E-book Conversion Project

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Tim Lockridge’s undergraduate Digital Publishing course teaches students about the technologies, techniques, and professional practices of digital publishing. For the midterm, featured here, students downloaded a book from Project Gutenberg and converted it to EPUB format, then wrote a production memo documenting their process. They turned plaintext into (X)HTML, created a style sheet, included metadata, formatted a cover image and illustrations, and provided all copyright and source information for the text. The final project asked students to convert a Miami University Press book to EPUB (with permission from the Press). By producing new iterations of books, students learned the conventions of digital publishing and the importance of small details in different versions of texts. Literary or technical writing courses incorporating digital editions could benefit from this model resource. Student example: Collins, Christopher, et al. “Production Memo for Fountain.” English 426: Digital Publishing, Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH, Fall 2015