Bookworm now features an alternate user interface for reading online.
Reading Mode provides an immersive reading experience by stripping away the site navigation and book table of contents and focusing just on the text. It was inspired by the Readabiilty bookmarklet and other experiments in web-based reading.
Here’s a comparison of the two views (click to enlarge):
TOC [...]
Over on the O’Reilly Labs blog I’ve posted instructions on how to help translate Bookworm into other languages.
I’m excited about this initiative for two reasons:
The ePub format is gaining ground faster outside of the U.S. than within, because the ePub-unfriendly Kindle is effectively useless anywhere else.
Translations are a relatively easy [...]
I really like the Readability bookmarklet, an experiment in reducing visual clutter while reading online. It works perfectly with Bookworm:
It works best with long chapters since it removes the navigation. Just hit “refresh” in your browser to get the original Bookworm page and then select the next page.
We have an enhancement pending to provide [...]
This week Bookworm was featured as part of a great discussion on ePub in the MacBreak Weekly Podcast (it’s the last topic in the podcast).
Naturally, Bookworm was down.
(It was a brief outage that — ha ha — was necessary to improve the reliability of the site.)
Many thanks to Andy Ihnatko for the plug. [...]
If you’re producing ePub files, take the time to ask yourself two simple questions:
Are all the files I listed in the OPF file actually in the ePub archive?
Are all the files in the archive in the OPF file?
The OPF file is meant to be the canonical listing of all resources in your ePub. If it’s [...]
This graph compares books-added-per-day from the period after Stanza integration (in blue), to the same duration immediately preceding it (in green). It’s especially impressive given the holiday dips around Christmas and New Year’s. I expect next week’s traffic to be even higher.
On average, the rate of books added has tripled, and Bookworm now hosts [...]
Bookworm Mobile now takes advantage of the Stanza linking protocol. When viewing Bookworm on your iPhone, “Read in Stanza” links now appear on the library list and at the bottom of each book page. Clicking the arrow will launch the book in Stanza and add it to your Stanza catalog.
I’m excited about this because it [...]
I was very pleased to be able to write an article for the Fall 2008 issue of NISO ISQ (volume 20, no. 4).
The full text of the article is only available to NISO members, but here’s a quick excerpt:
Bookworm was originally conceived as an proof-of-concept in leveraging web browser rendering for ePub display. Since the [...]
ePubs added to Bookworm are now fully searchable.
When you add a book to your library, its text is automatically scanned and indexed in the correct language. You can search across all of your books from anywhere in the site.
Results are returned in relevance order. Bookworm supports many advanced search features, such as stemming [...]
Bookworm’s public home page (the one you see if you’re not logged in) has a new look. This is just one of many changes in the largest update since the site launched in July 2008.
Much more public content and help
When I conceived of Bookworm it was largely a way for me and other developers to [...]