Entries tagged with “epub” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Two Cool New Bookworm Features

Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2009 | | Comments (0) | Listen Speech Icon

There's no question that there's plenty of room for improvement among EPUB readers. From simple things like poorly handling multiple author names to more complicated issues like CSS support, readers (the people, not the software) deserve better. That's one reason we've been sponsoring the open-source Bookworm reader, which is among the best ebook readers around (and looks great on mobile browsers, including Kindle's).

Liza Daly (@liza) has a post over on the O'Reilly Labs blog covering two very cool new Bookworm features:

  • Feedbooks integration: one-click import from the most popular Feedbook titles, localized to the language set in your Bookworm preferences
  • Add to Bookworm: any website can use the same technique to create an "add to Bookworm" button

Bookworm is currently available in seven languages: English, German, Danish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese (if you're interested in helping to translate Bookworm into more lnaguages, let us know). Report bugs and request features over at the public issue tracker. (And if you want to contribute to the project, visit the project page over on Google Code.)


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Amazon Acquires Lexcycle

Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009 | | Comments (5) | Listen Speech Icon

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon:

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.

The New York Times says terms of the deal have not been released. It's not yet known how Stanza will fit amidst Amazon's Kindle and recently-released Kindle iPhone app.

Karen Templer from the Readerville Weblog poses a number of key questions:

Will the Stanza/Fictionwise store be replaced with a Stanza/Amazon store? (Presumably.) And/or will Stanza be merged with the Kindle app? Will it continue to read ePub and other formats or will it conform strictly to Kindle? (Conversely, will Kindle begin reading ePub?) And, most of all, where does this leave IndieBound and their ebook plans?

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

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Over 160 O'Reilly Books Now in Kindle Store (without DRM), More on the Way

Andrew Savikas
April 17, 2009 | | Comments (24) | Listen Speech Icon

I'm happy to announce that more than 160 O'Reilly books are now available on Kindle (both Kindle 1 and Kindle 2), and are being sold without any DRM (Digital Rights Management). Though we do offer more than 400 ebooks direct from our website, the number for sale on Kindle will be limited until Amazon updates Kindle 1 to support table rendering ("maybe this summer" is the most specific they would get). The text-to-speech feature of Kindle 2 does work with these books. A list of currently available titles is below.


screen_shot-50931

There's a lot of overlap between the kind of early-adopter crowd likely to buy a Kindle and the audience for our books. So it's no surprise that we received a lot of requests to add O'Reilly books to the Kindle store, and it's great to finally be able to get those readers the books they want. We expect to add another 100 or so titles in the coming weeks; those have needed a more detailed analysis of the table content to identify good candidates.

There were two main reasons we held our books back from sale on Kindle:

  1. Poor rendering of complex content. Kindle 1 was optimized for the simple text of mainstream trade books (think airport-bookstore fiction and non-fiction), and lacked support for properly displaying tables or computer code, two very common elements in O'Reilly books. We knew customers would be disappointed to find much of the content of our books unusable (and likely to complain to us about it, rather than to Amazon). In this case, Amazon actually agreed with us, and after they saw how those tables looked on a Kindle 1, told us they weren't comfortable selling many of our books until they've updated Kindle 1. (More details below the fold).
  2. Compulsory DRM. We strongly believe DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption adds unwelcome cost and complexity to any digital system, frustrates legitimate customers who respect copyright and want to pay for their content, and is demonstrably ineffective at preventing unauthorized copying -- much of it done by people who either (a.) wouldn't otherwise pay, or (b.) resort to piracy when there's no legitimate sales channel. Other publishers are free to make their own decisions on DRM, but Kindle's compulsory DRM was inconsistent with our views on digital distribution.

Although we've been working for some time with Amazon to resolve these issues, as a stop-gap we'd been directing Kindle owners to oreilly.com, where all of our "ebook bundles" include a Kindle-compatible .mobi version that can be uploaded or emailed to your Kindle. While the table and code issues remained, readers at least had the other, richer formats (EPUB and PDF) for reference. We've now updated all of the .mobi files for sale at oreilly.com to display properly on Kindle 2 (basically undoing many of the hacks we'd done to get something passable the first time around). If you own a Kindle and have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com, visit oreilly.com/e from the Kindle browser to download the updated .mobi files directly to your Kindle. While we will also update our ebooks with Amazon as changes are made and errors fixed, they currently have no way of updating that content for customers who already purchased it.

