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.

BookGlutton.com offers an online-only reading experience. Anyone can preview a sample section of a book and use the community features inside, which include chatting with others inside the chapter of the book or attaching margin notes to any paragraph. To access the whole book, users click a buy button embedded inside the text. “This creates
an interesting opportunity for people to discuss books – people who have bought the whole book and people who are reading a sample passage can communicate together in that preview section – word of mouth promotion can take place inside the book itself,” said Travis Alber, BookGlutton’s president.

“Our users are constantly requesting new material, so we’re always looking for new publishing partners,” said Miller. He added that BookGlutton is standards-based, web-based, DRM-free, and uses the new EPUB digital book format that the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Lexcycle’s Stanza platforms use.

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.

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.

"You can chat inside any chapter of the book, or you can click on any paragraph and attach a comment to it, and someone else can come past that point in the book later and respond," she says.

The site has been getting a lot of interest from teachers, including New York University English professor Jessamyn Hatcher, who asked her class to use BookGlutton to read King Lear...

BookGlutton is still a fairly small site, with about 1,500 public domain books and 120,000 readers a month. But the site’s founders are already having conversations with publishers that would expand their online library to include newly released books.

Congrats, Travis, on the well-deserved fame. And don’t forget that we knew you way back when.

Related: BookGlutton teams with Random House for promotion, in Publisher’s Weekly, as well as Kat Meyer’s interview with Travis.

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

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.

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.

How do I add books?

To let epubcatalog know about links to books, the books must be on the Web and publicly accessible. To get links, often you can right click on them in a Web page and select “Copy link” or “Copy URL.” Then simply Direct Message (DM) the URL, prefixed by a plus sign (+). It will be added to the epubcatalog.org catalog as soon as your message is processed. Normally, it happens in a matter of seconds, but it can take several minutes to an hour depending on Twitter network congestion.

A command to add a book looks like this:
+ http://catalog.feedbooks.com/books/1001.epub

The space between the plus and the URL is required. You don’t need to type in the title or author, these will be pulled from the EPUB file.

How can I see books I’ve added or books other people added?

The epubcatalog Twitter stream will announce new additions as they’re processed. Since you’ve followed epubcatalog at this point, you’ll see everything new as it comes in, including your own adds (although to protect privacy, epubcatalog won’t tell anyone who posted the items). It may take a few minutes for your additions to appear. Another way to see new additions is to simply subscribe to the epubcatalog.org Atom feed. This is a catalog feed that you can subscribe to with Google Reader, most Web browsers, and a lot of other tools out there.

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.

———-

Addendum
———-
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.

I hope you guys are doing well! I wanted to give you a heads up that
BookGlutton is releasing a widgetized version of our social reading
platform today. This is a leap for the publishing industry – now
people can share books and actually chat cross-domain inside them.
We’re hoping a viral, social approach to reading, soon to be coupled
with the ability to sell content, will give publishers significantly
better online distribution.

The May/June issue of Writer’s Digest has honored us in its new List of 101 Best Websites for Writers! This is great news – last year there were over 2100 entries to consider, so we know we’re in good company. BookGlutton is listed in the writing community section. The article isn’t currently online, but you can find it by heading to your nearest local bookstore and grabbing a copy. Heck, grab two. We did.

KM: BookGlutton is gorgeous—both the site, and the design/layout of the books in the Unbound Reader. And from what I’ve read, the idea of well-designed e-books was a big part of your motivation for creating BookGlutton. You wanted to offer users an experience that rivals the “prettiness” of print books. Do you feel BookGlutton has been successful so far in accomplishing this goal, and do you have plans to add more design and usability features to BookGlutton?

TA: We’ve put a lot of effort into how the books look, and that comes from a real appreciation for well-designed print books. BookGlutton’s books have brought the industry forward in terms of reading experience. It’s not just about the information, it’s about how it feels to read it. We’re pretty happy with what we’ve done so far, particularly how we treat the text, which has dynamically styled drop caps at the beginning of chapters and flourishes for chapter titles. Since these are generated, we can change them easily, and we have a lot of design options moving forward. It also helps that we’re Web-based, so we’re not limited like hardware readers—we can have full color images and working hyperlinks embedded in the books.

