The books, as usual, are DRM free and the catalog is implemented using a prototype of the OPDS specs, part of the BookServer architecture.

The post says that books purchased through the app will receive a 15% discount for a limited time.

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.

However, Required Field has a great write up on the conference. You can read about the Ebook Pricing panel, the What Readers Want From Ebooks panel, and the Future of Electronic Reading panel.

In addition, Sarah, over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has a write-up on her participation in the What Readers Want panel.

Hope I have better luck next time.

Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the “Clipping” feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there’s a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on.

While I can’t speak about the terms other publishers have with Amazon (though it’s a safe bet at least some of those kind of restrictions weren’t Amazon’s idea), because we want O’Reilly Kindle books to be available without any DRM, we asked Amazon if those limits applied to our books, and if so whether they could be lifted.

Though it took some work on their end (and they deserve credit for being receptive to our request), I’m happy to say that there is now no simultaneous device limit or clipping limit for O’Reilly Kindle books, and those changes have been retroactively applied for anyone who’s already purchased one of our Kindle books.

Microsoft and O’Reilly Media have entered into a joint arrangement to distribute, co-publish, develop content and manage the expansion of Microsoft Press. This is for the Northern American market and will involve paper as well as electronic books.

From our point of view, however, the big news and possible news would be on the digital end. O’Reilly is solidly committed to the ePub format standard. Will Microsoft Press use ePub on some titles, at least? And could a future version of Microsoft Reader boast ePub capabilities? ePub is a kissin’ cousin of Microsoft’s LIT format.

Here are a few quotes from the press release:

… By bringing that content to digital and mobile devices and platforms worldwide, millions more will have access to that same great content. …

"There are more than 40 million people walking around the world with a mobile phone or digital device which essentially gives them a bookstore in their pocket. That’s an enormous opportunity for publishers today," said Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly and an influential leader in the Open Source and Web 2.0 communities who has over one million Twitter followers. "We are no longer a print publisher that happens to sell digital books too. We’re a digital publisher that also sells print books. All publishing is now digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the web. Books must behave like the web they’re now a part of."

"We will apply the lessons we’ve learned and the knowledge we’ve gained about digital publishing," added O’Reilly. "And we will remain true to our own values. All the derivative content from each Microsoft Press title–whether it’s an ebook, app, webcast or an interactive video–will be issued DRM-free, because that’s what we believe in doing." …

Five titles from Kaplan Publishing for law and nursing students will be available at the iTunes store via the Stanza e-reader.

More titles will appear for students with access to iPhones or iPod Touches. Medicine will be among the fields included.

This will happen through arrangements between Kaplan Publishing, LibreDigital (digital publishing service provider) and Amazon’s Lexcycle subsidiary (developer of Stanza).

Kaplan Test Prep is offering the Stanza option after a survey showed nearly 45 percent of its students next year will have access to iPhones and iPod Touches.

The first five titles are:

• The Law School Labyrinth: A Guide to Making the Most of Your Legal Education ($13.99).
• Legal Writing: How to Write Legal Briefs, Memos, and Other Legal Documents in a Clear and Concise Style ($16.99).
• First Year Nurse: Wisdom, Warnings, and What I Wish I’d Known My First 100 Days on the Job (Second Edition) ($4.99) [no link provided, apparently – D.R.].
• How to Survive Clinical: Advice from the Nursing Students and Teachers Who Have Been There ($8.99).
• Your Career in Nursing: Managing Your Future in the Changing World of Health Care (Fifth Edition) ($11.99).

Kaplan aims to deliver its students content in the format best suited to their evolving needs.

It is working with technology pioneer LibreDigital to deliver Kaplan content to the Stanza e-reader. With over two million users spanning 60 countries, Lexcycle’s Stanza is one of the leading e-book readers for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Stanza, which features customizable formatting and searching, has drawn more than 12 million book downloads.

