TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘net tools’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Alexandria Digital Literature, one of the earliest e-book stores (though the store portion of the site is now defunct), has gotten its collaborative filtering literature recommender, Hypatia, up and running again after a while of being down, and is accepting new accounts.

Hypatia is a unique system that is still entirely unmatched on the web today. To use it, you go in and spend time rating books and stories. You might rate a book you truly love as “Fabulous”, one that you enjoyed a whole lot but doesn’t quite reach the level of “love” as “Excellent,” and so on.

Once you have rated a sufficient number of books, Hypatia will compare your tastes to those of thousands of other patrons on file, see which ones are the most similar to yours, and then display a list of books they loved that you haven’t read yet. This gives you a great basis for making out your next check-out list at the library or searching for e-books.

Back in Alexlit’s heyday, I discovered many of my current favorite authors through the recommender. Perhaps you can do the same.

One caveat: Alexlit currently runs on a trial version of a database server that allows only five simultaneous users, so it is possible the site might hit capacity fairly quickly. If that happens, just try again in a few hours.

For more information on Alexlit, check out this summary of the podcast interview I did with its founder, Dave Howell, three years ago.

By Chris Meadows

Blogger Ben Forta remarks on a strange conundrum. The 2010 US Census has a fancy website, a blog, and is using social networking to spread the word…but when it comes down to actually filling out and sending in the census form, they require you to mail it back.

Using snailmail.

The site says they are considering response via Internet “for the future”. Of course, the next “future” census is in 2020.

It seems awfully strange in a world where we can download music, movies, and books, and so many government agencies (such as unemployment insurance) have web forms, that the census is not making web response available. It sure would be more convenient for most citizens than to have to fill something out on paper and send it in.

By Chris Meadows

The line between e-books and other Internet writing has been diminishing over time, with commercial e-self-publishing sites such as Smartbooks or Scribd, independent story hosts such as Shifti.org, and fanfic downloaders and converters that turn stories posted on fan-fiction hosts into formatted e-books.

One of today’s big buzz-words is “the cloud”, referring to the practice of storing data on remote Internet servers for access anywhere.

The e-book sites I mentioned above are places where reading material sits in the cloud—but writing is moving to the cloud, too, to let people work on documents remotely without the risk of losing or forgetting a USB stick or other media. And reading and writing are just two sides of the same textual coin.

So, in this post I am going to look at four cloud-based tools that can be used for remote writing. We have mentioned or covered some of these in different ways already, as some of them can be used for reading as well.

I am sure there are other such tools out there, too. If I miss mentioning your favorite, please suggest it in the comments!

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By Chris Meadows

[Note: This comment from “Adan” seemed to merit a reprint as a “Does Anybody Know” column. I’ve sent him a Google Wave invitation myself.]

I was using Yahoo Groups (they bought and crippled Dutch “Clubs” software, while Google Groups is even poorer; all quite outdated) and a little Drupal and Mediawiki site setup for some information freedom activist news. Most issues could be done in Drupal and/or Mediawiki. But now there is Wave…

Then my girlfriend and I both have some stories to write books about. She about (extreme) personal experiences and I about some political murder research.

So don’t know what to do. Maybe just start with Open Office to get the text digitalised, get Mediawiki and/or Drupal ready with add-ons. Must be secret and encrypted too, as the first edits contain too much personal info. I haven’t figured it out yet.

Anyway, I’d applied for Wave, but probably my remarks about Yahoo versus Google groups were not a main reason to select me.

Hope you still have an invitation for THE Wave and maybe can give more suggestions how to get to publish a book; both on internet and bookstores.

Thanks.

By David Rothman

Earlier item here. Thanks to Phil Bosua at LOL Software!.

By Chris Meadows

A couple of weeks ago, I covered the Google purchase, shutdown, and subsequent reopening of EtherPad. A couple of days ago, Google released the source.

