It may now be the case that there has been a policy change to require the presence of in-app purchasing whenever content can potentially be purchased. This potentially affects many applications, but ereading apps would be particularly hurt because of small margins on ebooks and the added complexity of agency pricing.

When I conceived of Ibis Reader, I thought the primary value of an HTML5-based ereader would be cross-platform availability. When the project kicked off in mid-2009, there were no versions of Android that actually supported HTML5; by the time Ibis launched in February 2010, compatible Android 2 devices were in stores. (Android still lags far behind iOS though, and overall we’ve been disappointed by the slow evolution of Android HTML5 support.)

Now it’s clear that HTML5 offers a more substantial benefit than cross-platform compatibility: ownership. Serious businesses take years to evolve; many of the ereading platforms that are threatened by Apple’s move are not even profitable yet. I would be very nervous about building a business with a long runway that could be rolled up at any minute.

That’s why we’ve decided to aggressively pursue licensing Ibis Reader in 2011. Our experience with our initial licensees has been overwhelmingly positive. Each new integration has strengthened the core platform and added valuable features, some of which are only available in the licensed version:

• Full internationalization support
• Secure content encryption
• Performance enhancements and core platform updates

Because we offer source code licenses, the entire platform is completely customizable and entirely within your control. You may hire us to help integrate Ibis with your ebookstore or content distribution system, or take the code internally for your own use.

Our roadmap for the platform in the coming year:

• Rock-solid, app-like performance
• EPUB3 and enhanced ebook support
• Annotations
• Dictionaries
• Strategic social-media integration

For more information or to schedule an appointment to meet with us at Tools of Change February 14-16, please contact us at info@ibisreader.com.

The following is a list of talks that I’m either planning on attending personally or recommend, based on topic or speaker:

Workshops

This year’s workshop program is really strong. Attendees will not be disappointed by any of:

• EPUB Finishing Touches with Joshua Tallent.
• Standards in Flux with Bill Kasdorf et al.
• Designing iPad Apps with Jennifer Brook, William Couch, and Craig Mod. Craig’s thoughts on digital books are worth the price of admission.
• Two of my favorite people are presenting Metadata Boot Camp: Laura Dawson (now with Firebrand) and Adam Witwer (O’Reilly Media).
• I’m quite interested in HTML5: A Workshop for Publishers as it’s given by the author of the HTML5 Google Pac-Man, though I haven’t met him.

Sessions

Tuesday

• Is There Such a Thing as a Good Business Model for Publishing These Days? with Louis Rosenfeld (Rosenfeld Media, LLC), John Oakes (OR Books)
• Value-Added Apps: A Conversation with Top App Makers on How to Create Apps with Craft, Care and Polish with Neal Hoskins (WingedChariot), Gus Balbontin (Lonely Planet), Anil Dash (Activate), Michel Kripalani (Oceanhouse Media), Pete Myers (BirdsInTheHand, LLC). This is a really strong lineup.
• Data-driven Marketing and Product Development with Emily Sawtell (McGraw-Hill International Publishing Group), Brett Sandusky (Kaplan Publishing)
• Bookselling in the 21st Century with Kassia Krozser (Booksquare.com), Lori James (All Romance/OmniLit/ARe Cafe), Jenn Northington (WORD), Kevin Smokler (Booktour.com), Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo (Greenlight Bookstore), Malle Vallik (Harlequin Enterprises Ltd)
• All about EPUB3: An Update with Robert Kasher (Book Masters), Keith Fahlgren (Threepress) and others to be announced.
• eReading Survey Findings and Research: A Look behind the Numbers with Sarah Weinman (DailyFinance), Matthew Bernius (Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology), Kelly Gallagher (RR Bowker), Peter Hildick-Smith (Codex-Group LLC), Jennifer Manning (Nielsen)
• From Startups to Publishing Companies Ripe for Expansion: What Are Investors in the Publishing Sector Looking For? with Jeff Shelstad (Flat World Knowledge), Linda Holliday (CEO Semi-Linear, Director New York Angels), Mark Jacobsen (O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures), Stephen Koenig (Interweave), Brian Rich (Catalyst Investors), Rick Richter (Ruckus Media). I run a publishing startup, so I may be more interested in this than you.

Wednesday

• What Do eReading Customers Really, Really Want? An In-depth, Research, and Data-driven Exploration of Reading Behavior, Content Consumption, and Consumer Attitudes Toward eReaders and Multifunction Devices with James Cathey (Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. ), Michael Tamblyn (Kobo). Any talk with Michael Tamblyn is worth attending.
• Solving the Digital Loan Problem: Can Library Lending of eBooks be a Win-win for Publishers AND Libraries? with Heather McCormack (Library Journal Magazine), Katie Dunneback (East Central Library Services), Ruth Liebmann (Random House, Inc.), Micah Bowers (Bluefire). This is a topic I’m particularly interested in right now.
• Open, Webby Book Publishing Systems with Hugh McGuire (LibriVox.org/Iambik.com/BookOven.com), Kirk Biglione (Oxford Media Works), John Maxwell (Simon Fraser University). All of the cool kids will be in this session.
• What’s in HTML5 for Publishers? with Philippe Le Hegaret (W3C).

Keynotes

Do not be caught schmoozing in the Exhibit Hall during these keynote speeches:

• The Condition of Music by James Bridle
• Making the Book Truly Accessible by Jim Fruchterman (Benetech)
• Context First: A Unified Field Theory of Publishing by Brian O’Leary. I have seen this talk and it is one of the best presentations in publishing you will ever see.

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.

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.

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 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>
'''

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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