if:book releases alpha version of Sophie, content creation tool

[sic]

Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) just released an alpha version of their content creation tool, Sophie.

Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.

Download from here. There's also a cool video on YouTube that shows Sophie in action.

[STML]

I wrote a fairly scathing review of Sophie over at booktwo.org:

http://www.booktwo.org/notebook/soph...artial-review/

I'd really like to hear others' thoughts. Am I just not getting it?

[sic]

hi STML,

actually, I've found out about it from your blog.
I should have given you credit... sorry.

I've read your review...
yeah for the first blick it looks like a pimped up HTML editor... but I think there's much more to it.
I haven't played around with it yet but looks like it will be a great tool for collaborative learning e.g. sharing notes and highlights.
By exposing this alpha release the team can get the necessary buzz and it will hopefully boost the product.
It's very early version though... (as they also wrote)
a list of planned features would be nice.

[sic]

For those interested... check out the developer site , especially their books section !

[STML]

If it's going to be good for sharing, that means across the web, right? And if so, how is it an improvement on things like writeboard at the bottom end, and thinkfree at the top?

[Steve Jordan]

I'm glad it wasn't just me who didn't "get" this Sophie tool at first glance. I need some clarification, though, before I form any opinions.

[STML]

Well, a number of people involved with Sophie have come back and answered some of my points... but I think you'll want to read it yourselves...

http://www.booktwo.org/notebook/soph...view/#comments

[Steve Jordan]

Okay... after reading the comments in the link...

Now I get it... sort of. I qualify that because it sounds like the creators are still on the fence about what they've created! Looks like it's an "average joe" app for creating e-books, including web-like features... like porting Quark or InDesign into the e-book world. And I see it's very much in a beta stage here, so I'll make no criticisms about the interface, the tools, etc.

One thing I wonder is what e-book formats this tool will be kicking out. Is it designed to convert e-books to various and sundry of the existing formats, or for specific devices? Or is it ultimately intended to create documents specifically for the Sophie Reader? How much is it "based on XML," and can that XML output be converted easily to other formats? I'd hate to think this potentially good idea might add to our "Tower of e-Babel."

[sic]

I guess it will Steve

My understanding is that they use XML as a binder, something like the Opendocusment format and IDPDF (whatever) guys are doing with their "glorified zip" files, but way better.
They use XML not just to bind the content together but also to build a book like document with format and structure and timeline -- for multimedia content synchronization.
From what I've seen so far looks like they'll support HTML and RTF at least and of course plain text.
Yes, looks like you'll need the Sophie Reader to read the documents. Remember it's FOSS, so I don't see it as a problem.
Would be nice to see it working on an eInk device some day.