---
title: "When is a book, not a book?"
date: 2009-05-12
url: https://learningischange.com/2009/05/12/when-is-a-book-not-a-book/
author: Ben Wilkoff
categories: ["Uncategorized"]
tags: []
---

# When is a book, not a book?

[![A graphical despiction of a very simple html d...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/HTML.svg/275px-HTML.svg.png)](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HTML.svg) Image via [Wikipedia](http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HTML.svg)

I believe that I have been looking for this capability for a solid year, but I was only able to figure it out today. It can be described most easily as: Converting a folder of html files into a format that can be edited and manipulated by an [LMS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system).

Before today, these were the things that I tried:

- Creating an iFrame embed for each important file and reconstructing a navigation for those files
- Linking to the files on a webserver and hoping for the best
- Importing individual files to [Google Docs](http://docs.google.com/) and then fixing all of the broken images and links. (This allows for editing easily as long as you are signed into your google account, but it is a lot of extra work to create the files)
- Researching the heck out of nearly every online hosting solution that integrates with an LMS to no avail.

Today, however, was a different story.

[Today I found this.](http://docs.moodle.org/en/Book)

It is a book module for [Moodle](http://moodle.org/), but really it is more than that. It is the single largest time saver I have ever run into. I can select a folder that I have uploaded to the Site Files and it will import all of the [HTML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML), remake the relative links into links within the book itself, and rework all image files to work within the book. It creates a tree structure for the files. It allows you to print the entire book or only one chapter, and you can even export the entire thing as a IMS file (a standard format for elearning resources).

So, now I can go from HTML that has do be downloaded, edited offline, and uploaded again into a single editable (IMS compliant) book that can be enhanced with pretty much anything you can create on a webpage.

I can think of about a hundred different reasons why this is a good thing for teachers to be able to do with their content, but I will leave you with just one:

Download anything you see on the web as a webpage and add it to your book.

Literally, everything becomes importable.

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