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:

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

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.

Ignacio Fernández Galván has contributed a set of new logos to highlight DRM-free ePubs. These are a modification of the public domain logos I’ve already released.

There’s a spirited discussion on MobileRead on the topic. (“Maybe it’s just me, but those are really ugly.”)

Please enjoy my despair at the beginning as all the wireless-enabled readers interfere with the microphone.

It might be useful to follow along with the slides in the latter half of my talk, when the camera doesn’t show them.

Bookworm will switch to your preferred language automatically if it is available, or you can manually set your language by updating your user profile.

Thank you to Jens Quade for his initial work in internationalizing Bookworm and especially to Michael Wiedmann for heroically translating the remainder of the site.

Danish, Spanish and Finnish are all coming soon.

For more information on translating Bookworm, see the post on O’Reilly labs or join the Bookworm translators’ list.

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).