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 the Feedbooks most-popular feed. This is language-aware; Bookworm will request books in your current language preference, and Feedbooks will return the most popular books in that language:

One-click adding

Clicking on a Feedbooks title will immediately add that book to your library, without having to download it to your computer first.

Any other site can create an “add to Bookworm” button using this simple URL scheme:

http://bookworm.oreilly.com/add/?epub=http://www.example.com/book.epub

For example:

http://bookworm.oreilly.com/add/?epub=http://www.feedbooks.com/book/187.epub

At this point, you will already need to be logged in to Bookworm for this to work. In the near future we’ll provide even more methods to get content in and out of Bookworm.

Many thanks to the O’Reilly TOC folks who sponsored this work.

The theme of my talk was that ePub is easy to produce using the same skillsets that some publishers already have in-house in their IT and web departments (though there were plenty of heads shaking that they don’t have even those). There was a lot of interest in being able to use InDesign since that is a tool that a few publishers do have.

Slides follow:

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? How can we get files ready for a variety of handheld devices? What will it take to get your titles into every online bookstore? Conversion experts will outline the array of e-book formats available to online readers and discuss what e-books look like, what e-books can and can’t do, and how you can prepare today’s scholarly books for tomorrow’s containers.

Moderator: Kate Davey, BiblioVault Manager, University of Chicago Press
Panelists: Liza Daly, President, Threepress Consulting Inc.; Daniel Lee, Director of Digital Content Development, Harvard University Press; Chris Palma, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Book Search

The session is at 5-6pm on Saturday, which means all the attendees will already be at the hotel bar. For the few who show up, I’ll be covering ePub, conversion from other formats, reflow and accessibility.

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.

Contributions of new styles aren’t just welcome, they’re strongly encouraged.

While all browser typography needs improvement, these screenshots were taken on a Mac, which provides the best experience right now:

More information on About ePub Zen Garden.

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 of the latter), and I was disappointed that there were no major product announcements — in particular from Sony.

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. It will also be my first visit to that city.

If you’ll be at any of these events and would like to chat, send me an email at liza@threepress.org.

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, but my feeling is that it reduces down to two statements:

1. Reading systems need to fully support HTML/CSS. Realistically this means they must be based on WebKit or a similar mature HTML rendering engine. A home-grown engine like Adobe Digital Editions is often a source of frustration for ePub producers and readers.
2. ePub producers need to take responsibility to understand how to correctly mark up their books. The best thing you can do when getting started is minimize your use of styles and custom formatting. Later, bring on an HTML/CSS expert to help fine-tune the layout.

Where I disagree with Mike is the idea that a beautiful ebook needs to precisely mimic its print equivalent. For born-digital works this obviously doesn’t apply at all, and the ability to read an ebook on devices of varying screen sizes and capabilities means that pixel-perfect rendering isn’t even desirable. Anybody with an ereader who’s tried to read PDFs on them is familiar with this problem.

What does need to improve are the defaults. This is where Apple tends to excel, by providing beautiful interfaces out-of-the-box.

But I also recently worked on a project to replace an unmaintainable website that was generated by Apple’s web-building software. It looked great in Safari but was totally unusable for the visually-impaired community, a substantial fraction of the target audience. I’m afraid an Apple ereading solution would be just as much of a beautiful cage.

Luckily, mature web browsers + high-quality HTML + reasonable CSS can produce some lovely results already. Here’s Mike’s test document in Bookworm’s new Reading Mode. I happen to think this looks nice.

But it’s much more important for ebook creators to proof the content rather than the layout. Check that the line breaks are right, that words aren’t run together, and that special characters are displayed properly. (The last Kindle book I purchased had numerous spacing errors — not bad enough to return it, but annoying for something that cost $6.00).

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 a similar clutter-free reading experience that would preserve basic navigation.

The Humanities E-Book (HEB) project took 20 books (as scanned page images + uncorrected OCR) and converted them to an in-house XML format. They compared the workflow impact, costs and user experience of the final XML product versus that of the page-image ebooks.

Many of their findings consorted with my own experience in this area:

1. The quality of the OCRed text was worse than expected: good enough for search, but not always suitable for reading.  However, the cost of double-keying the text from scratch was prohibitive.
2. The encoding vendor, while skilled and diligent, nevertheless produced output that would require a trained editor to correct properly.  HEB spent 4-8 hours hand-correcting each book in the sample set.
3. The average cost for conversion to XML was approximately 3X greater than for scans + OCR only.  This did not include in-house correction and review.

User survey results

After the 20 sample books were made available to their community, users were polled for their reactions.  I feel these are worth mentioning at length.

69% of readers preferred the XML-encoded books (presented as HTML in a browser).

Reasons for preferring the XML scans included:

1. Readability (despite the fact that not all books were completely proofed)
2. Usability (e.g. cut and paste, ability to use screen readers)
3. Layout (the HTML presentation had few distracting elements on the pages, and more content was available per web page than in the page-based scans)

Interestingly, of those readers who preferred the image scans, one of the primary reasons cited was the more book-like paginated layout. I’m very conscious of this tension: many Bookworm users complain about the chapter-at-a-time, scrolling layout of the pages, while others absolutely hate arbitrary emulation of the printed work. It seems to be a strong personal preference that runs in one direction or the other.

Ebook interface considerations

Although not directly related to the study at hand, I found some of the publisher-imposed constraints on their user interface illustrative. I feel these would be best be avoided when designing an ebook reading site:

Foremost among user requests was a desire for better printing options. Printing of HEB titles has always been restricted to fair-use provisions, and for this reason there had neverbeen any immediate way of printing out pages without prior browser adjustment to
accommodate frames—the intention being to discourage printing out long sections of copyrighted text at once.

The ability to print text at length is critical for any serious work.  I’m always unhappy when a site prevents me from doing an ordinary task like printing or downloading.  I hope that publishers reconsider these types of restrictions.

Similarly, revenue models should not constrain the ways in which licensed users can access content:

XML titles normally suppress all higher-level “container” sections, so that users always access only the smallest available text chunk in each overarching section. [...]

…for this set of titles, we would simply make all section levels accessible.  This would affect the process of tallying hits for these titles—something needed in order to calculate royalties  for publishers and usage statistics for libraries—as users could now potentially read an entire book by accessing only a small number of chapter-level sections (which in turn would generate fewer hits than reading the page-image version).

As a reader, I should absolutely be able to read content — especially XML-based content — in as fluid a manner as possible.  Generating accurate accounting is a programming problem, and not one that should drive decisions about the reading interface.

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.