TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Aaron Miller’ Category

By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

I’m happy to announce the first tool in our Web API, the BookGlutton ePub Converter. It’s a simple way to create the IDPF’s open e-book format, ePub, from a basic HTML file. The tool can be used from anyplace on the Web, in back end scripts or front end pages, but the curious can play with it on our site, where we’ve put up some documentation and a test form.

I’ve voiced concerns about the ePub format before, but I’ve been working with it for over a year and want to make it more accessible to independent, open-source Web developers and tech-savvy Web readers. I think free tools like this, and hopefully open source libraries to accompany them, will do a lot for the ePub format.

Try the converter—and share feedback

So please, create some ePubs. Readers, convert some of your favorite HTML editions to ePub and let me know how it goes. Authors, if you feel overwhelmed about how to get your work into the ePub format, use this tool to generate boilerplates. Web developers, if you’re curious about the internal XML workings of the format, rename your epub with a .zip extension and open the files up in your favorite text editor. Ask yourself how the format could be improved for Web browsers and let the IDPF know what you think. And finally, share what you build.

Moderator: That’s an unofficial ePub logo. Hello, IDPF? When will you do an official one? Meanwhile I’d encourage people to try out Aaron’s ePub converter, as he suggestions—and share feedback in our comment area, not just privately. - D.R.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Between Google and Amazon, a lot of books are going on-line every day, and while these two are not the only companies doing it, they’re the biggest and the most aggressive.

While many smaller outfits expect people to download a book and read it on the platform of their choice, both Amazon and Google fully expect you to read the books from the Amazon.com or Google.com domains, preferably on their Web sites. Google Booksearch and Amazon Online Reader are both fully functional web-based reading systems which allow you to read paginated text, annotate, communicate with other readers, bookmark and share, all in a browser. And despite Amazon’s offering of the Kindle they are still a Web company, built on Web principles, and we can expect the Kindle won’t forsake their web properties. The Amazon Online Reader is a core product in three of Amazon’s other moneymakers: Amazon Advantage, Search Inside, and the Digital Text Platform, which is itself linked to the Kindle and uses the Online Reader as a preview device for Kindle uploads.

As for Google, well, there’s no doubt as to where Google stands on the Web as platform. They already have us reading PDFs in one of the ugliest interfaces book readers have ever known.

Dictating how books are read

The two big lessons here are:

1. Major players are dictating that books must be read on the Web, and
2. Major players are dictating the experience of reading books on the Web

These two things should worry everyone, because even though many people are disappointed and angry at Amazon’s approach to the market, and plenty are unhappy with Google’s quality control, it’s taken far too long for the rest of us to offer alternatives.

My own company has put out its best first effort: a paginated, networked way to read books called the Unbound Reader. Since we launched it sites like Manybooks, Goodreads and even Gutenberg have added features that allow a user to “page” through texts instead of scrolling them.

Unfortunately this is not on the agenda of the most vocal supporters of digital books. Among e-book lovers, there’s skepticism and even contempt for the idea of reading a book in a browser.

(more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Tim O’Reilly is a publisher and web entrepreneur who has proved himself in both worlds, and I always admire his dead-on observations of Web technology and its possibilities for entrepreneurship. Before this last Web 2.0 Expo, he did some nice checks and balances on the hype. It’s always bittersweet to have someone reminding us that we have a long way to go. As an entrepreneur, this is the constant joy and lament.

In the interest of getting past both hype and disdain, we should all take a minute to speculate about what Web 2.0 means for books.

Some might say we missed the boat, but let’s be more hopeful than that. And set aside, for a moment, privacy concerns. Those revolve around critical issues, but they require sustained metaphysical wrangling, and for our purposes, as representatives of the big medium which definitely missed the 7:32 express, it’s better to learn something from the innovation that has already taken place. As O’Reilly wisely points out, we’re not at 3.0 yet.

Looking past the “distractions” issue

How about the “interruptions” and “distractions” that Web 2.0 supposedly brings to books: advertising, twitters, chat, graffiti, or other 2.0 trappings? These things are actually part of the hype, and therefore also objects of disdain. We need to look past both.

The book/screen device/laptop convergence is an imminent catalyst. We need to realize that first. And the Kindle embodies the first major dilemma on the path to the really big changes. Will locked-down architecture and content be the industry standard, or will there be a Book 2.0 approach to things? For most book-lovers, both of these choices are reprehensible, yet one must be chosen.

Apple to break into E?

Don’t equate the Kindle with other e-book devices. The Kindle is a product of a company which came into the world proclaiming “Earth’s Biggest” Web catalog. This device comes to us from a Web company, founded on Web technologies, fed by Web communities and Web shoppers. There’s no doubt Kindle is going to evolve faster than those jellyfish from hardware manufacturers with relatively undeveloped Web properties. For Amazon to step into the hardware space is huge–so huge that I don’t need to spend many more keystrokes on it. The next huge thing would be for Apple to step into the e-book space, something more imaginable now, given Amazon’s monopolistic decrees to publishers and Apple’s good relationships with content distributors. The arena for the big battle will be the Web.

And while much of what we think of as Web right now consists of so-called “social networks,” many of which may seem to have nothing to do with books (or when they do, nothing to do with the actual texts of the books), the core innovations of these properties can still be applied to our own enterprises. And being at the back of the pack, we have the advantage of foresight for the pitfalls.

Here’s a brief map of where “Web 2.0″ is taking us:

• E-book devices will be web-enabled. They’ll be using modern browser engines, like Webkit. They will be open, so that book authors and vendors can reach people the way they want to. They will be on-line as much as we need them to be. They will function offline, even when accessing web content. They will, by default, offer access to the whole Web, not just one vendor’s content.

