I helped out with the installation but the very competent folks at Simplicissimus will be managing it from here on. Best of luck!

There’s also a guide to how far you are in the current section. It’s based on a percentage rather than an absolute number of pages (similar to the Kindle’s pagination indicator).

Initial code release post.

Update Feb 18: Key controls have now changed
n = next page
p = previous page
j = next chapter
k = previous chapter

Update April 3: IE 7 now supported (and possibly IE 8, haven’t checked).

I think we can all agree that this is a don’t.

(There’s a free sample though!)

Sometimes the issues are minor: occasional spacing errors, missing or overzealous capitalization.  Other times they can be more prevalent.  A friend recently purchased Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates from the Kindle store and many of the quotation marks were mangled (it’s likely the wrong encoding was used).

Amazon responded to the customer complaint very quickly, saying that they would notify the publisher and my friend could re-download the corrected book when it was posted. They also gave him a credit for an additional purchase. That’s a good outcome, obviously, but you never have to return a printed book because the punctuation is wrong.

Clearly the quality control needs to be on the publisher end, as each individual bookseller can’t be responsible for checking all of the digital books they offer.  The recent survey conducted at the Frankfurt Book Fair found that 60% of the respondents did not have an ereader, and while I don’t think everyone involved in book publishing actually needs to own one, I’d hope that any group distributing ebooks would be able to review them in the same way that their customers are receiving them.  If you sell Kindle books, someone on your team should have a Kindle and should check at least a representative sample of your offerings, especially if your group is new to digital distribution.

The best thing readers can do to improve ebook quality is to complain.  For now I believe the focus should be on simple fidelity: does this ebook at least contain the same text as the printed version?  Eventually, though, expectations about digital books should rise to the point of considering design. This is especially true when the ePub format is capable of supporting embedded fonts and the same level of aesthetic sophistication that’s present on the web.  Books can be works of art, and ebooks can be beautiful too.

This is the output from my Google Analytics web traffic report on the country which sends the most visits to threepress.org. 44% of the traffic to the entire site, which includes this blog, some public domain ebooks and my contact information, is to the ePub validation service, a wrapper around Adobe’s epubcheck. (Bookworm statistics are not included in this report.)

India sends three times as much the traffic to the validation page compared to second-place United States, but only one-third as much the traffic to the home page.

It’s even more interesting to look at the “bounce rate” for the home page by country. The “bounce rate” is the percentage of times that a given page is the last one that a user looks at before they leave the site, and it’s one of the most useful metrics in web analysis. The overall bounce rate for the threepress.org home page is 37%, meaning 37% of the people who visited that page didn’t have a reason to click on another link. For India, that figure is 5% — presumably because they are all clicking through to the validation service. (By contrast, 80% of South African visitors leave immediately, suggesting that some unrelated keyword searches or links are driving them there.)

So if you’re looking for vendors who can provide high-quality, valid ePubs, I’d suggest, in descending order of frequency, suppliers in these cities:

1. Pune
2. Delhi
3. New Delhi
4. Chennai
5. Mahape

Much more public content and help

When I conceived of Bookworm it was largely a way for me and other developers to experiment with ePub books. ePub isn’t a difficult specification and I felt the best way for me to understand it was to implement it, leaving the ugly parts of rendering XHTML to the browser.

Since July, publishers have been accelerating their release of ePub books, and with more devices beginning to support ePub, it felt like time to re-focus Bookworm away from developers and towards readers and publishers.

To that end, Bookworm now includes a tour of the site, a completely new help page with some suggestions for common problems and a rewritten About page that describes the goal of the project.

Publisher-focused

There’s a need for more ePub information targeted at publishing technologists: people who are either actively converting to ePub or are still assessing whether the format is a match for their needs. Bookworm is ideally suited as a platform for publishers to test ePubs or to QA new workflows. Much of the new content is written with this audience in mind.

More advanced developer guidelines

Developers’ needs are still very important to me, especially as ePub evolves. Bookworm provides more visibility into how the site implements the ePub specification, and which features of the specification it does and doesn’t support. I’m hoping this can start a conversation among those organizations which already know that ePub is for them, and are moving to the next level to make full use of it.

User-interface enhancements

It’s now possible to add a book from any page on the site, with just one click: try hovering over the “Add a book” link in the upper right. There are other small details that should make the reading experience smoother, too.

Other code fixes and improvements

This release includes a large number of behind-the-scenes changes to expand the range of ePubs that are accepted. I’m especially grateful for a user’s assistance in fully supporting Chinese language content.

Still coming…

I’ve been promising the ability to search individual books or across one’s library for a long time. Putting that off was tough, but I felt it was more important to make Bookworm easier and friendlier to use. Now I’m going to focus on features that will really take advantage of Bookworm’s online nature in a way that standalone readers and devices just can’t do.

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!

Some samples of the current version of Bookworm Mobile running on an iPhone:

On the left, the main screen shows just the list of books in your library.  In the current version there is no pagination or sorting; that will change shortly.  News about Bookworm is displayed below the book list (it appears in the left nav in the web version).

On the right, the table of contents for a particular book, with the current section expanded out in gray.  (The gray versus black convention should probably be reversed.)

On the left is a sample page from a book, showing HTML styles and numbering.  Next and previous links appear at the top and bottom of the current page (as in the web version), but the mobile version includes a “Contents” link which jumps to the TOC.

On the right, a page including an image.  The iPhone screen is quite good and the images look great, although tables or complex figures are probably going to be too small without a lot of zooming and panning.

Unlike most other ePub readers, Bookworm allows for full use of stylesheets and images, which is especially critical for technical books which include HTML tables and code samples.

Bookworm is free for us and open source under the BSD license; the code is part of the threepress project and is available here on Google Code.  Currently it should be considered beta software — this is especially true as new publishers begin to release ePub-formatted books in varying methods.

Please be patient if you encounter errors — detailed error reports are automatically emailed to me, but user bug reports are always helpful too.

There will be several major updates to Bookworm in the coming weeks, including:

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)

For more information on Bookworm, please see our About page.