Proposal: Creating a Class All About Ebooks

In this time of the digital age, people have had to make a lot of adjustments to a new digital culture. One of these adjustments is to how people are reading and consuming content; it’s not just in print format anymore. With today’s technologies, people can have access to lots of information virtually anywhere, provided there is an internet connection.  People read texts on their phones, computers, tablets, and e-readers.

Ebooks are gaining more and more popularity. To adapt to this change from a print culture to a digital culture, there needs to be a greater understanding of how ebooks work and also how they are published. To ease into this adaption, I suggest that universities start offering more classes regarding how to publish ebooks.

Benefits to learning about ebooks will be of great use to those who are interested in the future of the publishing business and those who are interested in self-publishing. To start, people should get used to the idea of using them. Some people are just not used to the technology quite yet. Getting them used to the technology as it is now will prepare readers for the future when books will be on a digital reader and when they will be more interactive, such as infusing images, video, and audio with the text.

To be prepared for studying literature in the digital age, we should know how to consume and create content in the form of ebooks. Despite the resistance of a few traditional-styled people, this is where the technology is going. People who are interested in publishing, commercial or self, should especially be adapt to this new format, because it is still changing and has the potential to change even more. So, as an editor who is excited about the future of this technology, I propose that a class about ebooks, how to use them and how to make them, should be an added class to the editing minor.

UPDATED: (TWO of my) Final Product(s)

Like I said in my last post, my final project has kind of broken into many different pieces, but I made good on the promise from my proposal and made a little ebook of my essays on games and literature, which you can find here. It's in epub format, which most e-readers, tablets, and smartphones should support with the right app, or you can read it on the web through Firefox or Chrome with the right add-on/extension. A good Chrome e-reader add-on I found is Readium.

Also, I can't post my paper on the classical unities in videogames online because it's going to be published at First-Person Scholar, but here's a link to a doc of it.

If e-readers aren't your thing, all of the essays are also available (along with some other stuff I've written on games) at my personal gaming blog, Complicate the Narrative.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy!

E-books or Printed Books?

The future of publishing is in e-books, at least that’s what I keep reading. However, my professors in editing and publishing hesitate to make that same claim. And, after doing a bit of research, I can see why. Yes, publishing electronic content has become very huge; people can download this content onto their smartphones or tablets and take it with them anywhere.  

Most of the users who read e-books will still buy physical copies of books as well. I, too, am one of those people. I have a Kindle Fire, and I love that I can purchase books without needing to go to a bookstore, which is great because the nearest Barnes and Noble is thirty minutes away from my house. That being said, I don’t buy a lot of books on my Kindle. I get the public domain books because they are free, and I will occasionally buy a bargain book when the price is right. However, when it comes to a book that I know I will want to read again or lend to friends or family members, I will buy the printed book. I know some people that will only buy the physical copies of books. And, despite the convenience of e-books, they will never consider letting go of their physical books or trying a device such as an e-reader.

This article from the Wallstreet Journal reported at the beginning of the year that brought up a good point: e-books are just another format. They serve a different purpose from the physical copies of books. So, just because there is a large, growing market for e-books, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the market for printed books will shrink and disappear for good.