Bookworm is now available in Spanish!
I’m thrilled to finally have this up as Spanish was one of the languages I was most interested in adding.
I am obliged to disclaim that Keith Fahlgren made this awesome style within minutes of the site launch and I sat on it for weeks. I am lame.
There are a few easter eggs in it for other programmers to appreciate.
The same Italian translation available by default on the Simplicissimus Bookworm site is also now available on O’Reilly Bookworm. As with the other languages, it will switch to Italian if your browser indicates that Italian is your preferred language, or if you specify Italian in your user profile after logging in.
Thanks to Marco Croella of Simplicissimus for generously donating the translation to the open source project!
There was a sizable crowd and some good questions from the audience at our eformats talk at AAUP. I had to do half the presentation cowboy-style — no slides, no notes — when my USB drive turned out to be Mac-formatted and the slides had to be recovered from email. Thank you Kate!
The theme of my talk was that ePub is easy to produce using the same skillsets that some publishers already have in-house in their IT and web departments (though there were plenty of heads shaking that they don’t have even those). There was a lot of interest in being able to use InDesign since that is a tool that a few publishers do have.
Slides follow:
Bookworm has its second home in Italy: Simplicissimus Bookworm. Here’s their announcement.
I helped out with the installation but the very competent folks at Simplicissimus will be managing it from here on. Best of luck!
This Saturday I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Association of American University Presses annual meeting about electronic book formats:
Introduction to E-formats
Kindles, iPhones, Sony Readers, Google Books, e-pub, prc, DRM, no-DRM, images with OCR, page-based display vs. reflowed text . . . How do we put books in front of readers on the web? How can we get files ready for a variety of handheld devices? What will it take to get your titles into every online bookstore? Conversion experts will outline the array of e-book formats available to online readers and discuss what e-books look like, what e-books can and can’t do, and how you can prepare today’s scholarly books for tomorrow’s containers.Moderator: Kate Davey, BiblioVault Manager, University of Chicago Press
Panelists: Liza Daly, President, Threepress Consulting Inc.; Daniel Lee, Director of Digital Content Development, Harvard University Press; Chris Palma, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Book Search
The session is at 5-6pm on Saturday, which means all the attendees will already be at the hotel bar. For the few who show up, I’ll be covering ePub, conversion from other formats, reflow and accessibility.
There’s a lot of discussion lately about optimal digital reading environments. I could go on at length, but here are a few of the thoughts that keep rattling around.
Optimal text size for human reading is 11 point type. I don’t know what the studies are actually measuring here — comprehension? speed? — and I should find out. I have a science background and I like data.
But everyone knows that data is fuzzy and there are statistical outliers. I’m sure 11 point type is optimal across all (adult, visually-unimpaired) humans in laboratory conditions. If you are going to typeset a printed book, you probably can’t go wrong with 11 point type. It’s the correct size for most of the people who fall into that big hump in the normal distribution.
I studied reading disabilities in graduate school. There are individuals who rely on large amounts of context in their reading. There are others who benefit by hiding everything but the couple words they are processing at the time.
I’m a context person. I wish the font size on my Kindle could go even smaller. I like a lot of words on the page.
Except when I’m reading on my iPhone in bed. Then I like taking off my glasses (I’m really near-sighted) and holding the phone right up to my face. I also like dialing the font size way down in that case too, but it becomes pixelated quickly at that distance.
Then sometimes I’m one of these ubiquitous use cases catching up on my reading in line for coffee. I’m holding the phone away from my face. I make the font bigger now so I can read it. I don’t want it so big that the person standing in line near me can read it, and I don’t want to keep turning the page, but it should be readable for me at a distance of about 2 feet.
When I’m reading a long article on the web, I really like the Readability bookmarklet:
If I don’t have time to read it online, I bounce the article to my iPhone using Instapaper, which reformats in a similar way: big margins, white background, black text, no images.
When I’m reading or writing code, though, it literally is difficult for me to understand unless it looks like this. I’m sure this would be a horrible experience for someone else:
That’s my Emacs development environment, which I’ve been customizing since 1992. The reason I’m comfortable with that color scheme is because that’s how I learned to write software, using a screen like this:
Here, context and history trumps all. I’ve tried using more modern development environments with nicer fonts and white backgrounds and I’m simply not as productive.
Mostly, the way I like to read is the way that best suits me at the moment. As a book designer, you can provide me with a good default digital reading experience and use design to reflect the book’s content and the publisher’s brand. What you can’t do is predict the context of my reading environment and my personal history.
The surge in ebook adoption since reflowable formats have become widely available demonstrates to me that customers collectively feel the same way.
There were a lot of surprising comments at Bookcamp Toronto, not always in a good way, but the one that’s sticking with me most came in a conversation I had after introducing myself as a software engineer who works in publishing: “Wow, what a terrible job.”
Are you kidding? I think I have the best job in the world.
There is so much interesting work to be done. For me it’s like time-traveling back to the start of the commercial web in 1996, but armed with all the tools and learning of the last 13 years. Frankly I can’t believe how few other developers like me there are out there, given that geeks are typically such — pardon the pun — bookworms.
So by the end of the day at BookCamp I felt a little worn down by the amount of fear and negativity that arose in some of the sessions. Particularly dispiriting is that some of the most vocal dissenters were small presses and independent authors, the groups that are most likely to benefit from these transformations in digital publishing.
I’m glad that BookCamp brought so many different people together, but I wish more of them looked to technology as means to solve problems, not a scourge to be stamped out. Don’t scowl and insist, “Ebooks have to cost $20 because that’s what our production costs are.” Just ask us: “How can the internet help us to make $5 ebooks?” Technologists want to help.
I wanted to hear more from people like the author who, listening to a discussion about networked, linked, internet-aware books, asked thoughtfully, “Would I know that my book would be distributed this way?” I thought she was going to complain about loss of control, or sniff that this was an affront to her artistry, as many other authors had during the day.
Instead she said, “Because if I knew that, I would write a different kind of book.”
At BookCamp Toronto this weekend I released ePub Zen Garden, modeled after the pioneering CSS Zen Garden project.
EZG aims to inspire and promote digital book design. Like the CSS Zen Garden, it demonstrates that solely via Cascading Style Sheets (and in our case a cover image), a wide range of expression is possible.
Contributions of new styles aren’t just welcome, they’re strongly encouraged.
While all browser typography needs improvement, these screenshots were taken on a Mac, which provides the best experience right now:
More information on About ePub Zen Garden.
The second of two articles I wrote for IBM Developerworks: Doing More with the Django Admin (the first was Better Django Models).
The “Admin” is the administrative console that’s built into the Django application. It provides an easy way to administer content on any Django site. For developers who are tired of writing the same admin functionality again and again (”Add/Edit/Delete page”) it’s a huge win.