TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘BookGlutton’ Category

By Paul Biba

For those publishers interested in using BookGlutton to publish their books, BookGlutton has put up an article about how to do this and how to use their content management system, which reads Epub, incorporates Onix and uses the agency model. You can:

* -Maintain your publisher profile page
* -Interact directly with your readers and customers
* -Maintain a catalog of your EPUB titles
* -Instantly publish on a per-title basis
* -Control whether your files may be downloaded or not
* -Set your own prices on titles, changing them at any time
* -See real-time sales reports across all titles
* -Receive notifications whenever a title is sold

By Paul Biba

From Rita Toews:

Read an E-Book Week is gearing up for the 2010 event – March 7 – 13th. An impressive list of participants includes Kobo, PocketBook E-Reader and BookGlutton. Also joining in the celebration of e-books is Smashwords, as well as Badosa.com, with a selection of e-books in Spanish, Catalan, English and French.

The Wright State University Libraries of Ohio will also recognize the week. They have created a special template that librarians can download from the Read an E-Book Week website to produce lapel buttons for library staff.

This year a section containing resource articles has been added to the site. The articles cover a range of topics, including an interview with Cory Doctorow and a review of several e-book devices. More articles will be added in the near future.

By Paul Biba

Thanks to Kay Meyer’s Facebook page I found out that BookGlutton made Fox News. Here’s what Fox says:

If you want to join a book club but can’t seem to find one, or if you’re in one and can’t seem to agree on what to read, there’s a Web site you may want to try.

BookGlutton.com is a site where anyone with a computer and Internet access can read and discuss a variety of books. Users have access to BG’s “Unbound Reader,” which displays books with two side panels for discussion. You can chat with other users about the book in real time via the “Talk Panel.” If you want to add a comment after the initial conversation you can use the “Mark Panel.” Last October, BookGlutton made a deal with technology publisher O’Reilly Media, adding more than 500 titles to its collection. That’s in addition to material from Random House, Feedbooks.com, and public domain books.

By Paul Biba

Book Glutton has launched streamlined sites for the iPhone and Android. Here’s a video of how they work.

By Paul Biba

The nice folks at BookGlutton have revised their video. If you don’t know about them then take a look at how it works. It really is a unique service.

By Paul Biba

BookGlutton has a new bookstore. BG’s news release follows. – Paul Biba

BookGlutton.com, an online reading website that integrates community with books, has launched an online bookstore featuring technology publisher O’Reilly Media’s newest titles. Beginning today, visitors to the site will be able to browse over 500 O’Reilly titles, read them online together, and share annotations about them.

The addition of an e-commerce platform expands BookGlutton’s catalog beyond public domain titles. “Since launch we’ve steadily worked on building out an e-commerce system that integrates with our social network.” said co-founder and CTO Aaron Miller. “We’ve also signed deals with a number of small publishing houses, and we’ll be rolling out new books from them over the coming months.” Previously, BookGlutton has partnered with other content providers like Random House and Feedbooks.com for free and promotional material.

To see the new BookGlutton store click on the “Books” link on BookGlutton.com. Genres include short fiction, technology, and science fiction, among others. (more…)

By Paul Biba

I got the following email from Travis Alber. This could be a great service to the community and certainly is priced at a level that anyone can afford. Here’s what Travis has to say:

I wanted to drop you a quick note – as of today we’ve rewritten and
re-released BookGlutton’s EPUB converter as a paid service. Emphasis
now is on providing EPUBs that validate, for maximum compatibility,
and also on the EPUB authoring process – providing feedback along the
way so that EPUBs can be created with common tools used in web design.

People who know HTML can now, fairly easily, make a valid EPUB after
authoring some source HTML using simple web tools like Firefox and
Dreamweaver. Our graphic designer has been using it, so it’s not too
technical for those who follow the directions.

Short Explanation:
http://blog.bookglutton.com/?p=599

Youtube Walkthru:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us_bgqe-VeE

Converter Address:
http://www.bookglutton.com/api/convert.html
(also in the BookGlutton.com footer)

The Converter supports images, external stylesheets, nested tables of
contents, and Dublin Core metadata. The cost of downloading the
resulting EPUB is $5, but the tool itself and the feedback process can
be used for free.

This tool is now geared more toward publishers that want an affordable
way to generate production-ready EPUBs, but it’s also still a great
tool for anyone who distributes EPUBs and wants to make sure they’ll
work in different reading systems.

By David Rothman

I’ve been pestering the IDPF to do shared annotations or at least pick up others’ standards in this area.

And if there can be instant chat, then so much the better.

Well, even if the standards group isn’t paying sufficient attention to the importance of interactivity, others are starting to—notably, National Public Radio.

