We were curious about the distribution of languages for ePubs on Bookworm (Ibis Reader doesn’t yet have enough titles to be representative yet.)
The following information is derived from the dc:language field in the OPF file.
Here’s the chart:
Languages aren’t just written right-to-left or left-to-right, of course. They can also be written top-to-bottom, as in Chinese. How can you indicate that a block of text should be rendered vertically rather than horizontally?
In ePub, you can’t.
I was surprised to discover that the subset of CSS supported by ePub only includes the rtl or ltr [...]
ePub books are supposed to have a unique identifier: the Dublin Core identifier found in the OPF file. Unfortunately, the ePub spec doesn’t have any mechanism to enforce the uniqueness of the ID, so we live in a world where in fact many many epubs don’t have truly unique identifiers (or indeed, any identifiers [...]
One of the great things about sitting on 30,000+ ePub books (as uploaded to Bookworm) is the ability to look at what’s happening in real-world ebook production. Today I’m examining file size, which is useful if you happen to be doing resource planning for a cloud-based ebook reading system.
Smallest 1.6 kilobytes
Largest 233 megabytes
Total # [...]
We’ve been quiet about it, but Bookworm has had an API now for some time, which developers can use to write library management clients or external reading systems. If users trust your site, you can ask them to supply their API key and integrate your ebook-related functionality with their Bookworm account. Please send [...]
Since Bookworm has support for video you may want to experiment with creating your own video ebooks. Here’s how to do it and still create a valid XHTML 1.1/ePub.
Assuming you have a Flash movie called Creative_Commons_-_Get_Creative.swf and a containing XHTML page called chapter-1.html, put this in your OPF:
<!– Flash video [...]
This is an experimental new feature but of course a very cool one: Bookworm can now display and play ePub books with embedded video.
Whether the video will actually play depends on the epub file’s formatting and the capability of your web browser. Bookworm also needs to register the particular file type.
Supported video formats:
MP4
OGV
SWF
In later [...]
Details over at O’Reilly Labs: New features and bug fixes for Bookworm.
Most of these are (by design) internal and not user-facing, but at least two are notable and possibly quite fun.
Feedbooks integration
At the bottom of the user library page (your home page when you log in), there’s now an option to download any books from [...]
This is so cool. Bookworm in Japanese!
Thank you Mahalo Ito!
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.