My first on the TeleRead blog is up: Small pieces, loosely joined. This reflects my thinking in working with epub these last few weeks and with open source publishing in general.
There are a number of projects I’ve got lined up and they’re all going to follow the famous imperative that good programmers should be lazy. [...]
I’ll be at the annual meeting for SSP, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, this Thursday and Friday in Boston, MA. I’d love to meet with people about ebooks, the epub standard, and digital publishing in general.
There are a number of talks I’m looking forward to, especially in the areas of deep web reference discovery, [...]
For one-off checks or use by non-developers, there is now a web front-end for the valuable epubcheck validation tool.
Uploaded files are run through the validator and any error messages are reported. The error report includes some notes to help decipher the sometimes-cryptic messages (notes are taken from the epubcheck wiki).
epub files are deleted immediately after [...]
I have split threepress into two different projects hosted on Google Code:
threepress search, which is the web application that is running on threepress.org.
epub-tools, which is a repository for standalone tools which can be used in other projects
Most developers will be interested in epub-tools. Experimental projects will start in the search application, receive feedback from the [...]
The last set of Gutenberg HTML books that were planned for demonstration on threepress have been added. As usual, data-loading took more time and uncovered up more problems than expected, which is always a reason to add as many samples as possible. This set includes one non-fiction book (On the Origin of Species) and one [...]
The most useful standalone tool in threepress right now is tei2epub, which the system uses to convert its internal source XML to the emerging e-book standard format epub.
TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and is one of the most popular markup formats for printed works (especially in academics). All of the content on threepress [...]
Although this project is primarily aimed at tools for searching and reading textual content, software developers have increasing options to easily develop high-quality graphical applications. The program described here is written in the graphical environment Processing, but Adobe Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight can be used for similar purposes.
I imagine applying techniques such as this [...]
Two books that should’ve been in the initial release were added today: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe.
Tale was challenging because of the way the “books” were organized (they’re called parts in threepress). This book exposed a bug in the way I was handling [...]
I just added support for AdaptiveBlue’s AB Meta format on all book pages. I’m only supporting type, author and title because that’s all the metadata I have in the source XML. Hopefully I can find some content from other sources which is tagged in more detail.
I chose to use the Dublin Core namespace (rather than [...]
threepress.org is a repository for open source software designed for use by publishers.
What this means is:
All of the software is free, meaning there is no cost associated with it. It also means free in the sense of unencumbered: it can be modified or re-purposed for any use, including commercial use.
Most packages re-use other tools [...]