![](bg2.png)
cultural diversity survival, as small publishing
houses are the ones more directly linked with
minority languages and cultures dissemination, and
with promoting independent thinking and points of
view (Carroll, 1985). But small publishing houses
have no power over the “digital ecosystem”, so they
have to ensure that their contents adapt to the
functionalities provided by the most common device
platforms, that their formats adapt to the ones
supported by their most common tools, and that their
distribution channels are easily accessible on them.
Moreover, they will have to adapt their tools and
their existing contents to future changes on all those
platforms. But small publishing houses suffer the
lack of tools adapted to this new scenery. Big
publishing houses have resources to develop self-
tailored tools for that purpose, but small publishing
houses have not.
In this article we introduce e|ditor, a platform
designed to provide publishing houses with a tool to
produce format-independent and device-independent
contents. It has been developed in collaboration with
small publishing houses whose markets range from
school and educational books, to pop-up books and
pocketbooks. We describe the requirements
identified and the approaches followed to face them,
as well as the rationale behind those decisions. We
also give a general view of the resulting platform.
2 BACKGROUND
Although there are tools available to create digital
contents, small publishers suffer the lack of tools
supporting the full creation process and aiming to a
wide range of book types.
Almost all the tools available for pocketbook
creation are meant for converting existing digital
contents to EPUB, an open e-book standard format
designed for reflowable content that makes use of
XHTML and CSS and is extensively supported by
current e-reader devices and software. One example
is the open source tool Calibre (Goyal, 2006), which
allows the conversion of a wide range of document
formats to the main e-book formats (EPUB, MOBI,
pdb, etc.). But just translating conventional contents
to EPUB is not the best way to take full advantage of
digital contents. SIGIL (Markovic, 2009) is one of
the few that supports e-book creation and can export
them to EPUB. But this desktop application is
designed only for pocketbook creation, does not
allow interactive content and has no support for
content reuse or collaborative edition.
Last versions of Adobe InDesign and
QuarkXPress support exporting to e-book formats.
But they do not create enhanced e-books. Instead,
they just convert plain paper books to plain e-books.
Apple offers iBooks Author for e-books creation,
but it is provided only to sell them through iTunes
Store, and cannot be exported outside it.
EXeLearning (Univ. of Auckland et al., 2006) is
an open source authoring application to assist
teachers in web content publishing. It is a desktop
application and allows exporting to SCORM format
and to self-contained XHTML web pages.
With regard to tools for creating digital educative
contents, the efforts from educative administrations
have led to the creation of tools like Cuadernia,
Constructor, JClick, Hot Potatoes or Ardora.
Cuadernia (Junta de Castilla la Mancha, 2008) and
Constructor (Junta de Extremadura, 2005) allow the
creation of several types of interactive activities and
their packaging following SCORM (a collection of
XML based standards used in web based e-learning).
JClick (Generalitat de Catalunya, 1992) provides a
set of computer applications to develop different
types of educational activities like puzzles,
associations, text exercises or crosswords.
Hot Potatoes (University of Victoria, 1998) is a suite
of six applications to create interactive jumbled-
sentence, crossword, short-answer, multiple-choice,
gap-fill and matching/ordering exercises. It can
export to SCORM format or as HTML.
Ardora (Bouzán Matanza, 2008) is an interactive
exercises creator. Its contents use HTML5, CSS3
and JavaScript, and can be exported to SCORM.
None of these applications support collaborative
work or “book collections” (where the book design
is common and uniform through the entire e-book
collection). All of them are meant for independent
authors that want to create a specific type of e-book
content and rarely (only SIGIL) support all the e-
book process. They are usually format-centric
designed, more centred in translating contents to a
specific format than in the content design. They are
neither meant for content reuse nor to ease future
content republishing in new formats or styles. They
are not web applications (centralizing the content
storage) and have to be deployed in the user PC,
what restricts the platforms that can be used for
edition (usually only Windows, Linux and Mac).
Even worst, only a few of them generate device
independent contents. Cuadernia and Constructor
create Flash contents, and JClick generates Java
Applets, limiting the platforms on which they can be
displayed. All these reasons make them unsuitable
for small publishing houses.
TowardsCommercialeBookProductioninSmallPublishingHouses
117