From: 2034bang@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Steve Bang)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Writing a book in electronic format
Date: 11 Sep 92 07:55:41 GMT

In article <1992Sep9.225728.23672@massey.ac.nz> R.Singh@massey.ac.nz (R. Singh) writes:

>What's the best way to write a book in electronic format? I need text,
>graphics and "hot" text, that is clicking on it takes you further detailed
>explanation. Hypercard does seem to be the obvious choice but I wondered if
>there is another application designed for this sort of thing. However
>references to Hypercard stacks I could use as a stating point would be
>excellent. 

Check out the Expanded Book Toolkit by The Voyager Company.  This program
requires HyperCard 2.1, but is very slick and offers exactly what you're
looking for (and much more). Along with great text importing capabilities,
the EBT includes all the tools you'll need to rapidly construct an
electronic book.  E-books that you create with EBT are subject to a 1%
royalty to Voyager if you sell them for retail, but I think that if you
give away your books, they are royalty-free.  As far as I can tell, the
EBT gives you the same capabilities used to generate the Expanded Books
series for the PowerBooks.  Random House and McGraw-Hill will be releasing
books created using the EBT.  Voyager has already released quite a list
of electronic books, including Backlash (Susan Faludi), The Annotated
Alice (annotated by Martin Gardner), Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton),
and others.  The Expanded Books series were designed for reading oni
PowerBooks, but the EBT will allow you to choose whether you want to 
design e-books for PowerBooks, Classics, 12" monitors, or 13" monitors.

I was introduced to the EBT two weeks ago at a Mac Summit Conference
workshop led by Bob Stein (The Voyager Company).  He said that it was the
first hands-on workshop ever given using EBT.  Within 20 minutes, we had
covered all of the major features and tools available in the toolkit.
Bob was very surprised how fast the group was able to grasp the concepts
and create a sample "Expanded Book" using text imported from Moby Dick.

The major impressive features were:

* the ability to "write in the margins" of the text, highlight text by
  either bolding or underlining;

* "turning the corner" of a page to mark a place or using "paperclips"
  to mark pages;

* holding down the mouse with the cursor over a word causes a pop-up
  menu to offer you choices to find the first, last, next, previous,
  or "all-in-context" occurrence(s) of the word; 

* various annotation/link capabilities include: audio, QuickTime,
  pictures, text links, etc.; and,

* the ability to help you create a table of contents or an index. 

Technical requirements: any Mac with a hard drive and 2MB RAM (4MB if
  using System 7.0 or later) and HyperCard 2.1 or later.

Price: $295

For more info, contact:

   The Voyager Company
   1351 Pacific Coast Highway 
   (310) 451-1383

It may be available from MacWarehouse or MacConnection, but I'm not
sure.  Also, there is not educational discount.

Steve

--
Steven K. Bang                              !  The empires of the future
Sciences-Engineering Library                !    are the empires of the mind.
University of California at Santa Barbara   !      
e-mail: skbang@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu             !           -- Winston Churchill