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 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 addresses the main limitation of a web-based ereader: offline reading. I hope that people will consider Bookworm an ideal way to store, search and browse ePubs in a central place, and use this and future export methods to bring their ePubs with them on whatever device they like.

The Kindle, of course, would be an ideal reader for this use case, given that it already has a browser and internet connection.  But no ePub support, so no Kindle integration yet.

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.

I’ve seen “ePub in disguise” in a few places, most recently this release from Pan Macmillan:

If you click on the arrow, the site brings up a very long page explaining what all the various file formats are.  Discussing “Adobe Digital Edition” format:

ADE uses a format based on the Open Publishing Standard with the extension .epub, and so ADE files are also known as .epub or ePub. ADE will also display your PDF files in a double-page, single page, or fit-to-width view — or you can specify your own custom fit.

(Although it’s not mentioned on the book page, on the digitalist blog it was stated that this book is DRM-free.  I’m assuming, therefore, that this is truly just plain ePub, although there’s no way for me to be sure other than buying a £9.99 ebook.)

Now I worry a lot about making ebook technology comprehensible to the average person, so I sympathize with the urge to simplify. But:

1. “ePub” is a pretty good label (other than that no one agrees on how to capitalize it). It’s short and evocative.
2. Nowhere on the ebook help page does it actually say which format you need for what device.  If I bought a shiny new Sony PRS-505 in the UK, which format do I want?  What about on my iPhone? My Kindle? (It’s a UK site, but it’s also an ebook. There’s no reason why an American couldn’t buy it.)

The whole value of the ePub format is that it isn’t vendor-specific.  Disguising it under Adobe’s name just makes it harder for buyers to know they can read it on their Sony Reader or Stanza/iPhone, and that the book isn’t suddenly going to be useless when some proprietary device finally gives out.