TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘The Digitizers’ Category

By Kat Meyer

Hugh McGuire, co-founder of Book Oven, is Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series. Book Oven is a Web space for making, collaborating on, and selling books. Hugh is also the founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project that creates free public domain audiobooks, now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, and several other Webby projects. McGuire photo by C.C. Chapman.

KM: For those readers who don’t know about it yet, can you give us the elevator speech version of what Book Oven is, and what it does?

HM: We’re calling it "cloud-publishing," an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books and e-books.

Most of these tools exist, of course, in various forms already. You can collaborate with editors and proofreaders on a wiki or Google Docs, you can find other writers or editors on various writers’ forums. You can generate an ePub ebook using various tools, and you can make a PDF and send it to Lulu, or CreateSpace, and sell your book print-on-demand through your own site, or through online book retailers; you can sell your e-books on Smashwords, or Amazon’s Kindle store, or at Shortcovers.

But, we want to put all that together so that writers, editors, and designers can focus on the really important stuff: the content. So we’re building a set of Web tools, and a community, that will allow writers, editors, proofreaders and designers to work on a book, and get it into the hands (or devices) of readers.

How people organize themselves in Book Oven is up to them: small private groups of colleagues; open groups of strangers; people who work together out of interest in a particular book or topic, or people who find each other through a marketplace for services.

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By Kat Meyer

Moderator’s note on Hadrien Gardeur: Years ago I urged Project Gutenberg to come up with a truly slick program to download, manage and display Gutenberg books. “A book tuner,” I called the idea with radio in mind. Hadrien at Feedbooks had similar dreams and acted on them.

Hadrien’s technology now helps various e-reading apps serve in effect as book tuners. These include such programs as Stanza (the iPhone reader shown at left) and FBReader (a possible candidate for official use on the next OLPC laptop). From within those apps, his technology lets you directly search and call up items from Feedbooks’ collection of public domain classics and contemporary works. Stanza also lets you enjoy other collections, including, yes, Gutenberg’s. In another publishing area, Hadrien and colleagues are striving to greatly simply the publishing process for houses wanting ePub output. He is well qualified for such tasks, as the holder of a computer science engineering degree from Ecole supérieure d’Informatique, Electronique et Automatique.

Below is Kat Meyer’s Q&A with Hadrien, the latest in her Digitizers series for TeleRead—for which she also interviewed Neeland Choksi, COO at Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. Also see Mac Slocum’s Gardeur interview, done during O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference. – D.R.

KM: Tell me about Feedbooks and its unique technology.

HG: First of all let’s describe Feedbooks as a technology rather than Feedbooks as a service. Usually, you’ll notice two kind of workflows for digital publishing:

1. Self-publishing services such as Amazon DTP or Smashwords use direct conversions, which are very easy to use from a user perspective but provide low-quality e-books and very limited possibilities.

2.  XML-based workflows let you create the source based on a certain DTD (TEI, DocBook, DTBook) and generate the different end-formats using XSL.

The second choice is much better if you’d like to create e-books in multiple formats and generate good-looking e-books, but it requires some specific technical skills.

‘Workflow everywhere’ philosophy

What we’re building with Feedbooks is a third way—we apply the main principles of an XML workflow but use standard Web technologies to potentially integrate our workflow anywhere.

Our goal is to create something completely seamless that any user can use to create and distribute high-quality e-books. Currently, publishing on Feedbooks is strictly limited to our Web publishing interface, but in the upcoming weeks we’ll open our workflow. Since we’re using standard Web publishing technology, a lot of tools will be directly compatible with our workflow from the start and any developer will be able to create new ways to interact with us.

Feedbooks built as a Web service rather than a Web site

The other important technical component is the fact that Feedbooks was built from scratch as a Web service rather than as a Web site. That’s the reason why we were the first service to distribute e-books through Stanza on the iPhone; and that’s also why we’re also distributing content through Goodreads or FBReader.

Lexcycle did a tremendous job with Stanza to create a standard way of distributing e-books, using Atom as their catalog format. But if we want to create a real market for e-books on mobile devices, and compete with Amazon (the Kindle is a “cloud retailer,” unlike other traditional e-book retailers and that’s why Amazon can provide such a great shopping experience), we need to constantly innovate in this field.

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By Kat Meyer

Travis Alber, Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series, is co-founder of BookGlutton. See more on Travis at the end. Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a computer and a book group—a Web-based reading platform that lets users discuss books from the inside. People around the world can connect and chat about books inside the books themselves. 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. BookGlutton’s upload feature allows writers to share their own work.

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.

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By Kat Meyer

With the right e-book designer, your Kindle books can stand out from typical homebrewed jobs. Joshua Tallent, with eBook Architects and KindleFormatting.com, excels at making this happen. Kat Meyer interviewed him recently for her Digitizers series for TeleRead. Josh works not just with self-published writers but also with some major players in e-publishing such as LibreDigital. – D.R.

KM: As a self-professed geek and a technophile, what about the Kindle and formatting ebooks for it do you most dig?

JT: I love that the Kindle has the e-book buying experience wrapped up. Wireless book downloads and an easy-to-navigate store are two of the key features that have made the Kindle such a big success. The device does not require a degree in computer science to use, and even the most non-techie person can successfully get the content they want in just a couple of clicks, even without owning a computer.

The format does leave a bit to be desired—there are some pretty glaring options missing. However, I have always liked a challenge, and making books look amazing on the Kindle is definitely that.

KM: Given that Amazon and the Kindle have been very successful at taking e-books mainstream, do you find that most of your clients are looking to publish for the Kindle specifically, or are they open to all e-book formats/devices? (In other words, what  motivates your typical client to publish to Kindle as opposed to other formats, and are they also publishing print versions of their books? if so, how?)

JT: Most of my clients have heard about the Kindle but not about other e-book devices or formats. As a matter of fact, some have never seen a Kindle—they just know they need to put their content on it. The majority have tried to publish on Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) themselves and run into issues, or saw the difficulties others were having formatting books and just decided to sidestep those problems by coming to me.

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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.

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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.

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