Just in the last few days, details emerged of two new JavaScript ePub readers, rePublish from Blaine Cook (@blaine) and JSEpub (screenshot) from August Lilleaas (@augustl). These two new readers join @liza’s epubjs, which will be a year old on Tuesday. An improved version of epubjs powers the ePub Zen Garden, which helps “dispel the myth that digital books can’t also be crafted works of visual design.”

Why are JavaScript ePub readers interesting? They’re interesting to me for three reasons:

• JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world and it might be the best way to get more developers interested in creating and tweaking ePub readers.
• JavaScript ePub readers start challenging publishers, developers, and book readers to start thinking about what’s most important in delivering a compelling reading experience in a browser. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these choices while developing Ibis Reader, which will launch later this month, so I’m eager to see more opinions.
• Building a pure-JavaScript ePub reader requires unzipping in JavaScript, which had no open source implementations until just recently. August has written about and open sourced his critical breakthrough for unzipping files in JavaScript. [Edit: Oops! I was wrong about this one. See the comments for more details.]

Colin Hazlehurst has also published some impressive introductions, tutorials, and code for the .NET/C# crowd at his InsideEpub project and on his blog.

Do you know of other techies making waves with ePub? Please let us know!

(And if you’re one of those publishers who is looking for help, contact us.)

The invaluable epubcheck has officially been at version 1.0.3 for months, but the latest incremental build (1.0.5) has significant improvements. I’ve been seeing a number of ebooks entering the marketplace which pass epubcheck 1.0.3 but have serious flaws that are caught in 1.0.5.

At Threepress we’ve been using 1.0.5 internally for some time, as I suspect many organizations have, so I’ve upgraded the public epubcheck validation service to use the latest code. I’ll keep it up to date periodically until version 1.0.5 becomes final.

(If you prefer to use an earlier version you should download the code directly from the main site, but I strongly recommend against doing so as many serious errors may be bypassed.)

This one, from July 2008, describes an experiment using the Processing graphical programming language.

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, 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):

Original post from July, 2008.

This will be a review of the current state of hardware e-readers, both e-ink and LCD, and I’ll be co-presenting with Keith Fahlgren.

What’s it like to read your books on a Kindle? Can consumers put your content on their Sony Reader? Could you stand to read War and Peace on an iPod Touch? In this session, we’ll review the current set of popular e-readers with a focus on the reading experience: ease of use and purchase, navigation, fonts and layout.

Many publishers have never used these devices but may already be distributing content on them. I hope to give participants a good overview of what it’s like to use them, especially when it comes to purchasing books (preview: there’s the Kindle, and then there’s everything else).

Personally, I think there will always be a niche market for a specialized e-reader device.  Unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t look fondly on the day when I carry only one device.  I have an iPhone and I love it, but there are good reasons why I also own a real camera.

For some people, the portable form-factor of a phone will never be large enough for a comfortable reading experience.  Indeed, I’m often told when demoing the Kindle or Sony Reader that people wish the screen were even larger.  I expect the next few years in e-readers will look very much like the digital camera market: diverging between sleek and convenient consumer models and phone hybrids, and larger, specialized prosumer models.

If the number of books in your library exceeds 20, you will be presented with next/previous pagination controls.

In an earlier post I listed several features that I planned to add shortly, and two are now completed:

1. Optimized layouts for mobile readers (including the iPhone)
2. Search within book content
3. Methods for sorting and managing one’s library
4. 100% compliance with the IDPF guidelines for ePub reading systems (in regards to XHTML 1.1 content)

Looks like search is up next!

I cross-referenced the online OED for all the terms and indicated if it was found with an identical or related meaning.

Axeman: a prison barber

Beagles: sausages

Cackle-factory: insane asylum

Camisole: a strait jacket [OED, c. 1881]

Chatterer: machine gun

Die: to leave the underworld and go straight

Diver: one who robs drunkards [OED: pickpocket, through 1887]

Dream gum: opium

Eel: a slippery and unprincipled fellow [OED: U.S. A nickname for a New Englander. c. 1840]

Eye-wash: tear gas

Fourth of July: a gun fight

Get out the crying towel: “stop complaining”

Giggle academy: insane asylum [OED: giggle-house Austral. and N.Z. slang c. 1919]

To have go-go in one’s eyes: to be determined to escape from prison

Googs: eyeglasses

Grab scenery: to ride the top of a freight car (“Hobo”)

Griddle: to interrogate ['grill' is not listed but the OED shows it already in common usage]

When vacation ended, they were kind enough to let me have it (after much whining) because I wanted to post interesting entries online.  But was it still in copyright?

Here’s the citation:

Goldin, Hyman E., Frank O’Leary, and Morris Lipsius, eds. Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo, New York: Twayne, 1950.

When I got the book home I looked up Twayne (they’re now owned by Gale/Cengage), and checked their online catalog.  It wasn’t in there, but that only means it’s out of print, not out of copyright.

Enter yesterday’s release of U.S. copyright renewals by the Google Books team. Since the dictionary was published between 1923 and 1963, the absence of its appearance in the renewals data strongly suggests that it’s public domain.  Not so strongly that I’d just grab the content and re-print it, but enough that I feel comfortable posting some excerpts here now and then.

This time, we’ll start with the “Advisory Board”:

1. Bad Bill – arrested on a variety of criminal pursuits
2. Big Department – extortionist, police impersonator, jewel thief among the NYC elite
3. Bubbles – robber, forger and burglar
4. Butch – bank robber, strike breaker, election fraud boss, car thief, pinball and slot-machine operator
5. Chink – purse-snatcher, safe-robber and armed holdup man
6. Chop Chop – strong-arm terrorist [sic], burglar and robber
7. Dippo – pickpocket from age 14 to 39
8. Duke – pickpock, con man, carnival thief
9. Hal the Rebel – various
10. Iggy – robber, carnival thief, con man
11. Jo Jo – robber and burglar
12. Red Mack – robber and burglar
13. Slim – counterfeiter and forger
14. Stubs – larcenist, forger and swingler
15. The Colonel – con man ["He requests that no further details be made public"]