Book Descriptions:

• Law School Labyrinth: A comprehensive guide to law school, from the admissions process to beyond graduation. 
• Legal Writing: A guide to legal writing for the legal practitioner covering clear, concise writing with an eye towards the tools of the information age. 
• First Year Nurse: Wisdom and warnings from hundreds of experienced nurses.
• How to Survive Clinical: A pocket-sized guide featuring quotes, anecdotes, and advice from both recently graduated nursing students and current professors that will help new students face the academic and emotional challenges 
• Your Career in Nursing: Up-to-date information on trends in nursing practice, nursing education, and health care technology…

About Kaplan Publishing

Kaplan Publishing, a leading publisher of academic and professional development resources, offers a trade program that includes non-fiction narratives that educate and entertain. Kaplan Publishing is a unit of Kaplan, Inc., a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO).

    Contact:  Tim Brazier
              Publicity Director
              212.618.2432
              Tim.Brazier@kaplan.com

======================

KAPLAN CUSTOMERS APPARENTLY CAN’T USE THE SAME EPUB FILES ON DESKTOPS AND LARGER TABLETS. TIME FOR THIS TO CHANGE?

David again. This is mostly a very smart move by Kaplan.

Of course let’s hope that Kaplan will provide videos or other instruction for students who don’t pick up technology easily.

What’s more, Kaplan and its digital tech partners need to enlighten us about the copy-protection issue—the topic of the discussion below. Protection isn’t through the usual DRM. But it’s still interfering with typical students’ ability to use the ePub files on a variety of devices.

The positives of the Kaplan approach: Use of Stanza and ePub

Lexcycle’s Stanza is my favorite e-reader app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

And that isn’t merely because the ePub is Stanza’s flagship format (ePub is the IDPF standard and can generally work well on small screens).

You can customize Stanza just so, adjusting font sizes and styles and even the spacing between lines.

Also, Stanza lets you access Arial Rounded MT Bold. So far I’ve found this to be the easiest font to read on my iPod Touch.

The big frustration: Apparently no use of the same files on desktops and larger tablets

At the same time, I’d like the students to be able to use the ePub books on desktops, larger tablets and other machines, too; and some major questions emerge in this area.

The Kaplan books use “secure wrapped iPhone App,” according to a spokesperson for LibrieDigital. “That’s not to say that it can’t be tampered with, but it is to say that it would not be something that an average consumer would do. (i.e.: ‘Secure enough’ without additional DRM wrap).”

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the same books won’t be usable on desktops and other machines able to run ePub-capable software. At least that will be true of students without the skills to do the necessary extracting and file-jockeying.

If the above is the case, then I hope Kaplan and the others involved will reconsider.

About “secure wrapped” 

In a related vein, just what does “secure wrapped” mean?

Is this a different kind of wrapping from what O’Reilly Media uses on Stanza-wrapped iPhone apps, from which it says users can extract ePub for display on other machines?

Presumably the wrapping is different, but I’m just guessing. Will we see more and more educational material for the iPhone/Touch handled this way?

RX for Kaplan: Easy unwrapping and social DRM

At any rate, in Kaplan’s place, if it wants to make its books as attractive as possible for students, I’d make ePub files easily unwrappable—while using social DRM to discourage piracy, given the special piracy concerns in the education market

O’Reilly does tell how to unwrap its file. But its procedures could be simpler. The industry needs standards to make it a cinch for even nontechnical users to extract and manage ePub files for one-book Stanza apps. Apps offer quick access to material and can be an option. But students should also have the ability to access the ePub books through regular Stanaza and delete the apps. Or, of course, use the ePub files on other devices.

iPhone not for every student at every time

I appreciate the need to counter piracy. But, again, will students be able to display the same material for their private use on desktops and larger-screened tablets?

iPhones and Touches are wonderful for reading on the go, but for many students they may not be the optimal platform for hour after hour of study, given the small screen size. If nothing else, how about disabled students with special needs?

If nothing else, what about books with detailed illustrations? Or the preference of some students for E Ink machines, which will be getting better and better?

See the risk of an approach tied too closely to a particular type of hardware, no matter how popular?

Related issue: Kaplan better off creating digital material from scratch?

