TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘web books’ Category

By Jon Noring

I have been quite perplexed in reading the many comments about IDPF’s “ePub” format following the release late last year of its underlying specs. A number of very smart people, including several developers who naturally dig deeply into tech specs, have painted ePub as a dark and mysterious digital publication (e-book) format, unlike anything else in the Universe™.

The way some have discussed ePub, if Indiana Jones were to explore the deep caverns of ePub, he would probably find something exotic and other-worldly, maybe even the remnants of a long-lost civilization. [note 1]

In reality, though, the opposite is true. ePub is internally quite recognizable and familiar, very similar to traditional web content that we all know and love.

ePub and web content share a number of important commonalities:

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By Robert Nagle

WordPress forum thread: How to produce an entire book on WordPress blog.

Speaking of interesting threads, here’s a great mobilethread on obscure novels.  Notable mentions: Codex Seraphinianus, Will Cuppy’s How to be a Hermit, and Frigyes Karinthy’s Yes Sir.

I haven’t even discussed this with David Rothman, but I am now removing link condoms from URLs in comments on my idiotprogrammer blog. Link condoms, according to seomoz  are, “any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content”. The blog companies collaborated with Google to add the “nofollow” attribute to comments in order to prevent spam comments from receiving high placement on search results. (Wikipedia now is using link condoms on external links as well).

Here’s a list of arguments by a group opposing nofollow:

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam
2. nofollow is confusingly named
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
5. nofollow could be used to shut Web sites out
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
7. nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention
8. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
9. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
10. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
11. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion

Link Condoms sounded like a good idea at the time, but one unfortunate effect of link condoms is that it becomes practically impossible for self-publishing authors to be seen by search engines unless they pay for advertising. On my personal blog, I carefully monitor comments and akismet handles the rest, so I don’t have a problem with commenters mentioning URLs. Most of the people who comment on my blog are writers or artists like myself, and I have no problem with giving them a little link love. (On a bigger blog like TeleRead, this might be a little harder to implement).

Fortunately, solutions are only a wordpress plugin away.  In a nutshell, Dofollow wp plugin seems to handle the job admirably.

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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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