Details over at O’Reilly Labs: New features and bug fixes for Bookworm.
Most of these are (by design) internal and not user-facing, but at least two are notable and possibly quite fun.
Feedbooks integration
At the bottom of the user library page (your home page when you log in), there’s now an option to download any books from [...]
There was a sizable crowd and some good questions from the audience at our eformats talk at AAUP. I had to do half the presentation cowboy-style — no slides, no notes — when my USB drive turned out to be Mac-formatted and the slides had to be recovered from email. Thank you Kate!
The [...]
This Saturday I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Association of American University Presses annual meeting about electronic book formats:
Introduction to E-formats
Kindles, iPhones, Sony Readers, Google Books, e-pub, prc, DRM, no-DRM, images with OCR, page-based display vs. reflowed text . . . How do we put books in front of readers on the web? [...]
At BookCamp Toronto this weekend I released ePub Zen Garden, modeled after the pioneering CSS Zen Garden project.
EZG aims to inspire and promote digital book design. Like the CSS Zen Garden, it demonstrates that solely via Cascading Style Sheets (and in our case a cover image), a wide range of expression is possible. [...]
Slides and notes from my 15-minute presentation at the IDPF Digital Book 2009 conference:
Open-source ePub with Bookworm
View more presentations from lizadaly.
You can also download the slides as a PDF. Licensed Creative-Commons-Attribution.
It was a pretty good event overall although I felt that the main program was much stronger than the workshops (my talk was part [...]
I’ll be talking about Bookworm on Monday, May 11 at the IDPF Digital Book conference.
I’m also looking forward to meeting people at Book Expo America later this month (and most especially the BEA Tweetup).
Lastly, I’m very excited about BookCamp Toronto. I’ve been to a number of technical unconferences and they are universally great. [...]
There’s been some healthy discussion, instigated by Mike Cane, about whether ePub can provide a visually-appealing reading experience. I recommend the related discussion on TeleRead, especially the comments.
There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, but my feeling is that it reduces down to two statements:
Reading systems need to fully support HTML/CSS. Realistically this means [...]
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 [...]
There’s a great deal of valuable information in this recently-released white paper by The American Council of Learned Societies: ACLS Humanities E-Book XML Conversion Experiment: Report on Workflow, Costs, and User Preferences. Although the study was based on scholarly books, their findings would apply to many other digitization projects.
The Humanities E-Book (HEB) project took [...]
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 [...]