TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Feedbooks’ Category

By Paul Biba

From the Feedbooks blog (slightly edited):

One of the most important things about Feedbooks, is that we don’t store our e-books as terminal formats.

Instead, we generate these formats on the fly and can easily update everything archived on the web site.

Most of the time, we update our output to improve how the text in our books look, to offer more relevant recommendations or add new features.

This time, though, we’ve been working on our metadata in both Mobipocket and ePub.

We’ve started using the dc:description and dc:rights fields to provide more information about our books.

Shown is a screenshot from Mobipocket Desktop.

Moderator: We’ve added links. And meanwhile to fill up space so we can run the long image, here’s the start of "The Last Dream of Bwona Khubla"—the first story in Tales of Three Hemispheres. - D.R.

"From steaming lowlands down by the equator, where monstrous orchids blow, where beetles big as mice sit on the tent-ropes, and fireflies glide about by night like little moving stars, the travelers went three days through forests of cactus till they came to the open plains where the oryx are.

"And glad they were when they came to the water-hole, where only one white man had gone before, which the natives know as the camp of Bwona Khubla, and found the water there…"

Update, 11 a.m., Nov. 17: Earlier headline (written by me) changed. See Hadrien’s clarification. - D.R.

By David Rothman

The Feedbooks site and the Stanza e-book reader, two names familiar to TeleRead regulars, show up in an upbeat International Herald Tribune feature on e-books. So does the International Digital Publishing Forum.

"A survey published in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair last month showed that 40 percent of book publishing professionals thought digital sales, regardless of the format, would surpass the ink-on-paper kind by 2018," the Trib’s Eric Pfanner notes. Let’s hope this isn’t just boosterism in the tradition of the old dotcom boom. 2018 is just a decade away.

Feedbooks, Stanza and IDPF mentions

On Feedbooks: "…there are limits to what readers can find… The Orwell book ‘1984,’ for example, is available; the latest best sellers are not. That is because Project Gutenberg archives mostly books that are in the public domain, meaning their copyrights have expired." As I recall, 1984 is still under copyright in the Bono-hobbled U.S., though not in France and many other places, including Australia, where a local PG exists. Hello, Barack Obama? Time for Congress to kill Bono if you want U.S. tech companies to be more competitive? It could be legally problematic for me even to point to Feedbooks’ file of 1984.

On Stanza, with mention of the IDPF: "About half a million people in more than 50 countries have downloaded Stanza, an application that lets them read e-books on the iPhone, said Michael Smith, executive director of the International Digital Publishing  Forum in Toronto. ‘The adoption is happening,’ he said. ‘It’s not theory. It’s happening.’" Perhaps Marc at Lexcycle can update us on Stanza’s numbers—the total might be even higher now.

And some tidbits: "Penguin this summer joined Match.com, a creator of online dating services, to set up a site dedicated to helping book lovers hook up." Site is here. In addition, Penguin is considering new biz models such as subscription plans for access to bestsellers, or ads in books for those wanting them at reduced prices or perhaps for free. Good! The more options for readers, the better.

Euro digi library to launch Nov. 20

Of interest, also, in the Trib, is a little reference to "a group of European national libraries and archives plans to open Europeana, an online database of two million books and other cultural and historical items, including films, paintings, newspapers and sound recordings. Letters from Mozart to his friends, from the Austrian National Library in Vienna? They’re there. Early printings of his work, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France? They are, too." Here’s the link to Europeana, which will "launch on 20 November."

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By David Rothman

Feedbooks has beefed up its self-publishing side and also allowed readers to contribute to its public domain section. Check out a recent blog entry. 

If you want to self-publish in DRMless ePub and some other popular formats, this option is well worth examining. Feedbooks has tried to simplifying matters so that even nontechnical people can produce high-quality files. Shown here is Anne Whitehouse’s Fall Love, a novel published through Feedbooks.

Speaking of ePUB, the format standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, Feedbooks has joined the IDPF. Way to go, Hadrien! I’m looking forward to Feedbooks having a healthy influence on the IDPF to increase the flexibility of ePub and address such issues as reliable interbook linking.

