The beauty of a web 2.0 site is that your users innovate with the tools you give them.

We originally saw the site as a book publishing tool. But Jennifer Poulter, an educational author form Australia, saw in Sharing-Books a tool to publish one page books that she calls poster-poems as classroom aids to help students learn poetry and/or help teachers introduce discussion topics relevant to their classes. The form of the poster-poem has been received well and Jennifer's work has been used in classrooms around the world. One of our authors, Urs Dietrich, who wrote Miki Makes a Promise, reported that on his last trip to Odessa, he visited a classroom where Jennifer's poster-poems were used to teach English.

Now it is author Timothy Schenk who published last week a surprise he had hinted was coming. Timothy has previously illustrated two poster-poems written by Jennifer. He also wrote and illustrated My Pretty Pointe Shoes that won the second prize in the July 2009 Simone Woods Awards. This time Timothy published our first talking book: Fan of Halloween.

Fan of Halloween demonstrates Timothy's technical know-how as he took advantage of a new feature Adobe introduced to PDF files, the ability to insert flash files. So as you download what looks like a normal and relatively small PDF file, you also download a little movie and a recording of Timothy reading his poem. When you click on the image of the pumpkin on the page, the pumpkin moves in as Timothy reads the poem.

This is very exciting and very promising. We deliberately limited the file type of our books to PDF so that universal distribution would be easy and that given the small size of the files, our books could be downloaded in low bandwidth regions of the world. Obviously this limited the books in being two dimensional. Now we can see the form of the e-book developing new and valuable attributes. Imagine a PDF e-book where a child can click on a cow and hear it go Moo! Or have an alphabet book read to them or having technical details added to a science book.

We thank Timothy for innovating with this first book and showing the way to one more imaginative use of Sharing-Books.com

Labels: children books, digital publishing industry, e-books, Halloween, J.R. Poulter, new features, picture books, publishing, teaching english, technology, Timothy Schenk

Another site update on Sharing Books has gone out, and some users may have had a minor interruption of service around 9:30am PST. This update brings the following things to the Sharing Books website:

• Cleaner, quicker, and in theory more accurate search using quick search and advanced searching features on the site.
• Some improvements to some backend processes.
• For our Volunteer Librarians your navigation should now cease it's magical disappearing act.
• New and improved buttons for us administrators of the site to download your book and text versions of your book without having to download from the frontend of the site or the DB directly!

Not the most exciting of updates I know, but these changes do let us get into a cleaner, quicker workflow on administration of the site. That means our book creators should be getting faster turnaround times for ISBNs and the like. It also means we can start moving faster with anyone we strategically partner with, getting them content in a much more timely manner.

Labels: new features, news, site outages, site upgrades