TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Liza Daly’ Category

By Paul Biba

Liza Daly, ThreePress Consulting, discussed problems often found with current ebook production.

Typical problems with current ebooks: plain text cover as opposed to photo; often have to step through blank pages, irrelevant copyright info, wrong ISBNs, table of contents with chapter numbers that are irrelevant content and readers hate this (if use samples then up to half of sample is often irrelevant pages), misspellings, bad line breaks (in some cases the pirated version is actually better than the professionally better one).

By David Rothman

The infamous Nook is Number Two on Time’s list of the year’s best gadgets. Number One is the Motorola Doid.

Excerpt from the Nook write-up: “The screen is one you’ve seen before: the 6-in. E Ink screen in Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-reader is the same one in Amazon’s Kindle 2. It’s the stuff around and behind the screen that makes the Nook cool. Like that color touchscreen right below it, adding some flair and speed to go with the poky, drab E Ink display."

Speaking of the Nook, software engineer Liza Daly has found ePub-related horrors ranging from useless images of HTML anchors to hanging during the display of “multiple commercial, valid, battle-tested ePubs” and problems with font-face changes and Arabic and Chinese.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Yep, video books exist with the proprietary Vook approach. But how about ePub books with videos embedded?

Liza Daly, creator of Bookworm, had just shared some tips (via Reading 2.0 list).

By David Rothman

Liza Daly, a TeleRead contributor, has compiled a list of DRM free publishers such as O’Reilly and Drollerie. Help out “Liza’s List,” as I’ll call it—a kind of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval in the technical sense. Send her names to add.

The definition of DRMfree can be tricky. I’d hope that little Twilight Times Books in Kingsport, Tennessee, the publisher of my novel, could go on the list. At the same time, yes, like certain other anti-DRM houses, Twilight sells through outlets that taint all books with “protection.” Twilight has no choice. Publishing is a brutal business.

Another issue is whether social DRMed books, a compromise approach, would qualify as DRMfree. Social DRM means embedding a buyer’s name into a book to discourage copying. It is not a perfect system, given the privacy risks. But it is rather different from traditional DRM, which erects barriers against copying, even the legitimate private kind for backup purposes and the like.

(more…)

By Kat Meyer

Liza Daly is a software engineer and president of Threepress Consulting Inc., developing applications for publishing and education. Recent work includes online products for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Oxford University Press, and O’Reilly Media.  She is a frequent writer and speaker on publishing technology issues and will be appearing on two panels at the O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 conference. – K.M.

KM: You are the developer of Bookworm. Can you easily sum up exactly what Bookworm is and what it does for us? (No pressure!)

LD: As a project, Bookworm has two goals:

• Provide a place for users to store ePub-format books, read them online and download them to other devices.  iPhone users can transfer their books directly to Stanza’s software for the iPhone, for example.
• Demonstrate advanced features of the ePub format itself. When I launched Bookworm in July 2008, there were no other readers that fully supported e-book stylesheets,

And I wanted to show off some of the design possibilities available in electronic books.

KM: As a developer, you are committed to utilizing OpenSource software. Why?

LD: Although I’ve been involved in digital publishing since 2004, my background is really in general Web development.  I’ve been writing Web applications since 1995—about as far back as the industry goes—and the history of the Web as a whole has always been a push-pull between open source and commercial interests.

(more…)

By Kat Meyer

For her new TeleRead series, The Digitizers, Kat Meyer will talk to developers and designers who are forging the future of e-reading. Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle, the creators of the Stanza e-reader for iPhones and Touches, is her first interviewee. He handles Lexcycle’s marketing, business development and strategic management. Kat is a book marketing professional who, in her spare time, blogs at The Bookish Dilettante. Welcome to the ranks of TeleContributors, Kat!

KM: It seems that there is a certain amount of resistance among book publishers to going full speed ahead with e-books and other digital publishing options. While some of the opposition is just human nature and the tendency to resist change, it’s also true that publishers face some very real obstacles in going from a purely print-based production and distribution model to incorporating digital into the mix. Would you agree?

NC: Totally. Often the very thing that has made you successful for so long often is the thing that makes it hard to handle chaos and change. I think it is one of the hardest things to do especially when the formula has worked for so long. Heck, in Austin where I am based, the exact thing that took Dell from nothing to what I think is now $60B dollar business is the thing that is stifling its growth. And that’s not even a company that has reached its 15th birthday. So it should not be a surprise that incumbent publishers are struggling a bit with the changes that are taking place.

And then publishers have to face upstarts like Smashwords who are completely putting the traditional model on its head. Eighty-five percent of what Smashwords receives go to the authors.

