Every once in a while we collect our thoughts and opinions about Bookalope, book design, and publishing workflows into a blog post. Sometimes our posts are anecdotal, some are technical, and some are based on presentations or conference talks. No matter which posts you read, we hope you enjoy our musings!
When Judy Abbate designed the print edition of Keith Houston’s book The Book she added, for illustration’s sake, the names of various design elements. These label names make the book’s intended structure explicit. And that’s exactly the purpose of Bookalope’s structure classification AI, which enables Bookalope to build accessible ebooks efficiently. In this blog post we dive deeper into what Bookalope’s AI does using The Book’s beautiful design as an illustration of the process. (June 2023) Read more…
In our information age, access is everything, and because digital technology makes it possible to share content in multiple formats, from text to audio to video and images, what once were obstacles to accessibility are now opportunities. As founder of Bookalope, Jens Tröger has applied his background in computer science research and commercial software development to create professional tools for ebook designers. The trick to making ebooks accessible and even beautiful, says Tröger, is to think of them as software. (November 2022) Podcast with Velocity of Content
Creating an “accessible ebook” can sound like a daunting task. In this concise and introductory guide Oluwatoyin Jegede writes about why we should make the extra effort, and she outlines eight tips to pay attention to when creating an accessible ebook. (July 2022) Read more…
While English and most Western languages are written from left to right (LTR), billions of people read and write in scripts that go from right to left (RTL), scripts which have a long and rich history, and whose calligraphic art is astoundingly beautiful. In this conversational blog we learn more about RTL script and languages, and how Bookalope helps to build accessible ebooks in any one and even mixed scripts. (June 2021) Read more…
With the rise in advancing technologies, making our self-published books accessible to everyone is becoming easier and easier. In today’s post from the Alliance of Independent Author’s AskALLi team, we dive into accessibility issues for indie authors and how you can make your books more accessible. With thanks to ALLi Partner member Jens Troeger from Bookalope for his contributions to this post. (December 2020) Read more…
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…
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 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…
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)
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…
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…