With BookMaker you can create and distribute your own attractive and easy to read electronic books (e-books), even if you have little HyperCard knowledge or artistic skill. BookMaker’s book template was designed to be both highly readable and attractive. Text placement, text size, fonts and leading are all pre-programed, all you have to do is “pour” in your text and place your pictures.
BookMaker turns HyperCard into a page-layout program. It lets you import text and define picture boxes. BookMaker automatically flows text around pictures and from page to page.
Reading a BookMaker Book.
BookMaker offers several features that make reading a pleasure. You can page through a BookMaker book by selecting a menu item, clicking a button, clicking on the right or left hand side of a page, or with your computer’s arrow keys. The graph at the bottom of each page tells you where you are and you can “grab” the bar to skip forward or back in your book.
You can mark an interesting page by clicking on the little book icon (the one after the right arrow). When you double click on this icon you can skip to the next marked page.
You can add notes to each page by selecting “Make Note” from the Navigation menu.
You can mark your place in the book by folding over the page corner (upper right) with a mouse click. Then the next time you open the book, BookMaker automatically opens to the marked page.
Developing a BookMaker Book.
Tutorial
In this turorial we will open BookMaker, import text and create a text run-around.
Make sure you have the BookMaker Tools and Demo Book stacks as well as the Sample Text in the same folder on your hard drive.
Open “Demo Book - War of the Worlds” that came with this document. Choose “Table of Contents” from the Navigation menu. Click on “Chapter 3.” You are now at a blank page.
Choose “Import Text” from the BookMaker Menu and choose the Sample Text file that came with BookMaker.
Choose the remove dashes option when asked.
BookMaker will clean up the imported text, paginate the text and place it in the Demo Book. This will take a few moments or a few minutes depending on the speed of your Mac.
After BookMaker has placed the text choose “Edit Picture” from the BookMaker menu. A box will appear on the page. You can click down and hold in the middle of the large box and move the box around with your mouse, and you can use the grow box to change the large box’s size.
Place the box anywhere within the text you wish and then double-click the large box.
BookMaker will now calculate the run-around and re-place the Sample Text.
To edit a text run-around you can choose “Edit Picture” from the BookMaker menu or double-click on already placed picture boxes. You are limited to just one picture box per page.
Other Features
BookMaker imports and manipulates text one chapter at a time. To create chapters, choose “Create New Chapter” from the BookMaker menu. BookMaker will ask you to name the chapter and then insert a blank page as a place holder for the new chapter immediately after the current open chapter. You then pour in your text and create run-arounds as you wish.
After you have created all your chapters, you can have BookMaker create a Table of Contents by choosing that item from the BookMaker menu.
You can create a new book by choosing “New Book” from the BookMaker menu. BookMaker asks you to name your new book, and automatically copies a blank cover page, the information page, the Table of Contents page, the Help page and a blank chapter page. You can then paste on a cover and pour in your text.
There are many other features and more planned for future releases, but this should be enough to get you started.
Distributing a BookMaker Book.
BookMaker is free for personal, non-commercial use. However, if you plan to distribute your e-books commercially, you are required to have an approved BookMaker Unlimited Licensing Agreement. To get an agreement, just fill out the form that came with this file and send a check for $29.95 for each title you distribute to:
BookMaker Distribution License
c/o Ronald Ladouceur
Media Logic, Inc
1520 Central Ave.
Albany, NY 12205
With a BookMaker Unlimited Licensing Agreement you can make as many copies of a single title as you like and distribute them any way you wish.
When you distribute your books, distribute only your book stacks, not the BookMaker Tools stack. BookMaker book stacks allow readers full Navigation tools without the development tools. If you are an advanced HyperCard user, be sure to place any custom scripts in your book stack and not the BookMaker Tools stack.
Join The BookMaker Publishing Society
Many new features are planned for future upgrades of BookMaker. If you would like to be kept informed of future upgrades or if you have any suggestions for improving BookMaker, send your name and address to:
BookMaker Publishing Society
c/o Ronald Ladouceur
Media Logic, Inc
1520 Central Ave.
Albany, NY 12205
SPECIAL OFFER: If you wish you can even get an (almost) free copy of the complete text of H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds” published in BookMaker. Just say “Send Free Book” when you join the BookMaker Publishing Society along with $5.00 for disk, shipping and handling.
