This week Bookworm was featured as part of a great discussion on ePub in the MacBreak Weekly Podcast (it’s the last topic in the podcast).
Naturally, Bookworm was down.
(It was a brief outage that — ha ha — was necessary to improve the reliability of the site.)
Many thanks to Andy Ihnatko for the plug. [...]
There’s a great deal of valuable information in this recently-released white paper by The American Council of Learned Societies: ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences. Although the study was based on scholarly books, their findings would apply to many other digitization projects.
The Humanities E-Book (HEB) project took [...]
Safari is now supported (this John Resig post was invaluable). The screenshot below proves it!
There’s also a guide to how far you are in the current section. It’s based on a percentage rather than an absolute number of pages (similar to the Kindle’s pagination indicator).
Initial code release post.
Update Feb 18: Key [...]
I had a lot of fun putting this presentation together, and not just because it was an excuse to play with toys. It was also nice to see the PlasticLogic device up close, even though I suspect the final marketable product may be quite different from these early prototypes.
Keith and I beat pretty hard [...]
Here’s some trivia about the use of the required dc:identifier metadata element in ePubs that have been uploaded to Bookworm to date.
dc:identifier type
Percentage of total
None
0.5%
UUID
81%
ISBN
2.3%
URL
1%
Unknown format
15.2%
Although the ePub specification does not describe a particular identifier format, it is strongly recommended that ePub creators use one of ISBN, UUID or URL.
Note: only UUIDs and ISBNs that [...]
Geeks love raw data, so I couldn’t resist a text dump of all #toc tweets that occurred during the conference.
Here’s the quick visualization I threw together (warning, it loads very slowly):
It skips any images that are broken or any that were listed as having the Twitter default icon. For some reason the raw data [...]
I had meant to include this as a slide in my e-reader talk but didn’t have time.
I think we can all agree that this is a don’t.
(There’s a free sample though!)
I’m not sure I can bear to watch myself onscreen, but O’Reilly is putting up videos from TOC at a rapid clip. Here’s our panel session:
I’m not a huge fan of panels as an audience member and I think our practice session the day before was better than what we did on stage, but we [...]
(Bookworm traffic before and after Tools of Change keynote. More metrics)
I’m extremely pleased to announce that the Bookworm project is now part of O’Reilly Labs.
Like many software engineers, I learn best by building. Bookworm began as my way to learn the ins and outs of the ePub ebook format. Thanks to the growing adoption of ePub and integration with other products like Stanza, Bookworm now [...]