Threepress Consulting blog » features http://blog.threepress.org Threepress creates software for publishers, educators and authors. Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:02:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Major Bookworm release http://blog.threepress.org/2009/07/29/major-bookworm-release/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/07/29/major-bookworm-release/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:53:42 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=587 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 the Feedbooks most-popular feed. This is language-aware; Bookworm will request books in your current language preference, and Feedbooks will return the most popular books in that language:

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One-click adding

Clicking on a Feedbooks title will immediately add that book to your library, without having to download it to your computer first.

Any other site can create an “add to Bookworm” button using this simple URL scheme:

http://bookworm.oreilly.com/add/?epub=http://www.example.com/book.epub

For example:

http://bookworm.oreilly.com/add/?epub=http://www.feedbooks.com/book/187.epub

At this point, you will already need to be logged in to Bookworm for this to work. In the near future we’ll provide even more methods to get content in and out of Bookworm.

Many thanks to the O’Reilly TOC folks who sponsored this work.

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/07/29/major-bookworm-release/feed/ 0 Bookworm feature update: remember where I left off http://blog.threepress.org/2008/08/14/bookworm-feature-update-remember-where-i-left-off/ http://blog.threepress.org/2008/08/14/bookworm-feature-update-remember-where-i-left-off/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:51:04 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=34 Bookworm will now remember and display the last-read chapter of each book, allowing you to jump right to where you finished reading. This feature applies to both the web and mobile versions of the site:

In addition, a new setting in the Profile page allows you to configure the site to always link the book’s title in this list to the last-read page.  This is especially useful when using the mobile version.


Note that, per the ePub specification, opening a new book will always go to the initial page as defined in the ebook’s OPF file.

Comments or suggestions for improvements on this and other Bookworm features are always welcome.

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2008/08/14/bookworm-feature-update-remember-where-i-left-off/feed/ 0 Making movies out of words http://blog.threepress.org/2008/05/11/making-movies-out-of-words/ http://blog.threepress.org/2008/05/11/making-movies-out-of-words/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 21:09:34 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=6 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 to create algorithmic, generative book trailers, that exploit words in the text or use imagery derived from the web.

These two examples are the same program, threewords, running the text of Pride and Prejudice. Each time it displays a word, it records the frequency of that word. As terms appear more and more often, they zoom towards the viewer. Common words such as “the” are excluded. It would be possible to collapse all forms of a word to its common stem (the Xapian search engine used by threepress has stemming capability), but this version does not stem.

The first movie is of the initial four chapters, run at a readable speed:

The second is of the entire text, at 16X speed (2 minutes in length):

However, the application looks best when run locally. Processing exports standalone versions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Source code is included in the application folders.

Look for more text-based movies in the coming months.

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2008/05/11/making-movies-out-of-words/feed/ 3 AB Meta microformat support added http://blog.threepress.org/2008/05/05/ab-meta-microformat-support-added/ http://blog.threepress.org/2008/05/05/ab-meta-microformat-support-added/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 17:53:06 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=4 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 AdaptiveBlue’s) because it’s more familiar to me and more widely used in the industry.

Ironically it was much simpler to add AB Meta to my Django source code than it was to even explain how to do it in WordPress, as I did in a post on the Tools of Change blog.

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