Now there are at least five new public-access EtherPad servers operating in the wild, including one run by the Pirate Party of Sweden and one hosted by commercial collaboration wiki company PBWorks. I have written a brief guide to collaborative writing with EtherPad; it can be found here.

Google purchased EtherPad’s developer to add its staff to the Google Wave development team. I covered Google Wave back in October, and have since had the chance to try it out.

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By Chris Meadows

E-book stores aren’t the only place to find reading material for your gadget of choice.

Wesley Fryer blogs about another source: fanfic. I covered fanfic to a certain extent in my Paleo E-books columns, but mostly with an emphasis on the past. Fryer points out that the fanfic community has not stood still either.

Many fanfic stories are hosted on FanFiction.net. There are an app called Fanfiction Downloader and (as a commenter points out) a similar fanfic downloading web app that will take these stories and package them in HTML or e-book form. (The app makes MobiPocket books; the web app makes ePub.)

I tried out the web app myself, and found it quite easy to use: just paste the URL of a given fanfic, and it becomes an ePub. It only supports four fanfic sites so far, but those sites are full of plenty of fan-written fiction. Any e-book fan who is also a fanfic fan will never run out of reading material.

(Found via retweet by @stanza_reader.)

By David Rothman

TeleRead, the oldest general e-book news and view site in the English language, has some new spring in its step following a successful move to a new server. Pages should load faster in your Web browser, and outages should be rare. Like the new page load speed?

Big  thanks to the FullThrottle Development, a WordPress specialist among other things, for making the transition so smooth.

By David Rothman

If all goes well, FullThrottle Development will begin TeleRead’s move to a speedier server at around 10 p.m. Washington, D.C., time. Once the maintenance notice is up, please delay comments until FullThrottle is done—so your words survive the move. I’m just guessing that the move will take several hours.

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By Chris Meadows

Here are a few quick follow-ups to previous TeleRead stories:

EtherPad source released

Remember how I mentioned Google had bought EtherPad and was closing it down, then that it would stay up at least until it had been open-sourced? Google has just released the source. Right on, Google and EtherPad crew!

Just in time, too; the EtherPad server has been noticeably faltering lately with all the extra attention Google’s purchase has brought.

Fusion Garage responds to TechCrunch lawsuit, allegations

I mentioned in my previous story on this issue that we had not heard Fusion Garage’s side of things yet. Well, now we have. Fusion Garage’s statement addresses the lawsuit, Arrington’s allegations that there is no money behind Fusion Garage and about its founder’s “shady” past, and the ownership of its intellectual property.

Of course, it is still going to take a judge to sort the whole thing out.

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By David Rothman

We’ve called in a WordPress specialist, WordPress Upgrades, part of Full Throttle Development to help us get up and running efficiently. TeleRead, as the oldest English-language site devoted to general news and views about e-books, is not a simple thing to run, but we think we’ve found some experts to help us out.

On the positive side, today so far has been one of the our best traffic-days in months. Thanks for sticking around through our problems and we think we have the right people work out our WordPress puzzles!

By Chris Meadows

Yesterday, I reported that Google had bought AppJet, the makers of the web-based collaborative editor EtherPad, and was closing EtherPad down as they incorporated AppJet’s staff into the Google Wave team.

There was a great outcry over that decision, and the abruptness of the sudden cutoff, and today Google relented. In a follow-up blog post, ex-CEO Aaron Iba announced that EtherPad was back on-line for the time being, and would stay so until the AppJet team could open-source EtherPad and its underpinnings. They would also be getting all registered EtherPad users beta access to Google Wave by the end of the month.

Google has been playing the takeover game long enough, and consistently enough, that it has become practically a cliché that when Google buys your favorite company out, you might see that company’s functionality regurgitated again, eventually, with a Google brand on it.

But every so often, Google shows that they know what not being evil means after all. Not only is EtherPad back, but once the source is released the community will be able to take over and maintain it. Such a remarkably useful, simple tool should not be lost.