Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ What is a “book” in the age of the web? (Part 1 of 5)

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

It's a good question. I want to turn my course into a book. But when I look at book platforms, like PressBooks, say, none of them do what I want to do with the material. That's why I agree with Hugh McGuire when he says "while I think books, and in particular digital textbooks still matter now, our idea of the "book" must continue to evolve to deliver more." Freeing them from the shackles of commercial publishers would be a start. Pressbooks does that. But easing the navigation would help. Better mechanisms for design, and the integration of multimedia. Connecting the book to a database, and making it expandable. Embedded code (a la Jupyter notebooks, but without the complexity of juggling Python versions and environments). Versioning and collaborative authoring. Dynamic reference managing, with cross navigation from one book to the next. Via Alan Levine.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 23, 2024 11:39 a.m.

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