And of course there’s the related issue of whether Kaplan in the future might be better off creating content from scratch rather than just adapting paper books, assuming it isn’t doing this already.

Perhaps the new offerings could be designed so screen size didn’t matter as much as with adaptations of traditional books. And yes, there could still be paper editions. But here’s to “born digital,” so the material can be easily repositioned. This would be in line with some recommendations in a recent Gilbane report.

Your own thoughts—and maybe some from the companies involved?

OK, what are your own thoughts on these matters?

Meanwhile I very much hope that the companies involved can join this discussion, if they want to get closer to end users.

Speakers include Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd (photo); Matthew Bernius, co-director of the Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology; Angela James, editorial director of Quartet Press; Kasia Krozer of the Booksquare blog; and Neelan Choksi, CEO of Lexcycle.

ePub is the magic that will rescue us from the crumbling Tower of eBabel and give us e-books that Just Work.

Or not.

Here is the experience of a simple-minded publisher who believed what he was told about ePub. Perhaps there are some morals to be drawn. But if I’m not simple-minded, just simple— please correct me gently!

The book I’m formatting as an e-book is a collection of short stories. Here’s a link to one of them, so you can follow my reasoning if you want.

The formatting of these stories has two major complexities:

1. One or two paragraphs have extra space before them, to indicate the start of a new section.
2. There is one limerick, which has to be set as verse.

I’ve been checking my ePub files in Adobe Digital Editions (as a proxy for the Sony Reader), on O’Reilly’s Bookworm web site, and in Stanza on my iPod Touch. The actual XML was also viewed and checked in a standard web browser. I’m sure there are many other possibilities, but you have to stop somewhere. I built the files with Dreamweaver, so as to have full control of all the XML and CSS.

Space before paragraphs

Everyone knows enough CSS to know that the ‘margin-top’ attribute will control the space before a paragraph. Except that in Bookworm it doesn’t, because Bookworm ignores all the CSS in the ePub file (do View > Source if you don’t believe me). And Stanza takes over all the margin settings for its own purposes. Result: a short story that drones on, paragraph after paragraph, with no refreshing pauses to give it rhythm.

For my next attempt, I used the ‘padding-top’ attribute. This still fails in Bookworm, of course, but Stanza doesn’t seem to mess it up. So, victory!

Verse

There was an old man of Zermatt
Who was really exceedingly fat.
···Because we were thinner
···We had him for dinner.
Now what could be nicer than that?

Now what could be easier than that, in typesetting terms? A handful of paragraph styles controlling spacing and indentation, and there you are.

Except: Bookworm ignores the CSS, so we’ll get huge spacing, and Stanza has its own ideas about margins and won’t listen to our CSS, so we’ll get huge spacing. In both cases, a mess.

The cure is to put ‘br’ tags between each line. But even that is not enough, because some readers (such as Adobe) will indent the first line of a paragraph, which ruins the verse spacing. So we have to put a ‘br’ tag in front of the first line as well — which means that there’s an ugly blank space before the whole poem.

So you can’t set verse in ePub without knowing what software is going to be reading it.

Typesetting quality

People who set type for a living spend much of their time slaughtering widows and orphans. Adobe Digital Editions manages to eliminate them, though not perhaps in the most elegant way. Stanza, on the other hand, is a one-man benevolent institution. The last line of a paragraph is frequently left dangling at the top of a page; the first line of a paragraph is frequently stuck at the bottom of a page; and it has a love of hyphenating the last word on a page, even if that leaves only 4½ words of the paragraph floating absurdly at the top of the next page.

Yes, hyphenation… I conduct a running war against malicious publishers who hyphenate “wouldn’t” before the ‘n’, but Stanza goes one better than them. In the sentence ‘And how is the butcher’s meat, Valerie dear?’ Stanza manages to put a hyphen after the question mark and before the closing quote. It looks novel.

The moral of the story

The biggest complaint about the content of e-books today is that the quality is so low. This is not just an aesthete’s whinge. Beautiful text is readable text. It is our duty to our readers to do the best we can in e-books, just as we do in print. But despite all the promise shown by ePub, it fails, in practice, to provide the consistency that we need.