NPR’s Laura Sydell interviewed Travis Alber of BookGlutton. An excerpt from the text version:

Reading a book evokes solitary images of lying in bed late at night or sitting beneath a beach umbrella lost in a fantasy. But BookGllutton,, a Web site that permits readers to chat about books as they read, may be transforming a lone activity into a communal one.

The site was born out of co-founder Travis Alber’s desire to talk about books with friends who had moved away. Her solution? A Web site that allows multiple users to write in the margins of an online book.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

The Book Glutton people are so nice that it is always a pleasure to give them a little bit of publicity. This is from a press release I received:

The Random House Publishing Group has joined forces with the social reading platform BookGlutton to offer a chapter giveaway promotion of Sarah Dunant’s forthcoming novel SACRED HEARTS, on sale July 14.
Beginning today, the Random House imprint will make the first four chapters of SACRED HEARTS available to BookGlutton.com users. Special features will include an essay by the author and notes sprinkled throughout the pages about her extensive research for the book. Sarah Dunant will also log on to the site and answer questions from readers.

“We’re intrigued by the concept of social reading and want to give online book clubs the unique experience of reading and discussing our books in real-time.” said Avideh Bashirrad, Director of Marketing for the Random House imprint.

“We’re excited to offer Sarah Dunant fans a way to connect through her work. Books have always been a social experience. People love to talk about what they’re reading and BookGlutton lets them point to what they like inside a book just as they would in person” said Travis Alber, President of BookGlutton.

This promotion will be extended through the fall and will include more titles from the Random House Publishing Group.
Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a web-based reading platform that enables people to connect and chat about books, inside the books. The Unbound Reader is built entirely on open web standards, is free to use, and allows both shared comments and real-time chatting on a chapter-by-chapter basis. http://www.bookglutton.com

By Paul Biba

At the IDPF Conference I met Andrew Sacher who is CEO of Word-Player. This is an ebook reader for Android. Andrew said that the app will read EPUB and that he had gotten 60K downloads in the last 2 months. You can connect directly from the app to Feedbooks or Gutenberg. According to Andrew it was easy to put the app together in a programming sense and he gets good support from the Android website. He also said that it was very easy to upload the program to the Android app store and it was on the store and avialable in seconds.

The app has one-touch highlighting, which is easier than on the Kindle because the G1 has a touch screen, and bookmarking and computer assisted speech. Currently, of course, its on the G1, but it will run on all phones equipped with Android.

I don’t have a G1 so I can’t check it out. If any of our readers do have the phone (I know Travis Alber of BookGlutton has one) please leave a comment here, or if you’d like to do a full review get in touch with me about publishing it.

By Paul Biba

The BookGlutton people are really on a roll. As Roger Spergerg said in an email to me: The BookGlutton folks are just charging ahead madly! Wonderful!

They have started a new service, currently Twitter based, which will build a catalog of ebooks. Check out their epubcatalog info and here’s an excerpt from their write up:

How do I get started?

It’s very easy if you’re a member of Twitter. We plan to support many services in the long run, but for now, you’ll need a Twitter account. With your Twitter account, follow @epubcatalog. Once you’re a follower, you can tell epubcatalog about books you find on the Web. The only format supported for books is EPUB. Support for catalogs is planned through the OPDS recommendation.

(more…)

By Travis Alber, co-founder of BookGlutton

It takes about seven minutes into any conversation with a publisher before the DRM questions come up. Most publishers are very interested in hearing about new technologies and surprisingly familiar with new developments. But many are paralyzed by the DRM question and don’t have an informed corporate strategy to deal with it, let alone a good way to integrate new technology. Some ask to turn each page into an image; others want to disable right-clicking and other essential browser features. Neither one of these is a good solution.

The truth is the Web has evolved its own set of content controls, and a new approach to the problem is in order. To that end we’ve written up a short document on how BookGlutton approaches content protection. It hinges on two core ideas: 1.) in a networked society most people are interested in links – not downloads, and 2.) the Web runs on interoperability. BookGlutton didn’t come up with these things; they’re in the underlying structure of the Web.

Here’s a PDF for older browsers.

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Addendum
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Since the original intent here was misunderstood, I thought I’d add a few notes for clarification. The article is intended, ultimately, to benefit all of us as readers of digital text, by easing some of the fears about putting content online. Unfortunately, the responses to the article here and elsewhere, are doing a lot to perpetuate these fears. The point being made is not that unencrypted content in a browser cannot be copied, it is that is is much safer there than out in the wild, as files, even encrypted files. DRM and encryption are not reliable means of deterring content theft. Providing good content at reasonable prices, through familiar distribution channels (the Web), is the best approach. We want publishers to realize this as much as anyone else.