa [Go Bulls!] specializing in Rhetoric + Technology.

Former ad agency owner & current contract designer and eLearning developer working with a number of education clients to design & deliver electronic content: courses, collateral, & research.

Over the summer, I co-produced USF’s First Year Composition program pilot ePub: Network, Collaborate and Compose.

+A short history of the electronic reader/book movement

SOURCE: Wikipedia (E-book) (Nook) (Amazon_Kindle) (iPad)

1971 Project Gutenberg

1998 Soft Book & Rocket

2000 Microsoft Reader

2006 Sony Reader

2007 Amazon Kindle

2009 Kindle 2 & BN Nook

2010 Apple iPad & Kindle DX & Nook Color

2011 iPad 2 & Kindle Fire & Nook Tablet & Nook Simple Touch

+Started to see headlines like this:

“Planned Shutdown of U. of Missouri Press Underscores Shift in Traditional Publishing”

“Rice U. Hopes Mix of Grants and ‘Add Ons’ Will Support Free Textbooks”

“Start-Up Hopes to Create Free Digital Versions of Published Books”

“iPads change landscape of learning.”

+The rise of ePubs and Electronic books/readers signaled the death of traditional publishing…

“E-books' popularity crimps demand for paper.”

“How tablets will change higher education.”

“Will the new Kindles change the game for tablets in education?”

“Should tablet PCs replace print textbooks?”

+…Or did it?

“Students Find E-Textbooks ‘Clumsy’ and Don’t Use Their Interactive Features”

“Students Spent [Only] Slightly Less on Textbooks Last Year, Survey Finds”

“Why College students still prefer print over eBooks”

“Digital learning may benefit students, but it’s expensive to implement.”

+Directive for most of higher Ed was clear: leverage technology to drive down costs for students USFs TAP Program

Mission: to drive down the rising cost of education by connecting students and faculty with alternatives to full-price traditional textbooks. Average full-price cost of textbook: $200 Students are told to estimate $1000 per semester for

books. Per credit hour of tuition in-state: $514

Partners with EDUCAUSE + 28 other Universities + McGraw Hill, Inc. to deliver eText model

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1600 students enrolled and they get free access to electronic versions of their textbooks

Optional: purchase print version for under $34.00 via McGraw-Hill.

Courseload is a digital materials and distribution/learning collaboration tool

What it does: Embedded into BB Allows students to use their eTextbooks (e.g. highlight/annotate)

CourseLoad 101

+How we once managed our publication program

Past: contracted with traditional publishing companies to develop textbooks + teaching guides

Received $4 rebate for each book sold to students, new for X

Generated approx. $15 per yr for ENC 1101 and 10-12 K for ENC 1102

Labor costs: 200 hrs per graduate student (2) per book

Used $ to pay graduate labor, tuition, travel/conferences, scholarships, renovations/upgrades

+How we designed the pilot program for ePub

Train in-house labor (graduate students) to design ePub

Charge students small fee of $10-15 for access to all content, packaged as a “resource” not a textbook

Keep all fees as income

Potential (if everything goes according to plan) is estimated income is at $60,000 before expense per title

For an English department that’s game changing bread

+What worked

Our partnership with Courseload came just in time

Had the process of using graduate labor to design materials

Knowledgeable experts in Joe Moxley and Monica Metz-Wiseman

In-house technology staff at Media Innovation Team

Produced beautiful, peer-reviewed PDF for Courseload

+What didn’t work

Started ePub conversion too late

Understaffed

Experimented with resources/technology too little/too late

Institutional knowledge of production/technology left

No measurement standards

No accessibility standards

+Where we’re at now

Pilot ePub slated for Spring 2013

Funding set aside for graduate student training/work

Talent identified

Processes/protocols in production

Will have numbers back from Courseload pilot

+What you get with an ePub or Why go to all this trouble

“Reflowable” text (meaning: words resize based on screen dimension)

Images are “inline” and images can be raster or vector

Digital Rights Management is supported

CSS styling is supported

Out-of-line and inline XML islands extends functionality

+What we learned about planning an ePub pilot

Start twice as early as you think you must

Think resources not textbooks

Learn from Hollywood: run a pilot

Leverage graduate students and the appeal of “free” software and training

Set standards first (software)

How will test before/after? You’re testing platforms/devices/reader software and you’re

building style sheets/accessibility standards/workflow

+What we learned about managing the process of producing an ePub Just say “no” to exclusivity, proprietary vendors, limited

terms for content

You can’t ignore accessibility

Read the fine print (on everything)

Build & design for multiple platforms, but not all devices

+An unreasonably short look at the problems using Apple’s Pages Pages can’t, ironically, insert “page breaks” in an ePub

Whichever style is used first will be the style Pages uses to parse chapters.

If you rename the “chapter number” style it’s considered any other style and looses its original effect, which split the xhtml files and rendered “page breaks.”

TOCs are ignored in ePub export

You can have hundreds of images to your doc but if you exceed 1 MB per chapter the ePub won’t display them – Oh happy day

Tables are problematic

The moral of this story: learn Adobe InDesign 5.5

+What we learned about managing the “politics” of ePub

Read the fine print: For eBooks with a List Price at or between $2.99 and $9.99

65% of the List Price For eBooks with a List Price at or below $2.98 or at or

greater than $10.00 (but not more than $199.99 and not less than $0.99) 40% of the List Price

This is the wild west: learn what the terms mean (tech fee funds/resource vs. textbook) so you have more freedom to experiment and shift dollars for cutting-edge projects

Ultimately, we will do what USF tells us to do but students have a voice too

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Cautious optimism and the view from the edge

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Thank you.