You will say that this is a software question; but I say that there is no software involved. No-one really uses Adobe Digital Editions: they use the Sony Reader or another machine. No-one really uses Stanza: they use the iPhone or the iPod Touch. These things are appliances, not computers. Users have no concept that there is any software there at all — do you know what software powers your DVD player? — and so they have no incentive to put pressure on the software suppliers to make things better.

Even if pressure could be brought to bear, it may already be too late. Suppose you are responsible for maintaining Stanza, and you read this post. What will you do? Correct Stanza to be consistent with Adobe? Surely not. Because that will mean that every existing e-book whose author has tweaked it to work will Stanza will instantly look broken. The losers in any change will notice at once, and make a lot of noise; the winners will not even notice they’ve won.

Evolutionary biology has the concept of a speciation event: when two populations find that it is to their benefit for interbreeding to be impossible. Has this already happened within ePub?

Is it already too late?

The TeleRead take: Of course technical books from O’Reilly aren’t the same as novels from Knopf—cultural differences count less—but you can see the point here. While localization is fine for e-books or any others, publishers should work with authors and agents to rethink existing agreements. Really. It’s a win-win-win… game. Image is from O’Reilly’s app-packaged iPhone manual.

But one area where existing ebook resellers could really learn from Scribd is in terms of data access and reporting. During one particularly frustrating conversation with an ebook reseller just last week, I learned that we’d be lucky to get sales reports nearly 6 weeks after any sales. These are digital sales. On the Web. Paid by credit card. No inventory to track, no shipping, no check or invoice processing.

Compare that to Scribd, where I get an email every time a document is sold telling me how much it sold for, and the total lifetime earnings for that document. I can also view a graph showing document views over time ….
And every single day I get a detailed summary of document activity

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my industry colleagues in Europe during the past year, and it became increasingly obvious there was an opportunity to bring the Tools of Change for Publishing message to a European audience. So we’ve teamed up with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on a special one-day TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday October 13, the day before the Book Fair begins.

Many of the topics (and some of the speakers — including Tim O’Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and Sara Lloyd) will be familiar to TOC New York attendees, but tuned for a European audience. And while the program is still in development, we’re also trying to include some fresh voices who can bring a more global perspective — such as Kotobarabia’s Ramy Habeeb and Guardian Media Group’s Simon Waldman.

The show floor is not open today, that starts tomorrow, but there are a series of lectures, panels and presentations going on all day. I’m attending a few and will report on what I’ve heard.

This lecture is an update on the O’Reilly piracy project, presented by Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media who was hired by O’Relly to undertake the study.

They want to quantify the impact of piracy on book sales. Random House joined the study. The project is still continuing. Looking for more publishers to get a bigger database. For the piracy part of the study only O’Reilly books were looked at.

The primary findings are that the piracy threat might be overstated for the books they looked at. Not that many titles got pirated. 21 out of 65 O’Reilly titles were pirated. There is a signifact lag between the time when a book is published and the time when it shows up on peer to peer sites. The average time is 19 weeks.

If you give ebooks away what is the impact on sales? Found initially that sales were higher during promotional period and up a bit for the period after the promotional one.

Surprises: low volume of peer to peer incidence, long lag time on peer to peer seeding after the book came out, higher incidence of “free” in publishing in the industry then they thought.

Overall view so far is that the data set is so limited that it is very hard to draw any valid statistical assumptions. Seeds and leeches peak very quickly after issuance and then drop off quickly as well to a much lower steady state. Piracy research was conducted with only O’Reilly titles.

For the data they studied, pirated content show an increase after about 25 weeks and this seemed to cause a renewed interest in O’Reilly content and thus caused an increase in sales of about 20%.

Doing additional testing, continuing to monitor and trying to get more participants.

My own view of the presentation: piracy data is from O’Reilly so it is limited to technical books and a small market segment – a segment where you would expect to find piracy because of the technical expertise of the readers, thus it is unclear to me how this data translates to a mainstream publisher, if at all. It is an excellent effort and more participants are needed to make the limited data set meaningful.