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.

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.

Epub?

ePUB?

TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and is one of the most popular markup formats for printed works (especially in academics). All of the content on threepress has been converted from the Gutenberg format to TEI upon ingestion into the site.

epub is the shorthand for the e-book format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which uses XHTML and custom metadata formats. An e-book bundle is distributed in ZIP file format with its text and supplementary media “bound” together.

tei2epub is written in Python with XSLT. It also comes bundled with the latest version of epubcheck, for validating the output. It is meant to be used by developers rather than end-users (unlike the recent BookGlutton epub converter) and as most of the functionality is in the XSLT, should be easy to port to other languages. Like all threepress tools it is released under the BSD license which means it is free for all commercial and non-commercial use. You may download the ZIP version of the current release or get the latest version from svn at http://epub-tools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

Current limitations:

1. tei2epub has not been tested on extensively marked-up TEI. It leverages the standard TEI to XHTML stylesheets distributed by TEI, but it is unknown whether epub readers will support all of the resulting markup
2. It accepts only a single source document (i.e. an entire TEI book)
3. It does not handle images or other kinds of media

Any of the above can be addressed with the addition of more complex TEI source books.

Edited May 22, 2008 to point resources at a new standalone repository.