TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

The Digitizers: Travis Alber of BookGlutton, which lets you chat about books—inside the books themselves

By Kat Meyer

Travis Alber, Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series, is co-founder of BookGlutton. See more on Travis at the end. Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a computer and a book group—a Web-based reading platform that lets users discuss books from the inside. People around the world can connect and chat about books inside the books themselves. The Unbound Reader is built entirely on open Web standards, is free to use and allows both shared comments and real-time chatting on a chapter-by-chapter basis. BookGlutton’s upload feature allows writers to share their own work.

KM: BookGlutton is gorgeous—both the site, and the design/layout of the books in the Unbound Reader. And from what I’ve read, the idea of well-designed e-books was a big part of your motivation for creating BookGlutton. You wanted to offer users an experience that rivals the “prettiness” of print books. Do you feel BookGlutton has been successful so far in accomplishing this goal, and do you have plans to add more design and usability features to BookGlutton?

TA: We’ve put a lot of effort into how the books look, and that comes from a real appreciation for well-designed print books. BookGlutton’s books have brought the industry forward in terms of reading experience. It’s not just about the information, it’s about how it feels to read it. We’re pretty happy with what we’ve done so far, particularly how we treat the text, which has dynamically styled drop caps at the beginning of chapters and flourishes for chapter titles. Since these are generated, we can change them easily, and we have a lot of design options moving forward. It also helps that we’re Web-based, so we’re not limited like hardware readers—we can have full color images and working hyperlinks embedded in the books.

This is an old video and isn’t necessarily 100 percent up to date

Later this year we’ll be adding the ability for people to customize their books. Customization is important, and people expect to do it online. However, total customization can harm the integrity of the design, so we’ll be giving people some options. We see a lot of potential in the ePub format because of its alignment with Web design.

It’s an interesting challenge to think about where the book ends and the e-book reader begins. Most of the industry tends toward readers that look like software applications—they’re cold, technical, and uninviting. But a paper book, and a good Web site for that matter, is unintimidating. We want to strike a balance between something approachable and something technically savvy. We’ll be adding some functionality to the Unbound Reader in the coming months, but we’re working to keep it simple and clean, so people don’t feel like they’re working through an application, but instead feel like they’re browsing a book.

KM: That said, do you see other benefits or possible future benefits to the online reading environment (as opposed to reading on e-book readers)? In particular, I am very impressed with BookGlutton’s community features. As far as I know, current e-book reading devices don’t seem to have a comparable offering. Can you offer some insight about the community aspects of BookGlutton and how your members are utilizing it?

TA: Connectivity is going to be huge. People are used to being connected—they expect to be able to share their opinions and bounce ideas off each other. The Kindle’s ability to download books anywhere has been well received, but the top-down, one-to-many approach for their communication is really a missed opportunity on their part. Our focus on the browser makes it easier to incorporate a many-to-many solution—people have built pieces of this stuff already, so often it just comes down to combining and retooling the pieces we need. Interestingly enough, many of these e-reading devices have a browser, so the potential is there for them to run additional reading software. Maybe someday you’ll be reading BookGlutton on your Kindle.

As our audience grows we see more and more traction with the community features. People who join groups usually join multiple groups. Over half of the annotations are public. One of our challenges has been focusing on growing the social network as a whole – and to that end we’ve incorporated things like wall postings, group messaging, friend lists, etc. We’ve also talked about partnering with some social networks. There’s a lot of interest in licensing the reading experience itself, as a customizable, modular widget. We’re interested in talking with anyone about that possibility.

KM: The Web environment offers many more opportunities for rich media and interactive elements. Do you have plans to incorporate such features into the BookGlutton offering—maybe creating books with embedded video, etc?

TA: Our plan is to take full advantage of the power of the Web—that’s why we try so hard to avoid browser plug-ins and stick to standards. We’ve done experiments with videos and flash and it’s a real possibility. Some of this depends on expanding the limits of ePub, but we plan to try it all anyway. We haven’t completed the amount of work to finesse this, however, because there hasn’t been a demand for it yet. It really just comes down to what kind of content we can get. Most of our books are pretty simple—text with hyperlinks and imagery—so we focused on those in the short term. Even these presented some challenges. For example, you need to resize all the images and repaginate whenever the window size changes, so we had to deal with that. But the hyperlinks are a big deal, and we don’t take linking for granted; it’s really amazing to be able to jump to things within the book. Go get an ePub from Feedbooks.com, upload it to your BookGlutton account, and you’ll see what I mean: clicking one of Feedbook’s “read-also” recommendations loads an entirely new book into BookGlutton’s Reader. Immediately. And it saves it to your library, which you can share with your connections. It’s really powerful.

