TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘BookGlutton’ Category

By David Rothman

Matt Sumell, a short story writer, is the first “Featured Contemporary Author” on the home page of the BookGlutton site. BG is a Web community through which you can annotate others’ works—publicly or privately—or publish your own. You can even do ePub conversions from HTML.

“We’ll be highlighting contemporary authors that have uploaded original work or excerpts of published material in a section on the homepage,” says Travis Alber, BookGlutton co-founder. “Although we continue to bring in public domain and Creative Commons work, we have now begun to expand our catalog to new copyrighted material; we’re excited to provide a space for new and contemporary authors to showcase their writing. We’ll be rotating the featured authors frequently.
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By Rob Preece, founder of BooksForABuck.com

Moderator: See earlier item on e-book pricing. Unrelated: Rob’s test of BookGlutton’s ePub conversion. Try it yourself. - D.R.

Sometimes you can’t win for losing. E-books get dinged for being “too expensive.” But offer great books at super-affordable prices instead—and you might get attacked for that.

Pricing is one of the most controversial aspects of e-books. When I started BooksForABuck.com, my market research indicated that many e-book publishers had set price points above those charged by traditional publishers for paper books. I love e-books and can understand charging more for the portability, adjustable font, and convenience. The problem is, you have to try e-books before you discover the advantages. My market research indicated that high prices kept many from bothering.

Logical savings for the reader

There is a logic that if a publisher doesn’t need to pay for paper, for shipping, invest in printing thousands of books that might not sell and might get returned at some future point, there should be a savings for the reader. That made sense to me. Certainly for small publishers, the cost of printing is non-trivial, and the risks of offset printing a quantity (as opposed to the extremely high price for POD printing) are substantial.

I came up with the “Books For A Buck” concept and sampled everyone I could reach; a high percentage indicated that they’d be intrigued by affordable books, and that a buck was a heck of a price. Many of them indicated that they’d be willing to experiment with a new author if they could buy a book at a price low enough that they wouldn’t feel too disappointed if they ultimately didn’t enjoy it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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