This is an old video and isn’t necessarily 100 percent up to date

Later this year we’ll be adding the ability for people to customize their books. Customization is important, and people expect to do it online. However, total customization can harm the integrity of the design, so we’ll be giving people some options. We see a lot of potential in the ePub format because of its alignment with Web design.

It’s an interesting challenge to think about where the book ends and the e-book reader begins. Most of the industry tends toward readers that look like software applications—they’re cold, technical, and uninviting. But a paper book, and a good Web site for that matter, is unintimidating. We want to strike a balance between something approachable and something technically savvy. We’ll be adding some functionality to the Unbound Reader in the coming months, but we’re working to keep it simple and clean, so people don’t feel like they’re working through an application, but instead feel like they’re browsing a book.

KM: That said, do you see other benefits or possible future benefits to the online reading environment (as opposed to reading on e-book readers)? In particular, I am very impressed with BookGlutton’s community features. As far as I know, current e-book reading devices don’t seem to have a comparable offering. Can you offer some insight about the community aspects of BookGlutton and how your members are utilizing it?

TA: Connectivity is going to be huge. People are used to being connected—they expect to be able to share their opinions and bounce ideas off each other. The Kindle’s ability to download books anywhere has been well received, but the top-down, one-to-many approach for their communication is really a missed opportunity on their part. Our focus on the browser makes it easier to incorporate a many-to-many solution—people have built pieces of this stuff already, so often it just comes down to combining and retooling the pieces we need. Interestingly enough, many of these e-reading devices have a browser, so the potential is there for them to run additional reading software. Maybe someday you’ll be reading BookGlutton on your Kindle.

As our audience grows we see more and more traction with the community features. People who join groups usually join multiple groups. Over half of the annotations are public. One of our challenges has been focusing on growing the social network as a whole – and to that end we’ve incorporated things like wall postings, group messaging, friend lists, etc. We’ve also talked about partnering with some social networks. There’s a lot of interest in licensing the reading experience itself, as a customizable, modular widget. We’re interested in talking with anyone about that possibility.

KM: The Web environment offers many more opportunities for rich media and interactive elements. Do you have plans to incorporate such features into the BookGlutton offering—maybe creating books with embedded video, etc?

TA: Our plan is to take full advantage of the power of the Web—that’s why we try so hard to avoid browser plug-ins and stick to standards. We’ve done experiments with videos and flash and it’s a real possibility. Some of this depends on expanding the limits of ePub, but we plan to try it all anyway. We haven’t completed the amount of work to finesse this, however, because there hasn’t been a demand for it yet. It really just comes down to what kind of content we can get. Most of our books are pretty simple—text with hyperlinks and imagery—so we focused on those in the short term. Even these presented some challenges. For example, you need to resize all the images and repaginate whenever the window size changes, so we had to deal with that. But the hyperlinks are a big deal, and we don’t take linking for granted; it’s really amazing to be able to jump to things within the book. Go get an ePub from Feedbooks.com, upload it to your BookGlutton account, and you’ll see what I mean: clicking one of Feedbook’s “read-also” recommendations loads an entirely new book into BookGlutton’s Reader. Immediately. And it saves it to your library, which you can share with your connections. It’s really powerful.

KM: Right now a lot of the titles on BookGlutton are public domain. Do contemporary publishers appear to be catching on to the utility of BookGlutton? Can we expect to see any newer titles from traditional publishing houses available via BookGlutton? Has your audience been requesting any specific titles?

TA: We hope so! We’ve talked to quite a few publishers and they seem interested in the idea. BookGlutton is close to having a payment system in place, so as soon as we get the right partnerships, people will be able to purchase work. Our users send requests daily, and they run the gamut.

