Speaker Notes for Lawrence Furnival (section two):
author effectively group e-books with constraints

Imagine that you and TWO collegues are writing a book together. You are emailing the MS Word documents
each other with corrections and new sections. 

Now, imagine you are writing a book with 25 people. That is the mountain we are trying to climb. 

[Please note that if you were emailing Apple iAuthor documents to each other it other it would be not
be essentially different.]

We think that the time for e-textbooks has come and we think that collaborative editing, perhaps on a 
large scale, is an important part of this and no current tools address this problem.

BUT  
How much time do high school physics teachers have?
How much motivation do they really have?
How much would they benefit?
How much time will a project like this take?

Here is the Math behind math books.
  (Physics teachers have we guess) 5 hours per week on a project 
  And our users are the high school physics teachers, which is an interesting, very smart and motivated group.
  4 hours of editing per 30 page chapter for clean up if you are working from MS Word original
    (i.e. don't use Word if you can avoid it.  [adds +/- 30% to overhead of project] (discuss what are the alternates? docbook?
  200 hours of coding time for building this kind of project - including meetings etc. (we have done about 70 so far)
  multimedia slides with voice over in an ebook - 1 to 2 hours of work per minute of presentation time

So the technology:
First we considered wikis and google docs. These are flexible collaboration tools. The problem with wikis 
is that structure is optional. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki described a wiki 
"the simplest online database that could possibly work"

Imagine that you are a student in a class with a ebook and the teacher says "turn to page 23 of your textbook" 
Someone with a Kindle Fire turns to their page 23 and someone with an latest generation ipad turns to their page 23 and 
someone with a printed pdf turns to their page 23. This problem is really about navigation. If you are reading a
novel and you read strait through, cover to cover, then navigation is relatively simple. What if you are 
blind and trying to navigate an ebook. How will you move about?

The answer is that an essential component of a successful ebook is structure, and unstructured systems, like 
a wiki have real problems. You can imply structure from the use of h1 or h2 markup and so the system can 
infer that section 2.1 of the science text starts with the second h2 header followed by an h3 header. But
all of your users must follow those rules, and not make too many mistakes. We didn't think that this was
the way we wanted to proceed. So we built a database with implicit struture. We built our own "online database" that
was the simplest one possible - that still would do what we needed. Here to tell you about that is Ivo Antoniazzi our database and
php developer.