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Instructor Makerspace – Digital Textbooks

by | Jan 31, 2014 | Instructor Makerspace, The Exchange

In our second ever Instructor Makerspace, we explored ways to bring down the cost of college while at the same time creating customized textbooks for your courses through the creation of eBooks.   With so many important works in the public domain, you can easily create customized ePubs using Sigil containing guiding questions, analysis, and other information that you would like to make available to your students as they read.  The custom eBooks that you create with Sigil work on all platforms and can contain images, audio, and video as well.

If the majority of your students are Mac users, iBooks Author makes it easy to create slick and beautiful iBooks with rich interactive content.  Despite creating rich content, currently iBooks created with iBooks Author can only be viewed on Apple devices.  However, non-Apple users can view iBook as a PDF.  Unfortunately, though exporting iBooks as PDFs preserves the aesthetic qualities of your iBook, it eliminates much of the interactive function.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for full-featured open textbooks that are ready to go, there are a number of open textbook providers.  These providers make high quality textbooks available for the low, low price of FREE.  Many of these providers also make it possible to customize  textbooks so that only the chapters and content that you will use are contained in your textbook.

For more ideas about developing Digital Textbooks, checkout our Digital Textbooks makerspace support page.

Come on down to the Exchange on Fridays this semester where we will play with and explore the following topics together.  We’ll play, innovate, have fun, and see what we can create together!

Circuit vector image by JuliaBlumen