KM: Got any visitor stats, Travis? And can you compare the current stats to what you expect them to be a year from now?

TA: BookGlutton gets around 90,000 visitors a month, which is great for a primarily public domain collection. We get requests daily for contemporary content so the numbers will increase significantly with new things to read.

KM: BookGlutton also offers users the option of uploading their own content. Have you seen a lot of response to this feature (in terms both of titles being uploaded and/or readers taking an interest in self-published content available via BookGlutton)?

TA: Now that people can upload ePubs to BookGlutton we’re expecting to see a lot more growth in that part of the site. Readers are going to want to upload their personal libraries and read them anywhere.

We’ve also always seen BookGlutton as a great tool for writer’s workshops. Writers can upload work in a couple of different formats and invite their colleagues to come critique it. We talked quite a bit about building a full ePub editor (Aaron Miller, BookGlutton’s CTO, was very interested in it and spent time working on the idea), but it hasn’t been our top priority. If our readers want their work in print we do have a partnership with WordClay, a self publishing site, that will help them get their work in paper form.

KM: I’ve noticed that a number of teachers are using BookGlutton for lit class discussions. Was this an intended use, or did it come as a surprise to you?

TA: We thought it would be useful for schools – we assumed online English classes would want to use it. We were surprised by the ESL (English as a Second Language) crowd, though, which was a market we hadn’t considered.

KM: The beauty (great design) and function (community features) seem to get the most attention, but is there anything about BookGlutton that you’ve just been dying to tell more people about, or that has not gotten the kind of attention it should?

TA: Most people don’t think about BookGlutton as an ePub reader, but ePub is at the core of our site. In fact, members can now upload their own library of non-DRM epubs. We’re a bit proud of being ePub based—it’s a format we committed to almost two years ago, long before we built the site, and it’s turning out to be a good choice. Although the standard is still developing, alignment with ePub is significant because it will make a lot of the cool things you see on the web possible in books, and you’ll start to see a parallel between web design and book design.

KM: What’s the grand plan? Any thoughts you can share on the major ingredients of the biz model?

TA: Although some of the catalog will always be free we intend to sell books as our primary source of revenue – major ingredients of the business model are content sales and platform licensing.

KM: Given the state of the economy, things have been tough for a lot of startups lately. Are you worried about finances right now?

TA: I think everyone’s worried about money these days, particularly since investment options keep drying up. BookGlutton is fine financially?

KM: Excellent! Since I always need to find out what my favorite book geeks are reading—what are you, and for that matter, you partner in book crime, Aaron Miller, reading these days? And how are you reading it?

TA: Ha. Good question.

I tend to read a lot for work, so I don’t get to read as much fiction as I’d like. This week I’m wrapping up The Big Switch, a book on how computing as a utility changes the economic landscape. Welcome to the Departure Lounge is on deck. Digitally I’m reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow .

Aaron says he’s reading The Business of Books and A Good Day to Die, both on paper. On BookGlutton he’s been reading some poetry collections authors have submitted for consideration.

More on Travis: Her day-to-day role at BookGlutton has been Chief Creative Officer, creating the look and feel for the Web site and the Unbound Reader, and managing marketing and communications. Prior to founding BookGlutton.com Travis was a creative director at JLOOP.com . She has twelve years of online experience, and has worked in web design, advertising, online training and education. Her client history includes: Cisco, Sprint, Playstation, Wells Fargo, Macys, Midway Games and Dodge. In addition, Travis has won a number of awards for her interactive art, and has been recognized by Drunken Boat, The Flash Forward Film Festival, and the Electronic Literature Organization. She holds a Masters Degree in Interactive Multimedia.

Exhibit One is Kat Meyer, the Q&A whiz and TeleBlog regular, who is a professional book marketer. Kat has more than 1,500 followers on Twitter, not a bad start for someone building a new business.

Kat’s latest interview, by the way, is with Travis Albers of Book Glutton. The BG interview will run later today or tomorrow.