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Reminder: The TeleBlog offers many viewpoints, and I’m delighted to see Aaron not pulling any punches even if I disagree with him in places. - D.R.

Recent posts and comments have carefully pointed out that what we call .epub is actually three separate specifications which evolved from the OEBPS, or OEB for short. These three specs are OPS, OPF, and OCF . . . Or is that OCS? What do each of those stand for again?

The Web grew because smart people who were smart enough to understand SGML were also smart enough to know it was too complicated. What we need is a simplified subset of OEB … or OP … Or whatever it’s called — okay, epub.

Let’s face it: there is no grass-roots explosion of .epub adoption. The most hopeful implementation has come from Adobe, and it’s nice that we have a validator now, but we also need legions of independent developers building APIs and authoring tools and Reading Systems and open-sourcing all of them. We need writers, authors and artists who want to use .epub for their work because it’s simple and hackable, as easy as HTML or easier. We need a way for folks to put their own books up on their blog for download as .epub, or for them to post links to their writer friends’ latest novel, or to their favorite passage in a public domain text. The OP-OB-OC-OS-epub spec doesn’t give us this possibility.

(more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]

By David Rothman

Moderator: Best of luck to BookGlutton, whose co-founder, Aaron Miller, is a TeleBlog contributor—with an interest an making .epub more useful for interactive e-books! Hello, IDPF? Get the message? BG’s news release follows. - D.R.

The 12th Annual Webby Awards has nominated BookGlutton.com for the Best Community Site of 2008. Winners will be announced on May 6, 2008 and honored at a star-studded gala in New York City on June 10th.

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile Websites.

(more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Moderator: Aaron Miller is CTO of BookGlutton.com, a Web-based community for e-book readers. He has 11 years of experience building Web sites for startups and established clients, including WellsFargo.com, Playstation.com, and Macys.com. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Aaron, and keep the ePub criticism coming! Let’s hope that the IDPF will listen to all sides. Also see Tamas Simon’s essay. - D.R.

Links, bookmarks and annotations all depend on one important thing: the ability to uniquely identify a specific passage or point in a book. And it’s easy with paper. We put daggers and numbers where our notes belong. We highlight, clip, underline. Sometimes we just gesture at a page. But with a digital book, it’s not so easy. A digital book, materially, is something less—so we expect more. Go figure.

Humans need a computer to understand our paper-bound notions of footnotes and margin-notes so that a computer can do what computers are good at. Then we can share those notes, add our own, hide them, rearrange them, count them, abstract them into graphs, delete them. Moreover, we want pica-perfect pointers into texts, maybe even pixel-pointers, so that we have no doubts about where we left off, which syllable we’re analyzing, or where we want to jump next. To a computer, a book is a model, an abstraction of what it really is, and the more computers agree on that abstraction and how to interact with it, the better off we bookish humans will be. Too bad it’s easier said than done.

Key revelations

Smart folks of the digital book world have figured out some key things lately:

1. XML is a book’s best friend. It’s extensible, document-centric, thriving. It’s being used for .mobi, .lit, .epub and more generalized things like DocBook, ODT, and Docx. It can be criticized for bloat, but it’s open, extensible and a kind parent to XHTML. It happens to be more perfect for books than plain text.
2. Books are going Web. They’ve been on-line for awhile, in huge numbers, but until now, no one has taken the time or spent the money to care for them. By “care” I mean care in presentation, due diligence in cataloging, and measurement of the benefits and drawbacks of various technologies.
3. E-books will be cool. Right now, they’re not. At least not iTunes cool. Right now, they’re in the position the MP3 was in 1997. This was when audiophiles scoffed at the format as inferior. Half of them observed that CDs sounded better, and the other half said vinyl sounded best, and then proceeded to make fun of the ones who preferred CDs. Now, it seems, music fans realize that we can all co-exist, and that MP3s are cool in their own right. Book-loving groups aren’t so unified.

Whiffs of potential

Still, we can sense the potential. People are realizing there’s more possibility than the miles of typography-bereft scrolling and the various shopping-cart sites hawking trade at twice the price of paper. Amazon, a web company, is scrambling to figure out how to bridge worlds, extending the tradition of PHB (Proprietary Hardware for Books) while simultaneously trying to leverage their Web properties. Meanwhile publishers can be overheard babbling about widgets and blogs, and when they actually figure out what they’re saying, we’ll see an A-ha moment about DRM.

From a development angle, browser technology is quickly approaching a tipping point where typography and presentation will rival that of print and E Ink. Unlike E Ink, Web technologies are based on software, and this creates freedom and speed. And unlike print, which seems to get cheapened and not cheaper everyday, they’ll allow more at a lower cost. Someday we’ll all use something like E Ink, but not many of us will ever use E Ink as it is now.

More people can be seen firing up their MacBooks in Panera and Starbucks to get their dose of blogs and news. Younger generations, as any newspaper publisher will tell you, no longer read any news on paper.

Take note

This is all positive news. But in all this activity, no one has given much lip-service to a fundamental technology here: annotation. Granted, it’s not for everyone. But it rests upon the ability to point to fragments of documents, even as those fragments change.

The Web can be seen as an example of the perfect space to solve this problem, or a sad example of how annotation has been ignored, depending on one’s camp. Those in the Berners-Lee camp, if there is such a place, would look to the Semantic Web for standards and solutions. But those who look to Ted Nelson will tell you we didn’t implement everything we needed when we invented the Web. Nelson’s original concept included annotations and unbreakable links as part of the fabric of hypermedia. Now, we’re stuck improvising these things on top of a core infrastructure that was never intended for them. And we’re faced with the perplexing question: What happens to metadata when a resource disappears—or worse, when it changes?

(more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]