IBM DeveloperWorks has just released an article of mine on High-Performance XML Parsing in Python. Although there is nothing publishing-centric about the article itself, it was based on my own experience in dealing with large XML datasets in academic publishing.
Massive XML files are uncommon in the general web development world, where the primary roles of [...]
Over on Tools of Change there’s a post of mine discussing the so-called “analog hole” as it applies to digital books. It was a fun article to write, especially the hands-on part. I used Google’s OCRopus open-source OCR software, which was a little impenetrable to someone outside of the machine-learning community but did a good [...]
My attention was caught by this quote from Clay Shirky on the excellent ReadWriteWeb blog:
Back in 1974, when the Internet was a fraction of what it is now, the acorn to an oak, there were really only two applications,” said Shirky, “Telnet, and FTP.”
Surely he’s wrong, I thought. Those protocols aren’t that old.
But I was [...]
Many ebooks aren’t going through the same kind of quality control that regular books do. That’s been my experience and that of other ebook consumers. I’m not talking about technical problems here as much as basic editorial ones.
Sometimes the issues are minor: occasional spacing errors, missing or overzealous capitalization. Other times they can be more [...]
I was pleased to be able to assist with the Corpus Toneelkritiek Interbellum project, which allows reading, browsing and searching of early 20th-century Dutch theater reviews. I can’t read Dutch, but Google’s automated translation tells me that the review of Hamlet mentions a “long modern clown,” which sounds disturbing enough that I’ll leave the [...]
Here’s a good guess:
This is the output from my Google Analytics web traffic report on the country which sends the most visits to threepress.org. 44% of the traffic to the entire site, which includes this blog, some public domain ebooks and my contact information, is to the ePub validation service, a wrapper around Adobe’s [...]
Bookworm’s public home page (the one you see if you’re not logged in) has a new look. This is just one of many changes in the largest update since the site launched in July 2008.
Much more public content and help
When I conceived of Bookworm it was largely a way for me and other developers to [...]
Most of my work in maintaining the Bookworm ePub reader is keeping up with all of the variations of the format that people try to upload. There are some consistent problems that I’m seeing “out in the wild,” some serious, some understandable.
Lots of these problems would be caught by epubcheck, which can be used via [...]
Six styles of unofficial, public domain ePub logos are now offered by threepress.org for use: ePub logos.
These logos, created by illustrator John McCoy, are being made available to help spread awareness and adoption of the ePub standard. Publishers and booksellers may use them to indicate that they offer ebooks in ePub format; others may [...]
It’s fantastic to see more and more publishers beginning to distribute books in ePub format, but call the format by its real name!
I’ve seen “ePub in disguise” in a few places, most recently this release from Pan Macmillan:
If you click on the arrow, the site brings up a very long page explaining what all the [...]