In February, 2012 we came together in the SCoPE community to learn about what is involved in writing and publishing e-books. As part of the process we began to assemble an e-book about e-books. It’s still a work in progress!

We tackled the HOW part of writing ebooks in this Web Conference:
eBook Authoring Strategies and Platforms (Recording no longer available).
As with all SCoPE seminars, our discussion was archived and remains available for afterthoughts.
This event was organized in partnership with eCampusAlberta Professional Learning.
Facilitator: Richard Schwier
Curators / Researchers: Hilda Anggraeni and Diana Chan
Web Conference facilitator: Scott Leslie
Web Conference moderator Randy LaBonte

Description

I’m no expert, but I’ve written a few books and most recently a free e-book. I found the process to be similar in many ways to other books I had written, but different in some pretty interesting ways. I thought it would be interesting in this SCoPE seminar to discuss our experiences in writing e-books and e-publications. Is the experience of writing similar to other types of writing we’ve done, or does it differ in some important ways? Did you discover a new twist to your writing voice? Did your Muse carry an iPad? What are some of the creative and technical affordances and stumbling blocks you’ve encountered? What software did you use that was helpful (or not helpful)? Did you write the book for profit or free distribution, and how did you promote it? What would you do differently if you were starting over from scratch?
You can see that this will probably be a pretty free-wheeling and wide-ranging conversation.
But here’s the hook.
We would like to turn our discussion into an e-book. That’s right, and you’re a co-author if you contribute to the discussion. We don’t know what form it will take exactly — that depends on where our discussion takes us and what we talk about. But we are going to try to turn it into an e-publication and distribute it free of charge to anyone who wants it.
Because we will be publishing this as an e-pub, feel free to contribute stories, poems, examples, advice, audio files, videos, animations, photos, and drawings — just be sure you own the rights to the material or provide proper attribution to any Creative Commons material you submit.  And if you say anything you don’t want to include, let us know.
I’m looking forward to learning from you, and writing WITH you.