Kickstarter

The Rural Design Collective's recent work with eBooks was mentioned by author Anne Gentle in a blog post entitled "Writing Engaging Technical Documentation":

Another way to incorporate images is to use artwork, however simple or stylistic. Take a look at this watercolor created by Oceana Rain Fields, a participant in this summer’s workshop at the Rural Design Collective web site. Illustration used under the CC Attribution 3.0 license (credited to Oceana Rain Fields with permission) ...This image sticks with the readers of the manual, especially kids like the child-like figure shown. It should help the users identify with the manual (available online) and get cozy with it.

Neat! We met Anne during the course of this project - she kindly provided the cover templates Oceana is using on her FLOSS Manual cover layouts. And that is what is great about how the Internet works - folks helping each other out to make good things happen!

Anne asked permission to use our initial illustration that determined the visual style of our eBook - and we obliged! The licenses for the rest of the images will be determined on August 18th at #rdcHQ!

We ran a local ad in the paper this week - we're hoping it will help us raise the rest of our Kickstarter money - the attached story ran with the ad -
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The Rural Design Collective is in the midst of a fundraising campaign at Kickstarter - we have just 11 days to go - and if we don't meet our goal we don't get any of the funds.

You can visit our fundraising page at: http://kck.st/b9Fzl9

This summer we are working on an eBook about making eBooks that will benefit teachers in the classroom. We have two mentees: one is an extraordinarily talented artist named Oceana Rain Fields who just graduated from high school, and the other is an equally talented artist named Christopher Garcia who moved up from California to participate in our program. The designated funds go to support their hard work this summer, and any surplus goes towards continued work on eBooks. The author, James Simmons, is already thinking about his next book. :-)

You can track our progress at our website: http://ruraldesigncollective.org/ (we post weekly). We were also recently featured in this wonderful blog post that eloquently states how we believe that the most important resources are people: http://www.mardahl.dk/2010/08/08/kickstarting-an-ebook-on-ebooks-from-the-rural-design-collective/

Oceana completed the cover layouts this week for "An E-Book Revolution: Reading and Leading with One Laptop Per Child" (new title!) working in Inkscape using an .svg template supplied by the kind folks at FLOSS Manuals (we are currently collecting these templates in the Workspace section of our site)

We submitted these covers to the FLOSS Manuals Discuss and It's An Education Project (IAEP) mailing list for review. Oceana will incorporate any changes into her layouts next week at RDC Headquarters!

18 more days to go in our Kickstarter fundraising campaign. Essentially, the funds cover the scholarship for our two mentees ... if we make more than our goal, we will apply it towards continued development on this project. These two young artists have done an amazing job using their talents to help advance the state of the art surrounding eBooks. Please back our project ... and help spread the word! ... http://kck.st/b9Fzl9

More updates soon ...

Check out how the eBook is taking shape on the iPad! This is an ePub that is generated by default using the book content that is taking shape over at FLOSS Manuals and OBJAVI!, a PDF publishing tool for books created in the FLOSS Manuals wiki --> http://objavi.flossmanuals.net/