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By Chris Meadows

Ars Technica has an interesting review of a forthcoming iPhone e-book app called Classics.

Not yet available on the App Store, the gimmick of Classics is that it attempts to replicate the page-turning experience of a “real book” as closely as is possible on the iPhone’s screen. For $2.99, it will launch with a library of 12 public-domain titles, such as Alice in Wonderland or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with the possibility of adding more with later updates.

Without actually trying the app out, I cannot agree or disagree with the specific points Ars makes in its review. Nonetheless, I have to wonder if a nifty page-turning animation will really be sufficient to make readers pay even $2.99 for public-domain books that can be downloaded for eReader or Stanza from Manybooks or Feedbooks for free.

By Paul Biba

Received an email from the author about this book. I haven’t had time to download it myself, but take a look. I’m a little bit skeptical because the writer is from Warsaw and his English isn’t the best. However, good or bad, the main point is that the iPhone is sparking new ebooks and perhaps a new ebook subculture. Here’s a quote from the email:

Nick Name’s “Password Incorrect” is a selection of short stories addressed especially for iPhone users. The book was designed to be downloaded for free to iPhone, which among its many other features seems to be also a great e-book reader. Opposite to devices specifically designed for e-book reading, which still look inattractive and suffer early stage problems, iPhone with it’s large color screen, smooth interface and milions of users around the world has the real power of rediscovering the pleasure of reading books - so that we could hear a louder “bye, bye” to paper.

Choose one of download options:
A. Open Stanza in your iPhone, go to “Online Catalog”, select “Free Books by Feedbooks”, and then search for the book by name or title.
B. You can download the book directly, by opening Safari in your iPhone and tapping a link below:
epub:// www.wydawnictwoindigo.pl/pi.epub
Stanza will automatically open itself and download the book.

By David Rothman

Some 85,000 users of the iPhone and iPod Touch had downloaded Stanza as of August 12.

Now, just five week or so later, the cumulative number has shot up to 300,000, consistent with the fast growth of eReader as well. Stanza at this point would appear to be drawing more users. Just a few minutes ago it was #32 on Apple’s list of free iPhone apps for the U.S., one notch higher than this morning. eReader doesn’t show up in the first 50, but certainly isn’t hurting, with 300,000+ downloads of books from paying customers.

A major reason for Stanza’s own popularity could be its tight integration with Feedbooks via Feed’s API. You don’t just get a currently-free reader. From within the program, you can effortlessly download thousands of out-of-copyright classics—works from Charles Dickens’ to Edith Wharton’s—as well as Creative Commons books like Cory Doctorow’s. You don’t experience all the hassles that public domain sites require if used directly. May FBReader follow on the API front! Hey, guys, didn’t we suggest that? Care to do the integration to take full advantage of Android’s debut?

Marc Prud’hommeaux, the main developer at Lexcyle, responded to our e-mailed questions with other news about Stanza:

Congratulations to Steve Pendergrast and the rest of Fictionwise on their extraordinary number of e-book sales! As it happens, we just passed 300,000 users Stanza iPhone/iPod last week, so 300K seems to be the number of the day. We don’t currently have detailed information on the number of books downloaded, since the book files themselves are usually hosted by our catalog partners like Feedbooks, Munseys, and other catalogs that are in private beta. But we do know that well over 1 million books have been downloaded to date through the Stanza Online Catalog, and the count may well be closer to 2 million.

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By David Rothman

The first Android phones will hit the stores October 17.

For those tuning in late, FBReader is to work on the Android platform. FBReader is a promising open source e-reading program that handles ePub among other formats.

I’d love to hear from Lexcycle, the people behind the Stanza reader for the iPhone, what their Android plans might be. Same for Feedbooks? Hello, Hadrien at Feed? Will we see the same use of Stanza to pick up Feedbooks’ titles from within the program?

By Paul Biba

The Kindle includes an experimental web browser so I thought I’d see how it worked with some of the public domain sites I frequent.

Feedbooks: as we know Feedbooks works just fine in the Kindle. We have an earlier posting giving a “how to” about using the downloadable Feedbooks catalog.  There is also a mobile site for Feedbooks.  The mobile site has all sorts of ways to sort and browse everything, you can even access your customized recommandations (based on your previous downloads to guess your taste).

