When you start building your own ebook collections from items in your community, you stop looking at them as licensed products and start seeing them as tools. This talk I present the open source tools used to create The Community Cookbook website I created at Westlake Porter Public Library: http://cooking.westlakelibrary.org Presented at the Indiana Online Users Group Spring Meeting, May 16, 2014 in Indianapolis, IN. Slides updated for Oct. 10, 2014 talk at Ohio Library Council's Convention & Expo. UPDATE: I wrote about this project for codelib. The article includes more technical details: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/9911

1. EBOOKS WITHOUT
VENDORS
Using Open
Source Tools to
Create and
Share
Meaningful
Ebook
Collections

2. Who am I?
Matt Weaver
IT Manager
Westlake Porter
Public Library

3. Not an alternative to Overdrive, ebrary,
3M, etc.

5. EBOOKS AS TOOLS
To be created by:
• the library
• the community
For collaboration
For connection

6. Ebooks as source material
for new products

7. DIY Ebooks: Library as
publisher

8. An Experiment: Library as
publisher

9. An Experiment: Library as
publisher

10. WHY DIY?
Design for your community:
• Responsive
• Relevant
• Hyper-local

11. WHY DIY?
Gain knowledge and skills that can be
applied in other projects/partnerships

12. WHY DIY?
Content independence

13. OPEN
SOURCE:
WHAT IS IT?

14. OPEN SOURCE: WHAT IS IT?
 Free to use
 Free to develop
 Uses free licenses
(GNU GPL most common)

15. Open Source: Four Freedoms
The freedom to:
 Run the program for any purpose
 Study how the program works and adapt
it to your needs (requires source code)
www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

16. Open Source: Four Freedoms
The freedom to:
 Redistribute copies so you can help your
neighbor
 Improve the program and release your
improvements to the public
www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

17. Why Open Source? - Collaboration
& Community
Zero software costs, yet you get
powerful software

18. Why Open Source? Control over
Content
You control development:
ultimate control over content

19. Why Open Source? - Collaboration
& Community
 Collaborators can be united with
common tools

20. Why Open Source? -
Collaboration & Community
No restrictions on collaboration by
software publishers'
technologies/license agreements

21. An Open-Source Model for
Community Publishing
 affordable for even small libraries
 return on investment

22. Digital Rights Management
(DRM)
DRM (Digital Rights
Management)
“Think of DRM on an
eBook as a lock, with
your eReader having
the key to open the
lock and display the
file.”
- Jason Griffey

23. DRM in libraries
 Impedes access by imposing
“friction” = technological obstacles
 Expensive
 Counterproductive
 For much content, isn’t necessary

24. DRM in libraries:
“Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in [Digital
Editions 4]; this app was also scanning my computer,
gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my
hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers.”

25. SECURING
ACCESS TO
CONTENT

26. DIY: Copyright
Disclaimer:
I am not now, nor have I ever been a
lawyer.
I am not a copyright expert.

27. DIY: Copyright
Because of digital distribution,
and
because the library does not own titles
to be digitized…
o no Fair Use case,
o no section 108 protections

28. DIY: Copyright
Determine if book has fallen into the public
domain
Or seek permission from rightsholder

29. DIY: Copyright - Resources
 http://cocatalog.loc.gov/

30. DIY: Copyright - Resources
 http://collections.stanford.edu/copyrightrenewals/bin/page
?forward=home

31. DIY: Copyright - Resources
Digital Copyright Slider
http://librarycopyright.net/resources/digitalslider/

32. DIY: Copyright - Resources
Copyright Genie
http://librarycopyright.net/resources/genie/

33. DIY: Copyright – Show your work
Document copyright research to
justify your usage, and to show that
you acted professionally in trying to
locate rightsholders.

34. PERMISSION
TO
DIGITIZE

35. DIY: Copyright - Guidelines

36. Securing permission: consent
forms
Organizational leaders:
• may think they have to sign over
copyright
• may be afraid to sign something
• will likely seek broader approval

37. Securing permission: consent
forms
Consent agreement should be clear on
copyright
Be clear how content will be used
If you already have a consent form,
make sure it applies to new projects
For consent agreement questions,
consult an attorney.

