1. Readers can now select any of the on-board fonts (omitting some unsuitable decorative fonts for clarity).
2. Turning pages uses a more reliable method. It’s now much harder to accidentally switch pages by brushing the screen.
3. All visual effects now use CSS3. On iPhones and iPads these will appear to be much smoother than before.
4. Many menus are on the iPad are now drop-downs, providing a better overall view of the application.

Details follow, click on screenshots to enlarge:

Drop-down menus in iPad

To take better advantage of the larger screen we’ve made some options behave more like native iPad menus rather than the full-screen overlays on the mobile phones. (We do this purely with CSS, including the CSS3 effects for drop-shadows and the like.)

Font customization

On the iPad, we’ve converted the font menu to a drop-down. We’ve also included full support for all the on-board “body” fonts. The iPhone font list includes the new fonts in iOS4; if you still have 3.x, you’ll see them as well but they’ll have no effect.

Until iOS4 supports embedded fonts in a non-buggy way, we’re not able to support embedded fonts either, and at this time user customizations will always override book fonts that are supported on these platforms.

A note about Android: We don’t mean to neglect our Android friends, but we haven’t yet done the necessary research to understand which fonts are on which device/platform. We’d love some help from Android users on font selection; for now Android users will get the same serif/sans-serif selection as in earlier Ibis releases.

How to get the upgrade

As always, updates are automatic! HTML5’s update mechanism does mean that you may need to open and close Ibis Reader at least once to see the new changes.

Quote from the article:

Ibis Reader is written in HTML5, and is a combination of a web-based service and a locally cached web application running on the iPad’s mobile Safari browser which allows you to read DRM-free EPUB files that you can upload to the ibisreader.com web site, or connect to an OPDS-formatted book repository anywhere on the web, including ones you can create yourself.

Read the complete ZDNet article…

Just click Add your own catalog at the bottom of the Get Books page and we’ll show you some catalogs we recommend that are just one click away. If you know of another catalog of ePubs in OPDS format, just use the form at the bottom to add it by file upload or point it at a URL (your Calibre library in the cloud, perhaps):

The particulars of this OPDS Catalog format are still fairly new, but under the hood it’s just a list of available publications. It seems like a perfect fit for digital magazines like PragPub:

As always, any books you’ve added to Ibis Reader will be available anywhere, anytime. If you’re using the mobile app version, you can browse your whole Ibis Reader library using the My Online Bookshelf link and choose whichever titles you want to download to your phone/pad/thing.

Know of a great OPDS Catalog of DRM-free ePubs we should add? Please leave a comment with the URL of the catalog.

If you’d like to learn more about creating an OPDS Catalog for your own books, please introduce yourself on the openpub mailing list or contact Threepress.

You can encourage visitors to your site to add your Catalog to Ibis Reader using the same type of widget we introduced for reading ePubs:

http://ibisreader.com/catalogs/add/?url=URL-of-the-Catalog&name=Best+Catalog+Ever

As folks who need to listen to the desires of ebook readers, help publishers understand how to get the best from ePub, and implement increasingly sophisticated ePub readers, we’ve gotten used to riding a fine line between enabling thoughtful design and ensuring a pleasant reading experience on a wide range of devices. Here are some pragmatic perspectives from our experience building reading systems that can help those coming from a web CSS background understand some of the tradeoffs in the ebook design world.

I’ll start with a simple example of the impact of CSS margin and width on an iPhone-sized screen:

This may look like a minor change, but the line lengths were reduced from 34 characters down to 27. Either one of those line lengths is already less than the typical “sweet-spot” from printed book design, so losing nearly 20% is actually quite significant. The real surprise from the margin example above is that it comes from Feedbook’s tremendously reasonable CSS.

The problem (from the perspective of a reading system) is this: readers need top-level margins to make the text digestible, but we can never unambiguously tell if the ebook designer has already included top-level margins in the design. Basic, top-level margins should be established by every reading system based on the device being used and designers should include margins in their CSS only when they are focused on a specific type of content like a blockquote or poem. Unfortunately, some early ePub reading systems failed to establish even basic margins for readability, so many ePubs are designed to compensate for that flaw. [If you'd like a future post explaining the history of how we got to this position, please let us know in the comments.]

Now we’re in a chicken-and-egg fight: if ebook designers would include more complex design elements (and eliminate unnecessary margins), the makers of ebook reading system would be more motivated to fix their margin bugs and add more CSS support. Today, the maker’s of ebook reading systems might honestly believe that these features aren’t requested because the designers are being understandably pragmatic about current capabilities in the wild. We’d like to encourage more deliberate ebook design, but also inform designers about some of the basic design elements that might be dropped on the floor by the reading system.