KM: Right now a lot of the titles on BookGlutton are public domain. Do contemporary publishers appear to be catching on to the utility of BookGlutton? Can we expect to see any newer titles from traditional publishing houses available via BookGlutton? Has your audience been requesting any specific titles?

TA: We hope so! We’ve talked to quite a few publishers and they seem interested in the idea. BookGlutton is close to having a payment system in place, so as soon as we get the right partnerships, people will be able to purchase work. Our users send requests daily, and they run the gamut.

KM: Got any visitor stats, Travis? And can you compare the current stats to what you expect them to be a year from now?

TA: BookGlutton gets around 90,000 visitors a month, which is great for a primarily public domain collection. We get requests daily for contemporary content so the numbers will increase significantly with new things to read.

KM: BookGlutton also offers users the option of uploading their own content. Have you seen a lot of response to this feature (in terms both of titles being uploaded and/or readers taking an interest in self-published content available via BookGlutton)?

TA: Now that people can upload ePubs to BookGlutton we’re expecting to see a lot more growth in that part of the site. Readers are going to want to upload their personal libraries and read them anywhere.

We’ve also always seen BookGlutton as a great tool for writer’s workshops. Writers can upload work in a couple of different formats and invite their colleagues to come critique it. We talked quite a bit about building a full ePub editor (Aaron Miller, BookGlutton’s CTO, was very interested in it and spent time working on the idea), but it hasn’t been our top priority. If our readers want their work in print we do have a partnership with WordClay, a self publishing site, that will help them get their work in paper form.

KM: I’ve noticed that a number of teachers are using BookGlutton for lit class discussions. Was this an intended use, or did it come as a surprise to you?

TA: We thought it would be useful for schools – we assumed online English classes would want to use it. We were surprised by the ESL (English as a Second Language) crowd, though, which was a market we hadn’t considered.

KM: The beauty (great design) and function (community features) seem to get the most attention, but is there anything about BookGlutton that you’ve just been dying to tell more people about, or that has not gotten the kind of attention it should?

TA: Most people don’t think about BookGlutton as an ePub reader, but ePub is at the core of our site. In fact, members can now upload their own library of non-DRM epubs. We’re a bit proud of being ePub based—it’s a format we committed to almost two years ago, long before we built the site, and it’s turning out to be a good choice. Although the standard is still developing, alignment with ePub is significant because it will make a lot of the cool things you see on the web possible in books, and you’ll start to see a parallel between web design and book design.

KM: What’s the grand plan? Any thoughts you can share on the major ingredients of the biz model?

TA: Although some of the catalog will always be free we intend to sell books as our primary source of revenue – major ingredients of the business model are content sales and platform licensing.

KM: Given the state of the economy, things have been tough for a lot of startups lately. Are you worried about finances right now?

TA: I think everyone’s worried about money these days, particularly since investment options keep drying up. BookGlutton is fine financially?

KM: Excellent! Since I always need to find out what my favorite book geeks are reading—what are you, and for that matter, you partner in book crime, Aaron Miller, reading these days? And how are you reading it?

TA: Ha. Good question.

I tend to read a lot for work, so I don’t get to read as much fiction as I’d like. This week I’m wrapping up The Big Switch, a book on how computing as a utility changes the economic landscape. Welcome to the Departure Lounge is on deck. Digitally I’m reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow .

Aaron says he’s reading The Business of Books and A Good Day to Die, both on paper. On BookGlutton he’s been reading some poetry collections authors have submitted for consideration.

More on Travis: Her day-to-day role at BookGlutton has been Chief Creative Officer, creating the look and feel for the Web site and the Unbound Reader, and managing marketing and communications. Prior to founding BookGlutton.com Travis was a creative director at JLOOP.com . She has twelve years of online experience, and has worked in web design, advertising, online training and education. Her client history includes: Cisco, Sprint, Playstation, Wells Fargo, Macys, Midway Games and Dodge. In addition, Travis has won a number of awards for her interactive art, and has been recognized by Drunken Boat, The Flash Forward Film Festival, and the Electronic Literature Organization. She holds a Masters Degree in Interactive Multimedia.