Threepress Consulting blog » toc http://blog.threepress.org Threepress creates software for publishers, educators and authors. Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:34:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Video posted for ‘Survey of Current E-Readers’ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/04/22/video-posted-for-survey-of-current-e-readers/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/04/22/video-posted-for-survey-of-current-e-readers/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:08:27 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=435 O’Reilly has posted video from my session with Keith Fahlgren on e-reading devices.

Please enjoy my despair at the beginning as all the wireless-enabled readers interfere with the microphone.

It might be useful to follow along with the slides in the latter half of my talk, when the camera doesn’t show them.

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/04/22/video-posted-for-survey-of-current-e-readers/feed/ 2 Slides from “Survey of Current E-Readers” http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/17/slides-from-survey-of-current-e-readers/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/17/slides-from-survey-of-current-e-readers/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:56:37 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=359 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 on Sony and Fictionwise (and Stanza, by extension), but only because we want commercial ebooks to succeed. We want publishers to make money and readers to make use of a convenient service.

Here’s a quick summary of our conclusions:

  1. Your ebook purchasing process should be as much like the Kindle as possible.
  2. Buy your own ebooks through every device and channel you offer. Identify points of friction and fix them.
  3. Consider the mobile purchasing experience.
  4. Have empathy for your customers.
Survey Of Current E-Readers
View more presentations from lizadaly. (tags: ereader ebooks)
]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/17/slides-from-survey-of-current-e-readers/feed/ 0 Tools of Change twitter visualization http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/15/tools-of-change-twitter-visualization/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/15/tools-of-change-twitter-visualization/#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:51:42 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=342 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):

TOC tweet visualization

It skips any images that are broken or any that were listed as having the Twitter default icon. For some reason the raw data included a lot of default icons it shouldn’t have — for example, all of my tweets were listed with the default instead of my profile photo. Those are missing. I recommend starting with the XML instead (posted after I wrote this) and getting the profile icons directly via Twitter.

Source code that generates this from the raw text (not from the XML) follows:

#!/usr/bin/python
import re, copy, urllib, sys

# Pattern-match the twitter username
p = re.compile('^([^:]+):(.*)$')

data = []
tweet = None

for line in open('toc-tweets.txt'):

    # If we're not currently in a tweet, start a new record
    if not tweet:
        tweet = {}

    # Skip the useless relative date values
    if line.endswith('ago'):
        continue

    # This is an end-of-tweet marker, so push it on the stack
    # and reset the temporary datastore
    if line.startswith('*'):
        data.append(copy.deepcopy(tweet))
        tweet = None
        continue

    # Grab the user's image
    if line.startswith('http://'):
        tweet['img'] = line
        continue

    m = p.search(line)
    if m:
        # If we matched the regexps then we have a line containing a valid tweet
        tweet['name'] = m.group(1)
        tweet['message'] = m.group(2).replace('&', '&')

# Put in chronological order
data.reverse()

print '''<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
    <title>#toc timeline</title>
    <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      google.load("jquery", "1.3");
    </script>
    <script src="jqueryui/jquery-ui-personalized-1.6rc6.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <style type="text/css">
       .tweet span { display: none; width: 300px; height:200px;  }
       .tweet { display: inline; z-index: -1;}
       .drop { width: 240px; height: 135px; padding: 0.4em; position:absolute;background:white;z-index:99;}
       .drop h3 { margin: 0; padding: 0.4em; text-align: center; }

    </style>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="jqueryui/theme/ui.all.css"></link>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    jQuery(document).ready(function() {
      $('.tweet').click(function() {
        $(this).find('span').toggle('fast');
      });
    });
    </script>
   </head>
<body>
'''

images = {}

for t in data:
    if 'default_profile' in t['img']:
        continue
    image = t['img'].replace('mini', 'bigger')
    if image not in images:
        sys.stderr.write("Checking %s\n" % image)
        i = urllib.urlopen(image).read()
        if 'Error' in i:
            sys.stderr.write("Skipping...")
            continue
        images[image] = 1

    print '''
<span class="tweet">
  <img src="%s" alt="%s" width="73" height="73" />
  <span class="ui-widget-content ui-corner-all drop">
    <h3 class="ui-widget-header ui-corner-all"><a href="http://twitter.com/%s">%s</a></h3>
    <blockquote>%s</blockquote>
  </span>
</span>
''' % ( t['img'].replace('mini', 'bigger'),
       t['name'],
       t['name'],
       t['name'],
       t['message'])

print '''
</body>
</html>
'''
]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/15/tools-of-change-twitter-visualization/feed/ 0 Building a better web-based book http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/13/building-a-better-web-based-book/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/13/building-a-better-web-based-book/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:14:23 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=324 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 got some good questions and hopefully provoked some additional thinking on the subject.

