A conversation with ChatGPT
I am a designer. I was Assistant Professor of Web and Interactive Multimedia Design at Nashville State Community College for 18 years. I retired from teaching, at the institutional level, in 2023. Following my retirement, I chose to take the skills I had learned, and taught, to freshman and sophomore design students, and put that into my own creative projects.
My Background
I have a B.S. in Mechanical Drafting and Design Technology. That taught me about geometry, physics, and programming. Immediately following college I became a corporate trainer, teaching CADD (Computer Aided Drafting and Design) to engineers, architects, and project managers for the Intergraph Corporation. I designed a 5-day curriculum, and wrote the User Guide that was used internationally.
I got the teaching bug, especially teaching technical subjects. After my gig with Intergraph, I landed a more general corporate training position teaching Windows software, Microsoft Office, and a variety of design and desktop publishing applications, including FrontPage (an earlier Microsoft application for designing HTML pages). This was pre-CSS code in the late 1990s. I taught myself HTML and later CSS.
eBooks
Technical documents are so… technical. Look at any W3C document and you will find they are very dry. They are NOT designed for designers. They are designed for technical folks. Bridging the gap between design and technology can be quite the challenge. I know. I did it for close to 30 years.
When it came time for me to wrap my head around how to create eBooks, I poured over books, W3C documents (not for the faint of heart), online articles, etc. Then came ChatGPT.
Technical Documents
Around 2010, I was introduced to eBooks. Basically, eBooks are websites that are contained into a portable zipped package instead of being on the web. Because they are a an archive (zip file), they can be distributed as a stand-alone product. And that means they can be sold. Internally, however, they are built using the same technologies as websites.
I am a member of the W3C Community Group for EPUB3, and the more general W3C Publishing Working Group. After I retired from teaching college, I knew the next “chapter” in my professional life would be channeling my creatively, and teaching, into eBooks, Print, audiobooks, and whatever the next publishing format was.
Open AI
As I am writing this, the year is 2024. Open AI is an open-source Large Language Modeling program. The most popular paid service to surface from this project is ChatGPT. Different products are being created created using the same underlying technology to focus on specific creative challenges. Some versions are targeted at writers, some at coders, some at artists. I’m not going to mention brands here because things are changing so fast, that by the time I mention them, another will have been created and my thoughts will be obsolete.
What I have discovered is however, is that the open AI language models are becoming more conversational. No longer do we have to figure out how to “talk” to the computer. Just have a conversation.
So that is what I did. I had a conversation with ChatGPT about creating eBooks. Since I’m a coder of HTML, CSS, and JS, I didn’t want an authoring program to slow me down. For fast downloads and a good user experience, the less code, the better. Authoring programs tend to add bloated code and make file unnecessarily large. (I’m looking at you FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.)
The next series of articles will be a series of what I have discovered about coding eBooks. I want them to be lean, easy to download, compatible across readers. I want ChatGPT, with its extensive knowledge, to help me cut through the clutter and get to the core information. Since I’m a coder, and a teacher, I’ll explain stuff as I go.