Oliver Wise presenting how to use The People’s E-book.
Oliver Wise, together with Eleanor Hanson are the co-founders of The Present Group, a creative studio creating affordable and sustainable models for funding artists. In their first three years, their subscription art project has channeled over $20,000 toward funding artist projects, stipends, and development of critical essays. In May 2010 they began a web hosting project where a portion of the fees fund prizes for contemporary artists. Hosting clients get to vote on the recipient of each grant. At Off the Press Oliver presented their latest project, in collaboration with Hol Art Books, The People’s E-book, a free
The goal, Oliver said, was to make the People’s E-book as simple as possible to encourage and facilitate experimentation with the medium. Given the EPUB’s finicky nature, Oliver and his colleagues decided to strip it down to bare essentials: title, cover image and page(s). In order to make The People’s E-book as user-friendly as possible, instead of Markdown, it uses a WYSIWYG interface. This, however, created some problems, since WYSIWYG, being designed to work in browsers, offers a range of options which would not work on e-readers. To prevent any potential problems with display and re-flowability, the WYSIWYG had to be restricted to a certain extent.
The choice of EPUB as the format was justified by the following :
Oliver Wise demonstrates the use of The People’s E-book
Oliver expressed the hope that maybe one day EPUB will take on a life of its own, like the GIF format, with thousands of people around the world self-identifying themselves as GIF artists. One of the further experiments undertaken by Oliver and Eleanor with EPUB format is the Streambooks, a tool allowing to convert any Tumblr blog into an e-book.
You can find a PDF of his original presentation here: Presentation Oliver Wise
Follow Oliver on Twitter : http://beta.thepeoplesebook.net/