What do we do in Ibis Reader? Because of limitations in screen size, Ibis Reader tries to override the following CSS properties when used on an iPhone, iPod Touch, Droid, or Nexus One (as an installed app) at the chapter level:

Left and right padding and margin

We need to be able to limit the length of lines.

width

We need to be able to ensure that the user interface isn’t ever wider than the screen, so that scrolling isn’t required (except for code or other verbatim blocks).

font-size

Readers have a wide range of ability and sightedness, so we give them control of the base font size (but relative sizing still works as expected).

font-family

This one is a bummer. The current set of mobile devices don’t all support some of the newest techniques for including other fonts, so we’re limited to a tiny number of font families at this time.

Happily, the web version of Ibis Reader does not have these restrictions, especially when used on a big screen, so the design from the ePub is usually more faithfully preserved. However, we do still discourage ebook designers from using the following CSS properties:

• Left/right padding and margins (only when applied too broadly)
• width, mid-width, and max-width (percentage-based more permissible)
• background-image (and friends), which happen to be excluded from the OPS CSS subset
• Inline with the OPS spec, the use of the CSS position property values to achieve absolute positioning (i.e. absolute and fixed) is strongly discouraged.

That said, none of the above are hard and fast rules, and there may be occasions where any one of the above is entirely justified by the confident.

PS: A secret for ebook designers: While there are a lot of techniques the creator of a reading system can use to alter the CSS from an ePub, the most standards-compliant way you can make your voice heard is to use the !important declaration. Like any tool with great power, !important should be used sparingly and only in situations where you are confident that the clarity of the text will be compromised if a property is not honored.

We’re on track now to resume consulting and custom publishing software development alongside Ibis Reader, so please feel free to contact info@threepress.org for:

• Ebook strategy
• EPUB consulting
• Help getting books onto the iPad
• Challenging ebooks: enhanced books, video, audio, interactivity, custom fonts
• HTML5 and mobile development
• Custom Bookworm development
• White labeling Ibis Reader
• XML workflows
• DocBook and other schema development
• Speaking and training

Update: The EFF’s Richard Esguerra has posted about our answers to the checklist. His response is quite fair, noting that they appreciate the openness while they don’t agree with all of Ibis Reader’s answers. We’d love to understand more about what they didn’t like in the comments here (or elsewhere).

The EFF view of the privacy implications of networked readers is quite bleak:

The ability to read privately and anonymously is essential to freedom of expression, thought and inquiry. In the world of physical books, bookstores, libraries, and individuals have long fought against the chilling effect of someone, especially someone from the government, looking over your shoulder as you read….Digital book providers have the potential to track, aggregate, analyze, and disclose reader activity to an extent far beyond anything possible with physical books.

However, we’re hopeful that we can find a good balance between privacy and fully realizing the opportunities of digital reading. Peter Brantley outlines many of these benefits and drawbacks in his A proto bill of ebook management rights.

One of the very first user requests we ever received asked us to remember where they had stopped reading on any device so they wouldn’t have to. This was something we’d always planned on releasing, and is a clear way in which ebooks can trump physical books, but it also has a privacy component that some would find troubling.

So, what’s your take on how we should develop Ibis Reader? Would you rather build your own private cloud with something like calibre2opds? Please let us know in the comments…

If you access the site on an iPad today, you get a different block of content on the home page:

The link provided is the same one that we direct all HTML5 devices at. Here are some screenshots from the experience:

List page

Book table of contents

Reading page

Obviously there are some stylistic changes we’ll want to make:

• Making the margins in reading pages wider
• Enlarging the size of cover images
• Making better use of space on list pages

Tech notes

Here are a few things we had to change to get it working:

Event handling

On Android and the iPhone, touchstart and touchend events are fired when the user touches the application, followed by onclick. We preferentially use the touch events when reading a book because of some quirks in Android.

The iPad doesn’t seem to automatically fire the onclick event after a touch, so I had to make it manually trigger that for anchor links.

Orientation changes

The iPad simulator doesn’t fire the orientationchange event when the simulator is rotated. We don’t know yet whether that will be true of the device, so at this time Ibis Reader won’t correctly re-paginate after an orientation change.

Viewport width/height

The iPhone doesn’t report its height/width correctly, and doesn’t report it differently when rotated. We have these values hard-coded in the app.

