Towards automating accessible ebooks

Bookalope is a set of AI-assisted tools designed to make working with book manuscripts and invalid, outdated ebooks as easy and seamless as possible. In this workshop we will dive into the technology underlying the Bookalope tools, and we will walk through the different ways of using and integrating them: from web app and REST API to scripting and its extension for InDesign. (Presented at the Digital Publishing Summit in June 2020) Watch the video… or Read the slides…

Books are software, too

Traditionally, books are tangible objects that we can touch, feel, smell; this changed with the advent of ebooks. Even though books have grown to become real as well as virtual commodities, we still perceive books very much in their traditional contexts. But what if we were to look at them differently, what if we looked and books as if they were software… (November 2019) Read more…

Readying a book manuscript for publication can be laborious, time consuming, and expensive. In this blog post I make the case that the tools we use directly impacts the efficiency and quality of our work. That’s where Bookalope’s intelligent tools make the difference. (October 2019) Read more…

Building an accessible ebook

Building an accessible ebook doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right tools, it actually is a fun and easy little project. In this blog post I talk about using Bookalope to turn a crummy Word file with a few clicks into a clean and validated accessible ebook. Easy peasy. (August 2019) Read more…

Automation using its cloud API is one of Bookalope’s strengths. In this blog post I detail how I used a simple shell script that talks to the Bookalope API to automatically fix invalid ebooks as well as upgrade outdated ebooks in just a few minutes. (July 2019) Read more…

Podcast with We Are Futureproofs

Thank you John Pettigrew of We Are Futureproofs for an interesting and jolly interview. I enjoyed his questions and our conversation. This was my first public interview related to Bookalope! John has made the podcast available on his website, so please visit and peruse his other interviews. (February 2019)

Book Design and Hot Chocolate

This is a story of automation, and the story of how Bookalope came about. It was first published at Digital Book World in 2017 but has since then been removed when DBW was taken over by Score Publishing. The original blog has been republished here with permission, and a somewhat abridged version was later published by Booknet Canada. (Sometime 2017 and January 2019) Read more…

Of Carts and Horses

The traditional process of making books is tailored to the static medium of print. However, in a world of portable reading devices of widely varying sizes and capabilities, print books rarely adapt well. Converting from static print-designs to a format for customizable electronic presentations is error-prone, cumbersome, and time-consuming, and therefore expensive. That is where Bookalope helps. (July 2015) Read more…