Lynn Stephen's We Are the Face of Oaxaca will be launched on Monday, November 12, at the University of Oregon. Stephen will not only be launching a book, but also a companion website which is completely integrated with the print content.
For the first time, Duke University Press has developed an ebook project that thoroughly engages the reader both within and beyond. Lynn Stephen’s well-thought out and well-executed web project presented us with an opportunity to explore ways of bringing a physical object—a printed book—into conversation with an online, digital object. With We Are the Face of Oaxaca, we’ve been able to move beyond “For more, visit this website” and really exploit new standards, such as digital object identifiers (DOIs), to bring the reader of either the print book or the ebook directly and reliably to the relevant media available online. The companion website provides readers with direct access to the testimonies, ideas, and photographs found within the pages of the book to encourage deeper research and multilayered learning. The digital content is particularly relevant since We Are the Face of Oaxaca focuses on the use of oral testimony in contemporary social movements. Seeing the video testimonies firsthand allows readers to engage with primary materials from which Stephen based her analysis.
While we have partnered with local design and typesetting firm BW&A Books on a number of projects, including the development of a CSS template for Duke EPUBs, for Lynn Stephen's book We Are the Face of Oaxaca, the author, the Press, and BW&A Books worked together to integrate digital content from her companion website, designed by the University of Oregon, that includes 26 video testimonios, timelines, and additional information that expands on sections of the text into the ebook. Julie Allred of BW&A Books created a cohesive design both for the print book and the EPUB, and this design is mirrored in the companion website. A few weeks after the book's publication date, Julie visited the Press to give us a look under the hood of the ebook creation process. Julie demonstrated the HTML code behind the links to the video content, as well as showing how she created a functional ebook index, with links that take the reader to the paragraph in the text where the index term appears. Julie also described the extensive quality assurance checks that were done by BW&A staff to make sure that the links were accurate and worked smoothly on a number of e-reading devices. On devices that support the technology, the experience of moving back and forth between the text and the digital content is a seamless experience for the reader. The Press and BW&A Books worked to make the book as functional as possible for each reader of this important book.
We Are the Face of Oaxaca is an exciting project for us, and we think readers, students, and teachers are going to love it too. We hope you'll check it out.
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