38. EBOOKS
DISSECTED
& DIGITIZED

39. ePub as zip file

40. ePub as zip file

41. ebook markup
HTML & CSS

42. Everything has been digitized,
right?
Bad OCR: hours, fractions
Scanned ≠ Digitized
Corrected
WPPL
Epub
page

43. Homer ebook project
http://bookscanner.pbworks.com/w/page/40965440/FrontPage

44. Homer
The following tools are installed as part of the Homer Project:
 ImageMagick (for manipulation images)
 Jpegtran (loseless jpeg transformation)
 JBIG2 encoder (compression tool for bi-level images)
 Tesseract-OCR (optical character recognition)
 RubyInstaller (installs the Ruby programming language)
 Hpricot (HTML parser)
 RMagick (interface between the Ruby programming language
and ImageMagick)
 Pdfbeads (to create searchable PDF)
 Cmdow.exe (command-line utility used in Homer)
 ScanTailor (post-processing tool)
 Homer (command-line bash script)

45. Ebook
Production Workflow

46. Ebook
or
Production Workflow

47. Homer: ScanTailor
 Preprocess tiff-format
images of book pages
 Deskewing
 De-speckling
 Correcting warp
 Right-to-left language
support
 Outputs images for
Homer

48. Homer:
ScanTailor

49. HOMER BASH SCRIPT
It looks like
command-line…

50. HOMER BASH SCRIPT
but it’s drag-and-drop!!!

51. Homer: tesseract-ocr
Optical Character
Recognition
Multilingual support -
From Afrikaans to
Vietnamese

52. Homer: pdfbeads
Outputs a searchable
PDF

53. Homer & pdfbeads
Outputs a searchable
PDF

54. Sigil
https://code.google.com/p/sigil/

55. Epub Validator
http://validator.idpf.org/

56. Calibre
http://calibre-ebook.com/

57. Drupal
 Open source
content
management
system
 Widely used in
libraries
 Drupal 7
 “Responsive”
layout
drupal.org

58. Drupal
Ability to create
custom fields for
metadata – can be
hidden from users

59. 3 content
types:
•recipe
•ebook
•organization
 Drupal 7
 “Responsive”
layout

60. Drupal – Recipe module

61. Drupal – ILS authentication
module

62. USAGE: Since late Oct. 2013
More than 1,800 ebook downloads
More than 32,000 individual recipes
downloaded or printed

63. Costs:
Content: $0
Software licensing: $0
Staff time: 4-7 hours per ebook (estimated)

64. The Community Cookbook –
what’s next?

65. The Community Cookbook –
what’s next?

66. The Community Cookbook –
what’s next?
Original content:
We can help organizations produce their
own cookbooks
Work with organizations to produce ebook
versions…but

67. The Community Cookbook –
what’s next?
…with one more open-source tool, we can
even help them design print versions:
We can do everything but the printing.

68. It’s an exciting
possibility…
for the future of libraries that
there is value to be mined from
content already in our
communities.

69. Even more exciting
is the thought that the most
valuable content to libraries is
content from our communities
that hasn’t been created yet.

70. Further Reading

71. Further Reading
 Jarret Buse - A Hands-on
Guide to EPUB2 and
EPUB3
 Excellent guide to the
guts of ebooks
 Features many of the
open-source programs I
have discussed

72. Further Reading
Stanford University: Copyright & Fair Use – Charts and Tools
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/charts-and-tools/

73. mattrweaver

74. Image credits
Open Source Sign Timothy Appnel -
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tappnel/5798812875/
“Librarian from Turn of the Century” -
http://www.moyak.com/researcher/Clients/male_librarians/ind
ex.html?id=34
Ereaders - Michael Porter
https://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/5052936803/
Apples & oranges http://mrg.bz/n1xLHg

75. Image credits
Techno_background2.jpg (ones and zeroes)
http://www.morguefile.com/creative/Grafixar
Pile of books with lock: Librarian in Black -
http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2011/12/overdrive.ht
ml
Ricoh Copier:
http://www.itinstock.com/ekmps/shops/itinstock/images/ricoh-aficio-
mp-4001-fast-photocopier-copier-printer-scan-fax-5598-
p.jpg