A number of people expressed some interest in my SI791 independent study course covering EPUB3 and writing a Sakai book in EPUB3. Here is the blog post where I announced the course:
Unfortunately I bit off more than I could chew over the break in deciding to build my own open source MOOC environment based on IMS LTI and Moodle and teaching a Python MOOC with my own infrastructure starting January 14 (yikes).
I don’t think I can also pull off three entertaining hours of lecture per week on EPUB3 every week. I really needed to get a bit of a head-start on the class before it started and all my energy was consumed building MOOC software and learning the Raspberry Pi.
But all is not lost – I talked to Jim Eng and we hope to do a series of meetings at the Library around EPUB3 so we can still come up to speed a bit later in the semester. I am still going to move things gently forward as soon as the semester starts. If we set these up – I will announce them on si.all so SI folks can come if they like.
I still want to start writing the Sakai book in github. I have a new possible strategy after some recent experience with Calibre and EPUB – It occurs to me that the right way to do an EPUB3 might be to just to a constrained HTML 5 book that is carefully constrained so as to allow easy automated conversion into EPUB3 format through Calibre (or similar). If it will work it is a lot easier than trying to maintain it all in EPUB3 all the time. Maybe this will lead to an EPUB3 “shim” for the HTML 5 version of the book… All are just working ideas for now.
Sorry to back out on this…