TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Hadrien Gardeur’ Category

By Marc Prud'hommeaux, principal developer, Lexcycle

Moderator’s note: Marc is clearly listening to your feedback. I myself am a big Stanza fan. Question: Should we run a separate post on, say, eReader or BookShelf—and then likewise invite the devs to reply to your comments on the pros and cons? - D.R.

We at Lexcycle have been overwhelmed by the support and encouragement from the e-book community (especially TeleRead) regarding Stanza.

The praise has given us the confidence to forge ahead, and the constructive criticism has tempered our hubris and made us wiser.

And overall, the community’s many years of musings over what would make a perfect e-book reader has provided us with invaluable insight into the needs and wants of those who see the future of books unchained from their bindings.

85,000 Stanza users in a dozen countries

Stanza has gotten off to a tremendous start, with 85,000 users spread out over a dozen countries. This is thanks in no small part to Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks.com, whose content is central to the success of Stanza.

His vision and tireless work in creating the Feedbooks API cannot be underestimated, and his many efforts over sleepless nights half a world away in working out nuances with the glue between Stanza and Feedbooks have been truly heroic. Nearly half a million books have been downloaded from Feedbooks via Stanza thus far!

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By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

We’ve officially released a new companion software for Feedbooks users with Windows: News Stand.

Thanks to this software you’ll be able to automatically synchronize your subscriptions (RSS feeds, newspapers) to your favorite reading device.

See Help page. Download latest version here.

Moderator’s note: I’ll give it a try, Hadrien. Sounds intriguing. - D.R.

By David Rothman

The New York Times reading app (#38), Bloomberg (#51), and AP Mobile News Network (#80) are among the top 100 free iPhone apps that may be of interest to TeleBlog readers. All are news apps, and I suspect that the New York Times is the leader in part because of the popularity of its site.

Perhaps I’m overlooking something, but I don’t see any e-book-reading programs there. I’m in a hurry because the electricity is about to go off around here for maintenance purposes.

Within the entertainment category, the well-publicized eReader is apparently #28 and Stanza is #33, if I’m interpreting the sort order correctly. And I also see a new discovery, Shakespeare, #26, which is said to put all of the bard’s works "literally at your fingertips." Alas, no search or note-taking. So reports a user-reviewer—I’ll see later on. Another user praises the "easy to read format," which lets you change the size of the font.

Meanwhile, Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks has looked over the French-language rankings and says that that Stanza is #35–which means it’s beating the New York Times (#41) and MySpace (#87). One reason could be that Stanza offers a Kindle-easy way to download Feedbooks’ library of public domain classics in French and English.

By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

Until recently, Mobipocket had a pretty huge advantage over competitors—its ability to turn RSS feeds into Mobipocket files and auto-sync them to a mobile device.

As promised, I’ve been working on an easy way for everyone to turn RSS feeds into ePub, and the feature is now fully ready on Feedbooks development server.

Thanks to the REST API that we’ll also release this summer, it will be very easy for developers working on devices or software supporting ePub to add support for this: a simple GET request to a resource like /user/id/subscriptions.xml will respond with an XML file listing all your subscriptions (including a link to the ePub file).

Moderator’s note: Here’s a sample file—the one shown in the above screenshot—demoing RSS-to-ePub. Click here or on the screenshot for a more detailed view of the file as displayed in Adobe Digital Editions.- DR.

Related: Feedbooks’ page turning RSS feeds into PDF files. Please note that it isn’t currently working with TeleRead’s RSS feed, but I’ve reported it to Hadrien. - DR.

Update, 10:30 p.m.: "Regarding the PDF output," Hadrien wrote earlier in the day, "I’ve completely changed the PDF output for Feedbooks in the new version. It’ll work with Prince XML now. I’ve just downloaded TeleRead’s feed in all 3 formats (PDF, ePub & Mobipocket) and they all work perfectly well." Confirmed on the one feed I tried (while in the members’ mode). The trick is to wait long enough for the conversion to happen. Hadrien is working on speeding things up dramatically. Try the conversion yourself. Your speeds might be faster—help Hadrien and give him feedback.

And speaking of ePub: Global Reader going ePub, in MobileRead, and the source article in Publishers Weekly. It’s great to see various arms of the Holtzbrinck conglomerate getting into ePub.

By David Rothman

French-language video on experiment

Anyone in e-books should be rooting for the success of a trial of the iLiad tablet for newspaper reading—with Le Monde and four other major French newspapers involved.

Get people reading E for any purpose and they may well move on to e-books.

Newspaper/pub domain synergies?

In fact, the French experiment includes not just newspapers and city guides but also novels from Feedbooks, Médiatoon and Mango. Feedbooks is a favorite of ours because of its support of the ePub standard (disclosure: Feedbooks co-founder Hadrien Gardeur is a TeleBlog contributor).

The French experiment is a great example for any U.S. newspaper publishers who might try out the iLiad on readers. Just as e-newspapers are good for e-books, the reverse works. Getting public domain books in the bargain can only make the use of the e-reader more attractive in general.

Cellphone angle

While supportive of Orange’s experiments with tablets, I still wonder if the real future won’t be the use of cellphones for e-reading, as rollable E Ink displays improve—check out the Readius. The PaidContent blog, where I saw the above YouTube, seems to be thinking similar thoughts.

That said, I especially like the iLiad because of iRex Technologies’ open approach, such as support of third-party apps—a stark contrast with Amazon’s Kindle.

What’s more, the large screen should be helpful for readers wanting something reasonably close to the traditional newspaper experience. Other papers involved are Le Parisien, Les Echos, L’Equipe and Télérama.

By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

I remember very precisely my first day with an e-ink device. Instantly I realized what a difference it makes to read on a screen that looks like paper. But for some reason, the whole experience still felt like reading on a screen, instead of reading a book. It took me a few days to fully understand this impression: typesetting. I’m used to hyphenation, kerning, widows/orphans etc.—in a book. On a screen, the typesetting is usually very limited. While the screen looked like paper, the text looked like something that a screen displayed.

I managed to avoid this problem very quickly, using PDF files created for the device, but it’s still something that no reflowable format, no reading system solved yet.

Why should EPUB add support for hyphenation then? Customers expect the same quality of experience with an e-books than a book. Publishers are very picky with typesetting too. So let’s see how EPUB could add support for hyphenation…

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By Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks

Moderator: Our newest contributor is a familiar name, Hadrien Gardeur—co-founder and CTO of the Feedbooks site offering e-books for many devices and in many formats. Feedbooks supports standards for both e-books and the Semantic Web. A hearty welcome to you, Hadrien! - D.R.

EPUB as a standard—it’s actually three standards, OPS, OPF and OCF—is a real step forward for e-books.

I really like how flexible the OPF standard is: with proper fallbacks you can very easily support all sorts of devices, and extend the document. But there’s still room for improvements, and the best way to support EPUB is to discuss how things could be better. For example, how about improved means of linking to other books? Or adding new capabilities to travel guides displayed on a GPS-enabled device?

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