Kat has pumped out some 5,000 Twitter updates. She subscribes to messages from more than 1,000 fellow users and has attracted more than 1,500 "followers." I also track Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, now up to 54,807 followers, still a fraction of Barack Obama’s 379,716 before the First Keyboarder apparently abandoned Twitter for more conventional media. Unlike Obama, Kat can’t hold White House news conferences.

Thanks to Twitter, however, more people will know about Kat and maybe do business with her. She is author of The Bookish Dilettane Blog, as well as a book sales and marketing professional with past experience at Harcourt, the University of Arizona Press and elsewhere. I’d be shocked if Kat did not write a book at some point. Check out her Tweets—her Twitter entries—to see a pro at work.

A virtual coffeehouse

Whether she goes on to a book or not, Kat knows how to draw a crowd in a book-related context and could well serve as a good example for many other writers and publishers who prefer a low-key approach.

Kat avoids obnoxious personal ballyhoo, using Twitter as a coffeehouse, where she chit-chats and talks up friends. Followers are tempted to to click on her Twitter profile and blog-link there—and perhaps go on to Google her work samples, including, I’d hope, the TeleRead Q&A’s. Twitter lets her choose between sending a message to one friend, a group or all 1,500. In effect it’s a mix between a one-to-one instant message and mailing list without many of the usual list hassles. Twitter users can post and read from the Web or via programs for a number of devices, everything from iPhones and iPod Touches (try the Tweetie app) to desktops (Twhirl and Tweetdeck, for example).

But how to get the world to notice your own e-books or p-books after signing up for Twitter or another social network? Social nets can involve more than just messages back and forth, but in the message area, I’ll pass on a few tips to use when communicating with friends, clients and people potentially in both categories. The current recession makes networking all the more useful. There are even job-related networks such as Linked-In, and Facebook is after the same career-related business even though it began life as a social network for college students and still is largely for personal users.

Book-specific tips

For book-specific advice for Twitter and other social networks, check out Bring Sexy Back to the Book Party in the Digital Age,  Laurel Touby’s excellent presentation from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference last month. Chris Brogan offered his own share of good tips on blogging and social media, a session now viewable on the Web, where he discussed the new currencies of attention and trust, his terms. With Twitter, the goals are similar.

Laurel herself founded MediaBistro, a media professional site, which, yes, is on Twitter just like her. She sees online "book parties" as especially valuable because "your message is spread  by word of mouth" and the results are measurable. What’s more, the conversion can remain online for years. And you’re building a community. "The audience wants to interact with the author," Laurel said at TOC, "but they also want to interact with like-minded souls, just as they would at a traditional book party. And those relationships people have reflect back in positive ways onto the author, onto the book, onto the publisher who brought them together. It’s a beautiful and virtuous circle."

To find useful people in your book’s area of interest, you can try Twitter’s search engine—also good for topics—or Twellow.com. Go ahead; guess and check out names. The right trendies just may be on Twitter. None other than Daniel Schorr, the 92-year-old NPR news analyst, who at time has succeeded by sticking to his beliefs and not being a trendy, recently started Twittering and is a convert with 4,128 followers.

Some Twitter wisdom from Publishing Trends

Meanwhile my diligent friends at Publishing Trends (subscription information) have compiled a handy list of Twitter-oriented tips, and I suspect that Laurel and Kat would agree with most everything in PT’s detailed Twitter guide. Ahead are highlights, just a sample of what you’ll find in the actual newsletter from March 2009.

