Aladdin and the "wonderful" lamp

I read Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp over the weekend...let me just say Disney wasn't exactly true to the original tale....its not really a child's story.  The tale was about 100 pages long, read mostly on my laptop as well as an iPad.

Editorial:
I was surprised to find out that it is supposed to take place in China, though I wonder if that isn't a historical inaccuracy due to the fact that this version of the Arabian Tales was translated by a Brit in the late 19th century. I suspect the translator may have misidentified some of the important regional details.   I also feel like there  are also some subtle Christian undertones which would not have been in the original stories!  All in all, it is an interesting tale and follows Aladdin's life from impoverished "street" kid, to husband of a Princess, all made possible by the discovery of a magical lamp and the Genie within it.

My Process:

I edited a few portions of the text in the tales that used overtly offensive language.

I selected three pictures which illustrated some of the pivotal moments in the story and uploaded them into the epub file.   I linked them into the story by editing the XML document.

I created an Editors Page with information about our group: Matt, Kisha, Ebonee and myself to be included at the end of the book.

I validated the documents and uploaded them to our Basecamp account.  [I'll blog about the next steps and meeting recap....]

Takeaways:

Though the creation and validation process wasn't difficult using Sigil software, I did run into issues when I added the illustrations. For some reason Sigil used a syntax I couldn't figure out on my own, and had to use their "insert image" utility in order for the pictures to properly display.

It's actually pretty fun making an ebook!

Nicki

This Story Is Long...

So I started reading my story, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, this morning and I just want to say that this is pretty long. Or maybe I'm suffering from adult ADD. It has literally taken me an hour to get half way through the story. It's not a bad story, it just goes on and on and on and on. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish this book in the next hour and start figuring out what to do next. The reading continues...

From Edits to Images

Boy did we get a lot accomplished! After selecting the four stories that we would be featuring in our Ebook, we each chose which stories we would be individually responsible for editing and finding relevant images for. In the midst of our collective individual efforts while in class, we capitalized on great team-building through song (led by yours truly of course).

Anyway, by the end of our session today we had successfully uploaded epub versions of all four stories to Basecamp--our project management system of choice. In addition, we also found quite a few images that we could use within our finished ebook.

Overall, we had a blast singing and searching and trimming our files down to something Sigil would accept without crashing (ahem, Nicki).

Until next time!

Details/Discussions

Details/Discussions: 

Our first official meeting was held October 9th.  We outlined major tasks and goals to accomplish, as well as next steps.  The book we will be creating in .epub format is the collection of Persian folk tales known as "Arabian Nights" or "One Thousand and One Nights."  Originally written in Arabic, the tales have origins dating as early back as the 9th century, and have been translated into English and other languages around the world for centuries.

Some of the most appealing aspects of turning "Arabian Nights" into an ebook:

• Content Appeal: these tales transcend era, age, culture, and audience as most folk tales do, they are parables that can keep the interest of a wide range of readers.
• Public Domain: ancient stories, no copyright! 
• Illustrations: as vivid short stories, they provide the opportunity for ample illustrations which will make for a visually appealing ebook.
• Collection of stories:  as they are a collection of tales, we have the ability to pick and choose which stories to include. This also makes outlining the architecture of the book a little easier. 

Welcome!

Introduction: 

Welcome to our blog! For our e-publishing course, our group has been tasked with creating an .epub format  ebook from scratch. This blog will follow the process of creating the ebook from inception to presentation. 

The assignment has a 3 week deadline, and we'll be utilizing Basecamp to manage the project.