KM: What strategies would you recommend to publishers for proceeding into the digital age—what questions do they need to ask themselves to determine where they should start?

NC: I think the first place any publisher should look is to do an honest assessment of their ability and comfort level to change. Establishing those parameters for some span of time is very important to provide a framework and bounds to work within.

KM: Is there any one thing that all publishers should be doing, or is each and every publisher’s situation going to be different enough that they need to do it all from scratch?

NC: I fundamentally believe the one thing every publisher needs to do is to figure out their overall strategy and see how digital publishing fits into it.  Right now, the sense I get is that each digital group is not really part of the overall picture but more of a skunkworks, or side project.

I think a major publisher should go hire a McKinsey & Company or an Accenture or some other strategic change agent that the publisher CEO will listen to. Examining their traditional business for cost savings and determining how much to invest in growth areas like Digital Publishing is exactly in the sweet spot of most strategy consulting shops and the bottom line is it is human nature that the CEO will be more apt to listen to an outside consultant than internal employees.

(more…)

By Jon Noring

Flexibility helps keep us healthy. We can better enjoy physical activity which, in turn, motivates us to exercise. Keep on stretchin’!

Likewise, a flexible digital publication format is much better for the industry—and for readers—than a rigid, limited one.

To be more precise, a flexible format is more likely to be embraced, due to business pressures.

The IDPF’s new open standard e-book format, ePUB, is rapidly proving its flexibility. And ePUB’s flexibility is, of course, intentional by design.

A little history of ePUB’s predecessor as a consumer standard

Five years, two months and eight days ago, I published the reviewed eBookWeb article: “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?” My article delved into some of the requirements an e-book format must meet to be potentially embraced by the digital publishing industry as the consumer standard. From the requirements analysis, I concluded that IDPF’s OEBPS specification met these requirements and could become, when the time is ripe, the industry standard.

And indeed we are now seeing a groundswell of interest in ePUB by publishers and application developers. The primary reason is its flexibility in a number of areas, some of which are only now being recognized. I’ll delve into a couple of them in this article. [Note 1]

(more…)

By Liza Daly of threepress.org

"Three miles of books"—that’s the caption on a Flickr photo of a Blackwell’s bookstore.

Someday could the books all be online? Imagine working on your thesis at the beach. Just how much progress are academic publishers and university libraries making?  Here in the States, at least, many trade publishers are buzzing about the Kindle. Academic publishers, however, along with their library customers, are not quite as excited about Kindle-style e-books yet despite growing interest in digital works.

Leaders beyond the Kindle realm

But in many ways the academic houses been the real leaders in delivering other kinds of online content, whether as standalone product databases or as part of library aggregators. Universities see E as a way to fight the growing costs of academic journals and, yes, books, too. One study of academic, public and special libraries showed that only 25 percent of library spending on e-books was with individual publishers, while close to 70 percent was with aggregators.

Such thoughts come to mind not only from various statistics but also from the time I spent on May 29 at the "Going Large with E-Books" seminar at the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston. Despite the name, e-books in the usual sense were just part of the agenda.

Two different strategies but a common skepticism of DRM

Life-science publisher CABI recommended starting small and diversifying with multiple platforms where feasible. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers chose a single vendor that could deliver online features like subscription-based access and full-text search, but also provide a print-on-demand service.  Both presenters stressed that DRM was something to be avoided or at least made unobtrusive.

(more…)

By Liza Daly of threepress.org

Moderator: Liza Daly, our newest contributor, runs threepress.org, an open source project. See her bio at the end. Welcome, Liza! – D.R.

"Do one thing, and do it well" is the core of the Unix Philosophy. Unix is the third major flavor of operating system besides Windows and Mac OS (actually a certain-flavored Unix), and it’s the platform that serves most of the content on the Internet. Whether you are aware of Unix or not, its software development ideology has had pervasive influence in making the Internet an open platform not dominated by any one corporate interest.

I’d like to see this philosophy of loosely coupled, single-use tools applied more widely to digital publishing, and e-book development in particular. This is the time for publishers to look beyond the monolithic, closed-source frameworks that have defined conversion and digital workflows to date.

Three tenets in software development can apply here:

1. Most technical problems have been solved before. Start with those solutions and customize only when necessary.

2. Less code is better than more code. Specialized ("domain-specific") languages such as XSLT can dramatically reduce the amount of code that one has to write because they are so tightly coupled to the source XML.

3. Find ways to make all these different programs work together. If a better one comes along, make it easy to switch it in.

A lot of this philosophy was reflected in the thinking about the ePub standard:

1. XHTML and CSS already have the vocabulary and software support to display reflowable digital content.

(more…)