This graph compares books-added-per-day from the period after Stanza integration (in blue), to the same duration immediately preceding it (in green). It’s especially impressive given the holiday dips around Christmas and New Year’s. I expect next week’s traffic to be even higher.

On average, the rate of books added has tripled, and Bookworm now hosts more than 1,200 ePubs.

I attribute this largely to the fact that Stanza promotes Bookworm directly in their FAQ. I applaud Lexcycle for both offering the integration point in the first place and for understanding that openness benefits everyone in digital publishing, commercial and open-source alike.

Apropos of the sudden leap in the upload rate, I’ve just posted some changes to Bookworm which should help users who experience problems uploading books. I’ve specifically loosened some restrictions to allow for more imperfect ePubs to be added. I’ve also improved some messaging related to DRM ePub books, which Bookworm cannot read but now receives on the order of 2 or 3 per day. I’ve also increased the amount of memory on the server by half; uploading sometimes quite large ePubs and processing them in RAM is quite memory intensive.

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.