Book covers are likely to be copyright-protected works in themselves, and also often contain third party ‘artistic works’. So, for example, Amazon reflects this in its terms and conditions. Copying these digital images and making them available to the public (such as pinning them onto Pinterest), without permission will be an infringement.
JISC Legal
DIY Multimedia Ebooks for Distance Students
Seeing as I constantly lose track of the comments I make on other peoples websites I think I may try and make a note here.
Read about how Phil Wood and Terese Bird from the University of Leicester are getting on with an interesting ebook student programme and then feel free to read my comments.
Event: Accessible Bristol launch
Last week I attended the launch of Accessible Bristol, a local group who are hoping to gather anybody with an interest or expertise around accessibility. After an introduction from Steve Hilton, director of futures for the Bristol City Council, there were three talks and here are my notes from their talks.
Leonie Watson, Director of Accessibility at Nomensa with a talk called Digital inclusion reasons, challenges and action
Reasons
- Liberty – Our day to day is now digital – Shopping, council services and travel
- Economy – 20 percent may not have access and this is money being lost
- It is digital common sense ( SEO, speed of access is important) to reach a wider and larger audience and is no longer a luxury.
Challenges
- People’s attitude
- Technology – we should ensure we kick out all the old technology that doesn’t aid accessibility
- Lack of education
Actions
- As a nation we can use the equality act, hopefully give the legislation more weight
- As individuals be vocal to call out bad practices and technology
- Change one thing about some technology that you have control over
Joshua marshall, Developer and accessibility lead for Gov.uk
- Digital by default without leaving anybody behind
- Getting 30 million visits a month which is the equivalent of everybody in the UK over 16yrs old
- Why should we care ?
- All gov.UK stuff needs to meet wcag 2.0
- They started from scratch to purposefully leave behing crap tech and make it inclusive from the start.
- Small teams, build fast and iterate, agile with a small a.
- Aim to deliver the minimal viable product and get it in front of users.
- Got developers? Ask really nicely or lie, cheat, beg, steal to get stuff done.
- Start small, making tiny changes is still a step in the right direction and won’t be noticed if you didn’t ask for permission.
- Add aria roles.
- Have an ideal. Not all gov guidelines are equal, a WCAG double aa may not be best just because it passes
- There is always more work to be done
- Gov are trying to help by being an example.
- They have the design principles
- Trying to position digital by default by April 2013 as a service standard similar to BIS.
- New and redesigned services that no need meet the standard will not be hosted on gov.UK
- If he can do it for millions so can you for our smaller audiences
- Gov.uk has had over 1000 releases since launch in October
- Keep it lean as much as possible, hence no images until everybody complains ha!
Tim Taylor
- Lloyds bank has around 103,000 employees and has been behind.
- Laying the foundation for IT accessibility
- Battery on phone dies…
The how and why of making ebooks out of conferences
Writing a few thousand words in the space of a couple of days is obviously a big effort, but there are a couple of reasons I don’t charge for the books. Firstly, although everything is written by me, the book exists because of the generosity of the people who have given their time to talk, and the people who took the time and risk of setting up the event. I’d hate people to think I was trying to profiteer off their efforts to make a quick buck by selling an ebook. Even if it only ever upset a couple of people, the tiny amount of money it would generate isn’t worth it.
Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop using the Web Audio API
Explore the BBC sound of the 1960s with our 4 demos of Radiophonic equipment, built with the new Web Audio API standard. Each demo comes with commented code, so you can learn how to build your own audio applications.
Craig Mod: Subcompact Publishing
… Zip drives ate floppies.
CDs ate Zips.
DVDs ate CDs.
SD cards ate film.
LCDs ate CRTs.
Telephony ate telegraphy.
Text messaging ate talking.
Tablets are eating our paper …
Grab a hot drink and read it NOW.
Update 24th Dec 2012 – video now available
Alan Cann: Thinking About Publication
In this post I’m going to try to set down my current thoughts about the evolution of academic publishing. This is very much a work in progress so please excuse me if it’s not entirely coherent.
Fraser Speirs: Thoughts on Amazon Whispercast
Recently Amazon announced – in the US only, naturally – Whispercast. Whispercast is an online tool that Amazon is marketing as a method of deploying Kindles in your school or business. Given my long-standing wish for a way to deploy electronic books to devices in a way that isn’t astronomically expensive or entirely crazy-making, I was naturally interested.
Comments from blogs in an ebook
I have just begun work on making an ebook using a blog as the source material. Almost immediately I stumbled across my first problem – how should I include blog comments and the related tags/categories?
My first thought is to simply include any comments at the end of the blog post (chapter) with a link to the original post in case any further comments are posted after the book is released.
I wonder what the copyright position is of this, if the blog is a flavour of creative commons does this include comments too?
When I decide what to do i’ll update this post.