Manybooks: much to my pleasure Manybooks also works just fine on the Kindle browser. The picture you see above is of the Manybooks site. I have selected and downloaded several books from Manybooks and they read just fine.

Munseys: does not work. The site displays OK, but I am unable to select any of the action buttons. Munseys has a Kindle site that works  well, but the organization is not as good as the other sites mentioned here.

Gutenberg: can be made to work, but is a real pain in the neck and probably isn’t worth the effort since we have several other excellent sites working. Also, the downloaded book, in txt format, shows strange line breaks and pagination, making the extensive effort needed to get a book not worthwhile in the end.

Mobileread:  Mobipocket books can be downloaded either from the mobile site directly or from a catalog kept on your Kindle, just like the Feedbooks catalog.  Both methods work just fine, but of course the catalog method is much easier.

If anyone has a site they’d like me to try out, please ask in the comments.

Thanks to all who have made comments I’ve incorporated all the comments so that they can be referenced in one place.

By David Rothman

"Kindle-feeds is a command line tool that downloads Atom and RSS feeds and converts them into a special HTML file optimized for reading on the Amazon Kindle." - Daniel Choi.

The TeleRead take: This open source software is in beta, and on his site Daniel offers some handy screenshots and tells how he intend to make Kindle-feed easier to use. If you own a Kindle, help him out with feedback.

More details: "I’m thinking of setting up a Web site that will let you pick your feeds and perform the conversion round-trip and delivery automatically each day (or whatever interval you want) for a small fee—maybe $2 a month per user (on top of what Amazon will charge for the Whispernet transmission)."

Also of interest: Feedbooks’ RSS-related service.

By Chris Meadows

Steve Pendergrast of Fictionwise has reported that iPhones seem to be siphoning off Kindle users. But after looking at all of the major apps, it seems to me that the overall state of iPhone e-book options is still rather primitive.

Most of the readers are lacking useful features, and in some cases do not even render the text accurately. However, the clients are still under revision, so there’s hope for the near future.

For each e-reader, I will be looking at three aspects: readability, ease of use, and ease of loading up with content (both from the Web and self-made). Clicking the header link will open iTunes to the App Store listing for each application, which includes a screenshot. Shown here is eReader, from an earlier TeleRead writeup. I will update the present article with more screenshots as time permits. To avoid awkward phrasing, I will be referring to “iPhone” applications throughout this article, even though I am reviewing them on an iPod Touch.

eReader (v1.1)

eReader is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back ten years to the original Peanut Reader for the Palm Pilot—much farther than any other iPhone reader can claim. Even if the iPhone version does not share any code with other eReaders, it has still had a much bigger head start when it comes to user-interface. That should count for something, right?

Readability

Similar to its predecessors, eReader offers three font faces in four sizes. These font faces are Georgia (serif), Helvetica (sans serif), and Marker Felt (a Comic Sans lookalike). The sizes are “small,” “medium,” “large,” and “huge.” Small Georgia can fit 23 lines on the screen in portrait mode, medium 18, large 14, and huge 12. Just as with Safari, the screen can also be rotated for reading in landscape mode—although unlike Safari, eReader will adjust even if you turn the device entirely upside-down.

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By David Rothman

By Paul Biba

I received my Kindle yesterday and here are some of my first thoughts. This isn’t a review, just some impressions of the machine.  I may very well change my mind about them later.

Six font sizes, not just three as on the Sony Reader.  Here are approximate point sizes:

* 1 = 7pt
* 2 = 9pt
* 3 = 11 pt
* 4 = 14 pt
* 5 = 17 pt
* 6 = 20 pt

It will display the time.  Something I’ve wanted on the Reader for a long time.  It uses a different way of displaying location in a book—not page numbers—and the location doesn’t change when you change font sizes, unlike the Sony.  This means I can find my place easily even if I change the font.

Changing font sizes is fast.  As a matter of fact the whole machine is very fast compared to the Sony.  Makes the Sony look like a real slowpoke.  Screen seems exactly the same to me. (more…)