.epub - The Electronic Book Format

No, .epub is not the best place to get your favorite electronic cocktail.
Yes, .epub is the industry standard for the electronic book format.
And yes, you can create your own electronic book without going through a publisher. Using the .epub format will let that document be readable by apps such as iBooks on the iPod Touch or iPad and other eReaders. I discovered this information here. Basically, you make your "book" in Word or better yet, Pages (for Mac). There are some formatting issues that you may want to look into such as floating pictures or ones that move with the text. Anyway, save the file as a .doc or .docx. If you are using Pages, there is an export feature that will automatically save it as a .epub. If you have a .doc file, go to http://www.2epub.com/ and convert your file there. There is a 25Mb limit, but that shouldn't be a problem. I did a trial run with Pages and it was soooo easy. Give it a try.

Swiffy - Flash for iPod Touch / iPad

Swiffy - a Google tool that converts .swf to html 5 and makes it viewable for the apple mobile devices. I tried it with something that I created, but I made it with Action Script 3.0 instead of 2.0. It mostly worked. I may try to switch it to 2.0 sometime soon and see if that works better. Otherwise, I've heard good things about it so far.

A New Kind of Paperback

Your regular old paperback book, just get a 21st Century upgrade as you begin to paste these newfangled QR Codes in them. If you haven't checked out QR Codes, you can learn about them and create your own codes at QRstuff.com. So you take any book, find some closely related video clips, websites, question set, or some other multimedia enrichment activity and make a QR Code for that. Print your code, after shrinking it of course, and paste it in your book on the page that you want some enrichment. I can't claim to have created this idea. I give credit to this article that I read by Cyndi Danner-Kuhn. Thank you for sharing this great idea.

Make an App link directly to the iTunes Store

If you have ever wondered how to create a link that takes the user directly to the iTunes store, go to iTunes Link Maker. Here, you can find the App, Audiobook, Music, Podcast, or whatever you are looking for. Once you find it, there will be some basic information about it and a link. That takes you to a page where you can copy an paste the direct link, or create a small/large icon or just the text. Then all you have to do is cut and paste that information and use that on your website.