Ever since iBooks came out with the iPad, I have wanted to publish some of my own content. Yet, as anyone who has ever tried can attest, this is not easy. Creating EPUBs is just awkward and inconvenient. Think of it as writing a web page before WISWYG editors, or composing an essay on a pre-GUI word processor.

The recent release of Pages allows a document to be exported as an EPUB, but then to actually see it, a transfer to the iPad is necessary. In theory, this should be easy, but iTunes is such a piece of junk, that nothing like this is ever easy. (Say, Apple, when are you gonna fix this obsolete piece of bloatware anyway?) So, until the release of iBook Author, writing electronic books was not exactly convenient or easy.

Supposedly, iBooks Author is changing all of that. Roger Rosner’s demo was way cool — the video above gives you a bit of a look. The keynote emphasizes textbooks, but the potential for any kind of electronic publication is there. For example, I’ve started publishing literary content on LitMUSE, but wouldn’t delivery on the iPad be so much better, especially since you can annotate it and take it with you even without a network connection? Yes, maybe this is one more nail in the Web’s coffin. Plus, the ability to add multimedia content — e.g., Eliot reading The Waste Land, excerpts from a documentary on Homer, or photos I recently took in Greece — would boost it to the next level — especially in a Humanities class. I already have a ton of original content.

And speaking of the end of the Web, perhaps LitMUSE’s days as a course Web site are numbered in the light of the new iTunes U. It provides a slick way to deliver all sorts of content in a convenient format. They did not demo the course construction during the keynote, but Apple’s web site makes it look pretty easy. I know I would be perfect for this. Maybe this will be LitMUSE 2.0?

I already have ideas for my next semester’s classes, and I can’t wait to get started. I predict this is the beginning of a whole new chapter in my academic life.

The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough. . .
–John Adams

I know I’m a few days late for New Year’s resolutions, but the spring semester beginning tomorrow seems more like a point of a new beginning than an arbitrary day on a calendar. So, with that, I propose the following as resolutions.

I don’t really have much to add to the last two times I attempted such an exercise. They are very similar, but perhaps with a slightly different emphasis.

That’s about it.

In many ways, 2011 was a trying year. Three deaths affected me in different ways — Apollo, Steve Jobs, and Christopher Hitchens. Each died of cancer — the latter of the same pernicious variety that killed my cousin Dale Knack. McEwan’s tribute to Hitchens was both beautiful and difficult; we know the latter is what death is, but what makes it beautiful? Death is not beautiful — only life. It takes a good life to make death less dreadful. As Hemingway said: “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

I finally watched the HBO miniseries John Adams over the break, and the last episode of this series illustrates this point. It is a difficult episode to watch. Throughout the series, Adams — and those around him — age. Aging in the late-eithteenth, early-nineteenth centuries was much more noticeable — especially the teeth. I remember reading that George Washington suffered his whole life from bad teeth, and that likely he had not a one left when he became president. In fact, even some of his portraits — like Gilbert Stuart’s — show his swollen mouth and the obvious discomfort he must have endured much of his life. This seems an apt metaphor for life at this time.

One of the problems with biographies is you know how they all end. The final episode, “Peacefield,” is about not only Adams’ death, but the deaths of those most dear to him, especially his wife Abigail’s and Thomas Jefferson’s. Adams lived a long life — he was nearly 91 when he died — and he had been an observer and participant in the birth of the US. OK, this is getting morbid; I’ll have more to say about Adams in a future post.

2011 was great in many ways. I taught in London in the summer again, and Autumn and I traveled to Greece. Fantastic. I am healthy and happy. I have a wife who loves me — I’m still trying to figure out my luck there. My family and I are closer than we have been in recent years, and I hope that trend continues.

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope 2012 is even better.

I’m using a free theme from WooThemes called Snapshot. I’m not 100% pleased with it, but it’s better than any other theme I’ve seen for photoblogs. I might try to tweek the colors to match my gallery. A says it looks too “boxy.” Still, I like like its functionality.

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