With my time as a DOTTER (DUCKLING and OTTER) coming to an end and becoming just a DUCKLING, I thought this was a good opportunity to reflect on what I have learnt as a DOTTER (or OTTLING if you’d prefer!). 

As a DUCKLING one of the first things that I did was to experiment with e-readers and creating e-books.  Being able to create an e-book quickly and easily and that was in an industry standard format (ePub) made the experimentation in DUCKLING a perfect transferable to the OTTER project. One of the file formats that we have included as standard in our OER repository is the ePub file.

Working on the two projects together has enabled me to produce a step by step guide to creating and producing your own ePub files.  This file in itself is an OER as I have used open source software to demonstrate how the e-books can be created, and it is a handy guide that fits in with the two projects.

• Creating and formatting documents for e-readers using ePub: A guide

Talking to our resident Zoo Keeper he suggested that I send this guide to Calibre.  Rather than email I decided to tweet the guide across to them which proved to be a good idea as the guide I have created out of DUCKLING and OTTER is now appearing on the Calibre website in their help section:

• http://calibre-ebook.com/help

Hopefully this link will be useful not only to people who want to create ePub files but also to people that might want to know more about DUCKLING.