Raven's Roost

Gadgets ‘N Gear: Book’em, Danno!

// August 21st, 2009 // Gadgets, People, SecondLife

Hawaii Five-O’s classic closer, as McGarrett tells his trusty sidekick to take the bad guys away, just wouldn’t be the same as “Notecard’em, Danno!” Similarly, while a lot of good information can be sent around effectively using a notecard, it’s just not the same as a book.

You can’t format notecard text much nor can you include photos. Enter the SL book, where each page is a texture, and you have complete control over its appearance. You’ve seen them around I’m sure. You can rez them and flip through the pages or wear them as a hud to do the same.

I recently wanted to publish a calendar (or more properly, and unCalendar)  for fun and give it as a gift to a friend. I’ve also been considering publishing technical and marketing information for my biz as an in-world book, so it was time to dig into book publishing.

The Basic Book

Basic book technology is available from a number of vendors. I’ll mention three:

• IntelliBook, by Intelli Group
• Thinc Book, by THiNC
• Master Animated Book, by J&M Creations

Book publishing in SL is pretty much the same for all these technologies, with some minor twists. You get a blank book, which is modifiable, and drop textures into the book’s contents. Each texture is one face of a page, and the order the pages sort in determine the order of the pages.

You can set the cover textures and spine using either specially named textures in the contents or via a config card. Once you’ve got your content set up and the master book looking the way you want, you run it through a publishing script. This produces a copy of the book that is not modifiable, but is transfer / copy, that you can distribute freely.

In the case of IntelliBook and Thinc, the authoring is done using a separate publishing machine (pictured above). In the case of the J&M technology, the master book does its own publishing.

IntelliBook and Thinc sell blank books in a five pack for 350L, while J&M’s master book is copiable you don’t need to buy subsequent blanks. You might think having to buy blanks is a big deal, but when you’re paying 10L a page for the texture upload, the cost of the blanks fades into the distance fast.

Using PowerPoint to Author

Photoshop is great for detailed work, but if you need to do a 100 page document with more text and diagrams than pretty pictures, you need something else to author your content.

I’ve been in high tech management so long, the tool I can breeze in faster than the wind is PowerPoint. For technical explanations that include graphics and diagrams, it’s hard to beat. So I set up a new PowerPoint template and set the page up so it was square.

I tweak away on color and fonts and background graphics, aiming for a clean look, and when I’ve got some test pages, a basic cover and back I use the PowerPoint export to .png format to dump the slides as images.

Now, Slide1.png, Slide2.png etc. is going to be hard to keep track of in my SL inventory, so I kick up another handy freebie tool I use, the Bulk Rename Utility out of the UK. This tool is a geek’s dream for handling bulk file renames.

Once I’ve got the files renamed, I bulk upload them into SL and drop them into the book, configure the cover graphics and bam. It’s ready to go.

Stepping Things Up for Serious Publications

For my purposes of preparing promotional materials, technical documentation and classroom take aways, the basic book stuff is fine. For serious publishers however, I have to say the IntelliGroup have taken things to a whole new level with their magazine product line.

Larger publications will benefit from a table of contents. For publishers serving advertisers, these products enable landmarks, slurls, notecards and URLs. There is a set of tabs on the edges of each page that indicate which of these offers is available when the page is shown. The higher end magazine product enables links from anywhere on the page, animated ads and even gifts to be offered straight from the magazine page.

It’s pretty hard to argue with the obvious benefits this offers a publication in terms of services to their advertisers, but it comes with a hefty price tag. The publishing system for the magazine system, while admittedly a one time cost, runs  7495L for Mag Factory Lite, and 14995 for Mag Factory v2.

This compares to a cost of 895 (Thinc), 1795 (Intellibook) or 2000 (J&M) for the basic book publishing systems mentioned above.

Interesting Places

I’ll leave you with a couple of fun slurls. Two interesting places I found in researching this to feed your urgent bookworm urges:

• The NASA CoLab – Library and Archives. They have a stack of space books. This is actually run by NASA, so if you’re a space geek, check it out.
• The Rack – Magazine Store. They have a ton of kiosks for freebie magazines as well as for sale mags. The porn is on the 2nd floor (you knew it had to be there).

Originally posted at Shopping Cart Disco