Final Project: Experimenting with the Future of the Book

               A friend of mine has just finished writing one of the most wonderful YA novels that I have ever read. Currently, she’s looking for an agent to publish the book through traditional channels, but recently (thanks to the exposure to such things I’ve had in this course) the two of us have been talking about publishing the book as an e-book sometime in the coming year and a half. I figured that doing a digital experiment would be the perfect way to get a head start on this project, while fulfilling the requirements for this course and, thus, the germ of a final project was born. The project that I have proposed to Professor Galey involves coding this e-book and adding sound and images (the kinds of things that only e-books – the future of the book – can provide). We’ve commissioned a mutual friend of ours (an artist) to draw chapter pictures and have been searching through creative commons/open license music to find things to include in the project. At the same time, I’m also sensing that I might be making an epub format “book” for my final project for Sara Grimes’ Remix Culture course, where I intend to add video and audio to include the “voice of the author” into my project. Both of these are a little ambitious for someone who had no previous coding experience before the encoding challenge – but I figure, what the heck? That’s what experimentation is all about, right?

                So far, I have transferred the word file of my friend’s book into calibre, where I can play around with the code. I’ve also started to collect the image, video, and sound files that will be necessary to create the finished epub files and have looked into how incorporating sound and video into an epub3 format can be accomplished through a few tutorials. It looks like I’ll be using a few Adobe applications (which are thankfully free for 30 days) and Sigil to complete this project as well (which is excellent, because it will give me some minor experience with all of these platforms).

                The second part of my project will involve putting the choices that I make in coding these things into conversation with some of the discussions of the future of the book we’ve encountered this semester. I haven’t spent too much time thinking about which readings I might engage with, but I figure that will become more obvious as I engage with the coding side of these projects. Suggestions, of course, are very welcome!