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BeamBooks Tutorial |
Creating New Books
You'll
want to create a book when you can't find a book on the topic you want.
To create a new book, go to the list of books you have or books you can
get, and choose the New Book... menu item. When making a new book,
the most important things to remember are:
- Choose an appropriate scale for the book
- Describe the scope of the book
Choosing an appropriate scale
It might be tempting to make a book called "Italian Restaurants", but such a book doesn't have an appropriate scale. It would be unreasonable to have one book with listings of Italian restaurants all over the world. Such a book would grow to many thousands of pages, and become so large that no one would want to keep it on their organizer.Instead, if you live in Miami, you might make a book of "Miami Italian Restaurants"; this is a more manageable scale. Each page can list one recommended restaurant in the area and give a review of the restaurant. This book will probably stay a manageable size, and people who live or work in Miami and like Italian food would more likely keep the book and use it.
In general, a manageable book size is 200 pages or less. Although a book can contain any number of pages, once it gets over 200 it gets a little difficult to find pages or browse through the book. So, try to create books that have a reasonable scale to their topic.
Describing the scope
When you make a book, it's important to give it a title that accurately describes the scope of the book, so people can easily decide if they want the book. When you make a book, you give it both a title and a short abstract describing the book and its intended scope.For example if you made a book of "San Francisco Thai Restaurants" you might give it the following description:
- Recommended Thai restaurants in the city of San Francisco. Each page
lists a different restaurant along with a description of the restaurant,
it's address, and directions. The title of each page should start with
the area of the city followed by the name of the restaurant, for example
"Noe Valley: Bangkok Cuisine". Restaurants in other parts of the SF Bay
Area should be listed in other books. Please add new pages for restaurants
you recommend, delete pages for restaurants that close, and update pages
as necessary.
