Thanks to our friends and publisher at Athabasca University Press, we have been experimenting with publishing IRRODL articles in epub format. Epub format is supported by the The International Digital Publishing Forum and was designed for reading books on portable and lother electronic readers. The Web-Books site explains that “the EPUB format can be viewed by Calibre, Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), FBReader and Stanza. In addition to notebooks and desktops, ADE supports Sony Readers, Stanza targets Apple’s iPhone, and FBReader applies to Google’s Android.”
Displaying the epub articles can be a bit problematic- depending upon the software and hardware you use. Apple’s IPhone supports the free Stanza program (also available for desktop reading) so we have set up a Stanza catalog to distribute our epub formatted articles. Use this URL to add the IRRODL catalog added it to your Stanza’s online catalogs: http://www.irrodl.org/catalog/catalog.atom Or you can open the link below in your iPhone’s browser or email client, and it will do the trick for you:
stanzacatalog://www.irrodl.org/catalog/catalog.atom
We only have two articles from the latest issue, but we encourage feedback and suggestions. At some point we will likely add epub to HTML, PDF, and audio MP3 formats. However, conversion costs money and with an Open Access publications, there is always a necessity to keep costs manageable.
To help you make comparisons, I’ve posted the two articles with all 4 links below.
| Journals for Computer-Mediated Learning: Publications of Value for the Online Educator | Abstract HTML PDF MP3 EPUB |
| Matt Elbeck, B. Jean Mandernach |
| Transparency in Cooperative Online Education | Abstract HTML PDF MP3 EPUB |
| Christian Dalsgaard, Morten Flate Paulsen |
Please post any comments or suggestions or note which format you find most useful.
Terry
After a lot of trial and error I managed to download the articles from the latest issue of IRRODL using the Stanza app on my iPod Touch. I may have had trouble because I just got the Touch and it is new to me, but I think it might help if there were more detailed instructions on the process of getting the journal’s epub articles on mobile devices.
Thanks for the suggestion Thomas- Given the number of different systems, I was reluctant to get too detailed with instructions. But with your suggestion, here is how I loaded the epub articles into Stanza application for iphones, itouch and desktop versions of Stanza.
1. Select Online Catalog option (listed at the bottom of the “library” start page)
2 Click the “plus” sign at bottom right to add a new catalog
3. Name the new catalog- maybe IRRODL and type in the URL listed above http://www.irrodl.org/catalog/catalog.atom
4. Save this entry (click on upper right save button).
5. Now when you touch this catalog you will get a list IRRODL issues and then can select the latest and read happily ever after.
While good for text-centric books, EPUB may be unsuitable for publications that require precise layout or specialized formatting, such as comic books.Although, it has been criticized for trying to solve an already solved problem instead of fixing unsolved problems.