The points I wanted to get out (or that I felt were insightfully provided by my co-panelists):

  1. Readers do want to engage with others in a non-intrusive way.
  2. Look to web-native reading and writing communities, not publishers, for innovation.
  3. A “web-based book” does not have to exclude a paper representation. In fact it should draw from it.
  4. Web developers are familiar with sites optimized for mobile devices vs. desktop computers. Digital books too will have aspects best suited for one kind of media versus another.  That’s an opportunity, not a problem.
  5. Mundane-sounding issues like pagination and versioning are still unsolved, and will probably be revisited again and again.
]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/13/building-a-better-web-based-book/feed/ 0 The Tim O’Reilly bump http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/12/the-tim-oreilly-bump/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/12/the-tim-oreilly-bump/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:37:39 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=318 Bookworm launch visitor traffic

(Bookworm traffic before and after Tools of Change keynote. More metrics)

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/12/the-tim-oreilly-bump/feed/ 0 Introducing epubjs http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/09/introducing-epubjs/ http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/09/introducing-epubjs/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:52:31 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=310 To celebrate TOC I’m announcing an early prototype of epubjs: a pure Javascript ePub reader. The entire application is only 11K (plus 53K for jQuery 1.3).

This is a pretty rough release, still very messy, but I’m hoping to evolve it into a lightweight reader that authors or publishers could add to  their websites with minimal technical expertise.

Currently the reader works only in Firefox and requires that the ePub be expanded out in the top-level folder containing the JS code. (There are some issues related to browser security, and that it’s only been tested with this single ePub, and that I wrote  a lot of this on the train ride down to New York).

picture-63

You can extract the code directly out of the HTML file, or track it via Subversion:

svn checkout http://epub-tools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/epubtools/epubjs epubjs

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2009/02/09/introducing-epubjs/feed/ 18 Building a better web-based book: talk at TOC http://blog.threepress.org/2008/12/10/building-a-better-web-based-book-talk-at-toc/ http://blog.threepress.org/2008/12/10/building-a-better-web-based-book-talk-at-toc/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:22:32 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=219
O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009

I’ll be presenting as part of a panel at the 2009 Tools of Change conference:

CJ Rayhill (Safari Books Online), Travis Alber (BookGlutton), Aaron Miller (BookGlutton.com), Liza Daly (Threepress Consulting Inc.), Ben Vershbow (Institute for the Future of the Book), Dave Gray (XPLANE)
11:35am Tuesday, 02/10/2009

Developing a digital reading interface raises social, aesthetic and technical challenges. Panelists in this session will talk about interface development (web-based vs. client-based), technical decisions, community requirements and intellectual property issues.

Because it’s a panel I’m not sure yet where the discussion will go, but I think the mix of designers and technologists should provide for a good talk.

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2008/12/10/building-a-better-web-based-book-talk-at-toc/feed/ 0 Slides from “What publishers need to know about digitization” http://blog.threepress.org/2008/11/13/slides-from-what-publishers-need-to-know-about-digitization/ http://blog.threepress.org/2008/11/13/slides-from-what-publishers-need-to-know-about-digitization/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:17:32 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=193 O’Reilly Media will be posting a complete recording of the presentation, but in the meantime I’ve posted the slides from the webcast, “What publishers need to know about digitization” on Slideshare.

Thanks to everyone who attended and especially to those who asked so many excellent questions.

What publishers need to know about digitization
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: schema epub)

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2008/11/13/slides-from-what-publishers-need-to-know-about-digitization/feed/ 1 The analog hole, and a seminar on digitization http://blog.threepress.org/2008/10/23/the-analog-hole-and-a-seminar-on-digitization/ http://blog.threepress.org/2008/10/23/the-analog-hole-and-a-seminar-on-digitization/#comments Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:01:01 +0000 Liza Daly http://blog.threepress.org/?p=154 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 job once I fumbled around with it for awhile.

Also on that page at the moment is a giant photo of my head advertising What Publishers Need to Know About Digitization, a web seminar I’ll be hosting with O’Reilly Media on November 12. It will be a very high-level, introductory overview aimed at non-technical staff in publishing who are considering a digitization project.

Going full-circle, I wonder if there would be interest in a simple web-based OCR service where publishers could upload a scanned document to see how well bare-bones OCR performed on an image-only PDF or JPEG scan. I imagine it might help predict the complexity of a digitization project, and understand some of the challenges inherent in the process.

]]> http://blog.threepress.org/2008/10/23/the-analog-hole-and-a-seminar-on-digitization/feed/ 0