1. "Developing your Twitter presence." "The number-one tip from people we talked to: Publishers shouldn’t be afraid to get personal on Twitter, and their tweets shouldn’t sound like marketing." Chris Brogan, the social media expert, told PT: "The best people using Twitter are the ones who talk back to people, not just the people who are talking about their dumb stuff." Look for companies whose Tweets please you, then think about similar tactics and strategies, Chris says. Ron Hogan, who started the Beatrice.com literary blog and now blogs for MediaBistro’s Galley Cat and produces workshops and conferences for writers, says publishers should "let the person running the account put a personal spin on their posts, not just announcing every press clipping or YouTube clip that comes down the pike." Same advice would apply to others. Twitter’s length limit is too short anyway for extended ballyhoo in one place—just 140 characters or perhaps 20 words or so. Use Twitter for chat and informal pointers to other Web pages. The percentage of business conversation depends on whom you’re in touch with. Just don’t overdo it. Blog headlines are okay if people expect ‘em.

2. "Using Twitter to Connect with Your Audience and Gain Recognition." A "Pew social media survey," notes Publishing Trends, "found that Twitter users as a group are much more likely than the general population to use wireless devices like cell phones, laptops, and handhelds for Internet access. They use those devices to get their news. ‘For many Twitter users, learning about and sharing relevant and recent nuggets of information is a primary utility of the service,’ says the report. ‘While Twitter users are just as likely as others to consume media on any given day, they are more likely to consume it on mobile devices and less likely to engage with news via more traditional outlets.’" You might even want to set up search words connected with your topic. For The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel, I created, yes, #solomonscandals. But I really should try tagging other topics.

3. "Oh, Yeah—It leans to increased sales."

"’Publishers should not think about Twitter initially as a way to drive book sales. Instead, it’s a way for them to connect and communicate with readers in a way that is foreign at first,’ says [Wiley Associate Publisher Christopher Webb. 'If we [are part of the community], the opportunities to introduce people to the books we publish will present themselves naturally. But we have to listen for them as part of the ongoing conversation….Having said that, Twitter can drive sales. It has been widely reported that Dell [computers] drove an additional $1 million in revenues in 18 months via its Twitter account.’"

For more Twitter tips from Publishing Trends, see @Chelsea Green has 2,350 Followers. Here’s Why. The first tip: "The main thing we do on Twitter is listen. We learn a great deal about community mood, upcoming trends, interesting news, and influential people. We find and vet possible book topics all day long."

Twitter’s visitor count:  It’s said to be almost six million unique visitors a month. Twitter is only the third-larger social network, but is especially attractive for book promo because  like radio it has an intimate one-to-one feeling, especially if you talk back to your followers—a nice way of letting people know you’re approachable, even if, like Kat, you have 1,500 fans.

How to get my "Tweets" about TeleRead and The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel from Twilight Times Books: Just sign up for Twitter and click here.

Related: When everyone’s a friend, is anything private?, in the New York Times. Just where to draw the line?

Another promo tip—riding Amazon’s coat-tails: Now that the Kindle books are available more widely, thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch, why not encourage people to use their gizmos to read Amazon-posted excerpts from your books? Put up the instructions on your book-related site. Here’s how, with the Kindle and other e-readers in mind, I’m now following up on the Scandals link in the upper-right of the TeleRead home page. Yes, I’d like the Kindle and the iPhone app much more without that horrid proprietary format and DRM, and I hope that Amazon will see the light and discover ePub and either drop DRM or switch to social DRM.

BookGlutton has just pushed some major updates, some of which I think
you might be interested in.

BookGlutton now supports non-DRMed ePub uploads. We’ve released a
suite of new upload features, including direct URL imports for HTML
and ePub files, as well as the ability to upload ePubs from your
desktop.

We’ve also released private sharing – something we’ve been working on
for quite some time. Now users can upload their private work and
invite others to share it, without having it appear in the catalog.
Features like this are great for writer’s: workshops can have a
private upload with shared annotations and real-time feedback without
showing it to the rest of the world.

Sharing Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBOB1cOkS7M
Upload Page: http://www.bookglutton.com/book/importnew.html

They understand that if a publisher, store or tech company goes out of business, you eventually may not be able to access a DRMed book. You really don’t own DRM-blighted titles for real. You’re just leasing them.

So who are the heroes in the anti-DRM struggle?

