Creating a Custom eBook with Anthologize

I watched the #oneweek unveil at this afternoon on Ustream. Turns out the team assembled at George Mason University built a WordPress plugin that allows you to create custom eBooks from your blog posts and/or external RSS feeds. Projects can be assembled through a drag-and-drop interface. Publish formats currently include ePub, PDF, TEI and RTF.

From the Anthologize blog,

Use the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

Please note that Anthologize cannot be installed on blogs hosted at WordPress.com.

I tried the tool this afternoon and am still trying to conceptualize the best approach to using this tool in my own learning and teaching. Here’s a brief rundown of the process and my thought/questions. Detailed instructions can be found at the Anthologize blog.

1. Install the Anthologize plugin on your WordPress blog.
2. Create a NEW PROJECT. You can give the project a title, a subtitle and list an author(s).
3. Build your project outline by managing PARTS and POSTS.
4. Your blog posts are available by default and you can import content from other sites using RSS feeds.

I created an eBook of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app reviews. As part of the IEAR community, I contribute a monthly post to the IEAR blog. Most often, this is a review of an education app. The IEAR community also has around 20 other regular app reviewers, so using the RSS feed from the IEAR blog, I imported other IEAR app reviews and included them in a PART of my Project.

I was successful in exporting an ePub file of my eBook. I was able to add this file to my iTunes Library, add a cover image and then sync it to my iPad. The eBook is then available in the iBooks app. Download #iear eBook.

The Table of Contents looks great.

A couple of quirky things I noticed with the ePub:

• My Introduction turned out alright, but the title of the blog post was cut off after 13 characters.

• Spacing became somewhat of an issue as I looked through the posts in each chapter. In some places, Anthologize just didn’t seem to render line breaks in the appropriate spots. I also found a bunch of goofy characters interspersed in the post text.

• None of the images from the IEAR imported posts rendered in iBooks.

• I couldn’t seem to get each of my PARTS to start on a new page.

• I briefly looked at the Known Issues log and I believe there is something in there about the tool handling images. When I tried to export my project to PDF I kept getting some type of error message. I was never able to download and save a PDF.

I’m going to have to take a little more time kicking Anthologize’s tires before I can fully wrap my head around its educational potential. Right off the bat, I really like the tool and think it could be useful in a number of settings, many of which the Anthologize team outlines on their blog. My initial thoughts are that it is getting easier and easier to create eBooks from readily available content sources. I think that’s a good thing.

Anthologize is a project of One Week | One Tool a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.