After more than three years of planning and developing we began a small alpha trial this week of the DIFFUSION Generator. This is another pillar of our public authoring concept, enabling people without graphic design skills or access to professional desktop publishing software (such as Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign) to use our DIFFUSION eBooks format as a new form of internet distributed, tactile, on demand publishing.
We plan to test the system thoroughly over the coming months and hope to launch a public beta test of the first version in June. Later in the year we plan to add the Generator's instant publishing capabilities to the new Urban Tapestries system, allowing users to create 'pocket' postcards and 'thread' posters as we proposed last year. In early 2007 we also hope to add the StoryCube template to the Generator, enabling people to publish not just eBooks, but their own StoryCubes as well.
The image below is a screenshot of the sketchpad area of the Generator where people add in their writings and begin to format the text. This is the first of four stages in the eBook publishing process – once the finished eBook is generated the creator has the option to publish it into the DIFFUSION Library alongside all the other titles published since 2000 by Proboscis.