Among the stars, as I see it, are Steve and Scott Pendergrast, the owners of Fictionwise, who offer DRM only because publishers insist on it. They really prefer that books appear in a bunch of formats without DRM, and as a bonus they’re updating their eReader software to handle ePub, the industry standard.

Please help the anti-DRM cause by using the comments section of this post to name your own favorite anti-DRM examples. Or e-mail me. Mention the good guys’ actions or planned actions. Mark Coker, moderator of Tools of Change’s Feb. 10 panel on the rise of e-books, will be celebrating these anti-DRM heroes during the panel.

Below, to help get you going, are some of my other choices for the anti-DRM honors—listed in no particular order, except that I’ll mention publishers first.

• Small publishers such as Lida Quillen of Twilight Times Books (home to The Solomon Scandals, my own novel), who arranged with the Pendergrasts for her books not to be infested with DRM at Fictionwise’s eReader.com site. Who are your own favorite small publishers battling against DRM? Some of the romance houses, such as Ellora’s Cave, have led the way. For publishers like Lida, one of the big frustrations is that stores such as Mobipocket’s insist on use of DRM. And my impression is that publishers have to go out of their way for Kindle Store books not to be DRMed, assuming that Amazon will let them. It’s another indication that DRM is really better as a monopoly-promoter than as a genuine protector of intellectual property in the era of the scanner and crowd-sourced transcription of popular books.
• Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan. Pan Mac is laudably asking writers not to insist on DRM, when they sign up. It’s already offering some DRM-free titles. Most Pac Mac e-books are still DRMed, but ideally this can change over time.
• Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Savikas and colleagues at O’Reilly Media (TOC organizer), which is promoting new books as DRM free and is also championing the ePub format. Perhaps someone at O’Reilly can enlighten us as to the DRM situation with past titles. Significantly, within the book world, O’Reilly is known as a technological leader.

• Random House, which in the past has at least experimented with nonDRMed books, and which is encouraging authors of audio books to drop DRM.
• Wiley, which publishes books in a number of areas, including the technical one, O’Reilly’s specialty. It, too, has experimented with DRM-free books. Laudably this house has even tried social DRM, which isn’t "protection" in the traditional sense. Rather books come with users’ names embedded, as a way to discourage sharing. This doesn’t interfere with long-term ownership of books.
• Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press, who, through Wowio, let his titles appear without DRM (yes, Wowio itself deserves praising for relying on a form of social DRM rather than traditional DRM). Soft Skull will be releasing a number of e-books on its own for the iPhone and, I suspect, other formats. And my bet is that Richard will avoid DRM.
• Smashwords (Mark’s company), Book Glutton and other new outlets for independent authors—which aren’t hobbling themselves with any DRM.
• Marc Prud’hommeaux and Neelan Choksi at Lexcycle, who, while offering DRM to publisher as an option, have strongly spoken out against its use.
• Jon Noring. Early on, as a small publisher, Jon discovered that "protection" harmed e-books. His tiny Blue Grass Publishing avoids DRM entirely.
• Cory Doctorow. He’s consistently slammed DRM in his blog and lobbied against it among fellow writers.
• Jeff Gomez, now at Penguin, who, during his names as an Internet marketer for Macmillian, wrote Print Is Dead—where he took some swipes at DRM even though I’m sure that many of his publishing colleagues didn’t especially cotton to this criticism. Let’s hope that Macmillan and Penguin will both pay attention to Jeff’s warning that DRM detracts from price leverage (even though I don’t think that people want to may $20 for e-books, "protected" or not).
• Hadrien Gardeur at Feedbooks, a mostly public domain site, which in the future will be getting into commercial books and doing its best to avoid DRM.
• Techmeme, which, like TeleRead, has regularly published examples of DRM as an anti-consumer technology. So has MobileRead. Keep it up!

In responding, please list or link to the Web addresses of the people involved, and in the cases of stores and publishers, tell how far along they are in dropping DRM. Realistically publishers can’t always wean themselves away from DRM overnight—given their existing commitments.

