We are considering a gov’t contract; they would like to digitize and keep all their English French and Bislama books on the BLOOM library, as well as making the available as books for phones on the BLOOM Reader. Currently one can publish “simple pages” to the BLOOM library, which I’m sure the MOET would appreciate for printing for teachers for A4/A3 books. But I think they are also going to want pdfs in A5 for small hands to hold.
Before anyone goes too far with this contract, is it possible for you make it so that we can upload A5 pdfs that would be downloadable from the BLOOM library?
Hi Beth,
PDFs are always the size of the book. If you have an A5 book, the PDF is A5. So can you help me understand more what it is you are asking for? Are you creating A4 books but want to Bloom Library to host both A4 and A5 sizes of PDF of the book?
If there is funding involved and we are asked to add features to enable a contract, the contract needs to contain funding for us to make the change. That doesn’t mean we necessarily can agree to do it, but it might be helpful for you to know ahead of time. Note that as well, generally funded projects will need to budget for Bloom Enterprise subscriptions.
Yes!
I think they will want BLOOM library to host both two sizes of PDF of each book.
Ok, I’ll let the Vanuatu Director and Pacific Area Literacy Coordinator know that about funding
Beth I’m glad you’ve raised this issue. We’ve been doing some thinking about it. We’re trying to understand what your scenario needs. And thinking about the more general needs in this area. Of course we also have to consider how expensive it is to create and then satisfy the subsequent requests.
Our only conclusion thus far is that we could use a lot more input from the Bloom community.
Here are most of the factors that came out of our team discussion:
PDF Settings
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Imposition: Simple vs. Booklet insides vs. Blooket cover vs. Combined booklet
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Page Size: The current size of book vs. re-laid-out to other sizes. (not to be confused with paper size). Changing this without manual tweaking will tend to make ugly books.
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Language(s): The current language(s) shown on the page vs. other languages in the book.
Who’s Deciding?
- Uploader decides (“provide these PDFS”)
- Consumer decides “Make me a PDF with these characteristics”.
- Bloom server decides “Let’s make booklet forms of all books available throughout the library”.
If Uploader decides , how does that happen?
- Some UI on the collection
- Some UI per book
- Uploader can point to a folder of PDFs during upload
- Uploader can just add whatever extra PDFs they want to the blorg page after uploading.
Have I missed any other factors?
OK, discuss!
This is very helpful–thanks.
- I would favor “Bloom server creates the two booklet PDFs automatically.” That’s similar to the current automatic creation of the BloomPUB files. The uploader doesn’t have to do anything special to provide both “simple” and “booklet” PDFs. But this only addresses the matter of “simple” vs. “booklet” format.
- But if people want to have different page sizes, I would favor the uploader being able to upload additional PDFs after they upload the book. For example, if the book is A5 but I also want to make it available as A4, then I can upload it in one size then adapt the book to another page size (A4, Half Letter, booklet form, etc.) and upload the additional PDF or PDFs myself.
I agree that Bloom server creating the two booklet pdfs automatically without the uploader doing anything special to produce both simple and booklet automatically is helpful. And I agree page size is adaptable by the user.
I really like the idea of the user being able to upload specific PDFs to the blorg page. And it would be great if they could have the option of removing automatically-generated PDFs, too.
In one of our projects we have made 3 versions of each of the books in a certain series that we’re trying to promote for use in the classroom. The 3 versions are to format the layouts nicely on 3 different page sizes in Bloom Desktop: Portrait Device, Horizontal Device, and Half-letter Portrait, so teachers have versions for phones, projecting, or printing out. It would be great to have the PDF that is produced for the Half-letter Portrait version be the one that is available for download from the Device versions’ pages as well.