Happily, the iPad does seem to report the correct value, both when the URL bar is visible and when it’s not (because the app has added to the home screen). We don’t yet know about rotation since we’re unable to detect that.

HTML5 database size

There’s a bug in the current iPhone OS (3.1) in which the user won’t be prompted to increase an HTML5 database after the webapp has been added to the home screen. This means that Ibis Reader users on the iPhone can’t ever add more than the default 50MB worth of books. This bug appears to have been fixed in the iPad OS.

(Android does not prompt the user to increase a DB, but does increase it automatically if there is space available on the device.)

http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub=URL-of-the-ePub

For example, to add this book (or any one of their nearly 2 million texts!) from the Internet Archive:

http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.archive.org%2Fdownload%2Fbeadlesdimebooko00bead%2Fbeadlesdimebooko00bead.epub

If you have an Ibis Reader account, the book will be automatically added to your library and opened to the first page. If you don’t, just register using our easy two-field sign-up form and the book will be waiting for you.

We’re also releasing an icon you can use to wrap this link:

Here’s some sample HTML if you’d like to start embedding links on your own pages:

<a href="http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub=URL-of-the-ePub">
  <img src="http://ibis_logos.s3.amazonaws.com/read-in-ibis-reader.png" alt="Read in Ibis Reader" width="300" height="61" />
</a>

You’ll need to encode the URL of your ePub file, either using the function in your programming language or a form like http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ (paste a URL and hit encode).

Please let us know if you’d like a custom icon at a different size.

Update: Thanks to David Pierron in the comments, there’s now a bookmarklet. Just drag this into your Bookmarks bar in most browsers: Open in Ibis Reader.

First, here’s how to get the update, since this was already asked:

Getting the latest update on your mobile device

HTML5 devices will get the very latest code on the second time you open the application after an update. So if you haven’t used Ibis recently, you might need to open and close it twice. If you’ve never used it, you’ll already be up to date. That’s it!

We always post the revision date at the bottom of each book information page:

We’re recommending that you also log out and log back in again if you haven’t used Ibis in awhile.

Full position syncing across all clients

While Ibis Reader has always kept track of the books you acquired from any device, it now also tracks your position within each chapter (as requested).

For example, if you read on the web site for awhile, then switch to reading that same book on your iPhone, you should see a message like the following:

Position syncing across multiple devices and font configurations is tricky and we’ve still got a few bugs, but we’ll be improving it along the way and would love feedback.

“No distractions” reading mode

While everybody loves fuschia, we always wanted to include a distraction-free reading screen that fulfills our mission of “getting out of your way.”

From any reading page on the website, click “No distractions”:

You’ll be taken into the new mode:

In both the table-of-contents view and in reading mode you can now make font face and size preferences, and these will persist across sessions.

You can also adjust the width of the text in reading mode by dragging the right margin right and left. This value will also persist:

Currently, automatic position updates are only posted when you’re in no-distractions mode, or when reading on a device. We don’t want to post your position if you’re just jumping around the TOC searching for something, only when you’re engaged in reading. But that might be a bad assumption, let us know!

Other updates

We also fixed a number of bugs and added a few small features here and there, primarily:

Open in Stanza or Aldiko

From any book information page you can choose to export the current book to these popular programs if you’re on an iPhone/iPod Touch or Android, respectively:

Though it’s been live for a few days now, Threepress is happy to formally announce that our HTML5 mobile web reader Ibis Reader has launched.

It was exciting to get some favorable coverage from the Wired Gadget Lab blog almost immediately:

Ibis reader is an e-book reading application that does everything that you’d expect an iPhone e-reader to do, with one big difference: It doesn’t come from the App Store. The app runs on any iPhone or iPod Touch and offers full offline access to your library of books, and is as fast and responsive as a native iPhone application. It manages this through the magic of HTML5, which is supported by Mobile Safari and – crucially – offers offline storage for web-sites.

In the coming weeks we’ll be listening to feedback on Get Satisfaction and implementing some of the features we didn’t finish in time for launch. Because Ibis Reader is just a website, we can roll out new things quickly and painlessly, and as mobile browsers improve we get an automatic upgrade. (In the coming weeks we’ll also post more about HTML5/CSS3 app development and some of the challenges we faced.)

Some other early reviews:

1. Ibis Reader: An Innovative Mobile Web App, eBookNewser/MediaBistro
2. Ibis Reader is Well Done, Exact Editions blog
3. Interview on BookOven about Ibis Reader and where we’d like to take it