Update, noon EST: Yes, it would be nice to have mentioned Baen—which for years has been clueful about DRM and hates it with a passion, just as my own publisher does.  Check out the late Jim Baen’s record. As noted, however, I didn’t claim to be mentioning everyone. I want people to help me fill in the gaps. I’m sure there are players missing as important as Baen. Help Mark and me out!

Detail: Yes, as the author of this post, I hereby declare myself ineligible for mention.

This topic is more than just grist for a post. I wanted to give the planet a quick preview of The Solomon Scandals in the standard IDPF format. And, if, along the way, people could also download Mobipocket and PDF versions of the three-chapter sample, not just ePub, then so much the better.

Easy to learn

Now, having tried the publishing tool at Feedbooks, I can say that it’s as easy to master as I’d hoped—at least if I want to stick to standard formatting. I’m unworried about frills in my case, even though ePub allows plenty for those who need them.

My Feedbooks file isn’t a heavily illustrated medical textbook, but rather an excerpt from a novel without photos.

The Stanza-iPhone connection

But I do want the sample from Scandals to be readable easily on an iPhone by way of Stanza, the most popular e-reading app for the iP and iPod Touch. Now, thanks to Feedbooks’ integration with Stanza, it is. Check it out for yourself.

From Stanza’s Library screen, just go to the Online Catalog, pick Original Books and Stories, then call up Recent Additions, and you’ll most likely see a screen showing Scandals’ cover. In case Scandals is no longer in RA, you can also search by title or my name. Or you can click for the next screen.

A few how-tos

But how to get your book in Feedbooks’ system, in ePub and other formats? The key is to follow the documentation and structure your book in components as Feedbooks suggests. You’re actually better off creating the skeleton of the book before you load it up with actual text.

For example, you an specify Parts—such as Part I—and chapters within them. Feedbooks provides lines along the left edge of the screen so you can see how the different components relate to each other.

Quick trip between views

I also like the interface’s ease of snapping back and forth between draft and a semi-WYSIWYG mode. A quick click will do the trick. You can also slip, almost instantly, into previews in Adobe Digital Editions, a PDF-only reader or Mobipocket.

Of course, ePub is the format of most interest to me, and Feedbooks has done the e-book community a real service in using it a the flagship format. Let me also praise Smashwords and BookGlutton for their own ePub efforts. Yes, there will be technical challenges along the way, but at least those sites are trying—which is really in the interest of readers and publishers alike. TeleRead’s Chris Meadows has shown us how Amazon may very well be sitting on a Mobi reader for the iPhone. And that’s the kind of world we’ll get if proprietary formats prevail, whether from Amazon, Apple or ScrollMotion. Time for the Kindle and ScrollMotion to do ePub!

While some ePub backers such as Adobe continue to wrap up books in DRM, they’re still one step closer to format nirvana than Amazon is. Remember,  the current Sony Readers uses Adobe software handle either unencrypted or nonencrypted ePub.

I see hope of major progress in e-book sales if publishers of all sizes work to make a large number and wide variety of books available without the taint and hassles of “protection.” That is the process that Feedbooks  and others like BookGlutton and Smashwords are working to facilitate. Significantly, BG, too, shows up in Stanza’s catalog, Smashwords will soon if it isn’t there already, and Stanza is sure to have more e-commerce features.

New ecosystem

Simply put, a whole new ecosystem for DRMless e-books is evolving with key players working together, and the end results for e-book-lovers should be much better than just Kindle-level simplicity alone. Readers also need to feel that they can own their books for real rather than relying on problematic DRM-dependent access in the Kindle vein.

Reminder from Feedbooks: The Scandals excerpts will also be available via Feed’s Kindle Guide, not just on the company’s site and via Stanza.

Detail related to the second image: Nope, David Rothman isn’t a pseudonym—it’s my real name (and other people’s, too). I was merely testing out possibilities.