While the rendering in Kindle 2 still leaves a bit to be desired, we felt it was an acceptable baseline, and look forward to continuing to work with them to improve the display of technical content on Kindle. (Ironically, the Kindle 2 web browser displays complex content like tables and code quite well -- check out the Bookworm mobile version if you have a Kindle.)

Our thanks do go to Amazon for working with us on this. They're a favorite target of criticism (often right here, and often for good reason), but this is a good step and they do deserve some kudos. While we'd prefer that Amazon directly supported the open EPUB standard, this is real progress in giving readers easy access to digital books without locking them in to a single vendor.

If you want to tell Amazon to hurry up and update your Kindle 1, or to improve their rendering of technical content to match Sony Reader, Stanza, Bookworm, Calibre, and others, you can drop them a line at kindle-feedback@amazon.com.

Current Available Titles

(As of April 16, 2009)

The Tables problem

Here's some screenshots showing the table problem:

How Kindle 1 (mis)handles tables:

screen_shot-50931

The same table on Kindle 2:

screen_shot-50931

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Open Publishing Distribution System -- an Open-Standards Catalog Format

Andrew Savikas
April 8, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

It's no secret we're big fans of the iPhone/iPod reading app Stanza. While the Kindle App has overtaken Stanza for the top-spot among free book apps in iTunes, Stanza offers a much better reading experience than the Kindle App (for example, by supporting standard formatting like tables and whitespace-preservation) (Update: You can use the latest version of mobigen.exe to get better whitespace-preservation (from <pre> and friends) on the Kindle.) And I'm not the only one who feels that way: "Stanza is hands-down the best e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its free. Go. Get it now." (Wired.com).

But more than the quality of the software, the major reason I'm so bullish on Stanza is their willingness to experiment. When our own Keith Fahlgren suggested they use the standard Atom format for their catalog system, they responded:

We wound up taking your advice and implemented support for Atom for Stanza's catalog format. Thanks for the suggestion! Using the Atom standard is much better than using our own custom format (although we may need to eventually extend the custom format with our own tags).

And when we proposed using Stanza to create a standalone book app (for iPhone: The Missing Manual), they were eager to dive in head first, and we both learned a lot in the process.

That Atom-based Online Catalog feature turned out to be an interesting prototype for a distributed digital discovery and ecommerce system, and it's awesome to see them willing to embrace the potential for such a system well beyond the boundaries their own product, and to join with Peter Brantley and the Internet Archive in laying the groundwork for what's being called the Open Publication Distribution System:

Users of compatible Reading Systems, in addition to being able to access content they have previously acquired or acquire via other means, are also able to access a catalog (list of online sources of content). Typically, the catalog offers a number of free titles, which may be hosted by the Reading System vendor and/or other sites, as well as the opportunity to purchase or borrow paid content from stores and libraries. Additional stores and libraries may be added by the user to their personal catalog. The mechanism through which compatible Reading Systems access the distributed catalog has three components: eBook content, XML catalog metadata, and an HTTP transport for the catalog. The remainder of this document will discuss each of those components in turn.

One of the reasons we've thrown our support behind the Bookworm online ebook reading system as part of O'Reilly Labs is to help support the development and testing of new standards like this one, and we're excited to contribute to this new initiative. It's also great to see Adobe support this as well, and is a nice follow on to our work with them on EPUB output for the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets.  

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Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader

Mac Slocum
March 19, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

Sony is adding 500,000 public domain EPUB-based titles to its Reader catalog through a partnership with Google. Paul Biba at Teleread examines Sony's rationale:

Sony's apparent intent, meanwhile, beyond adding value to the Reader, will be to use public domain books in ePub to entice people to install its software and in time buy its reader devices.

In the exclusive TeleRead interview, Steve [Haber, President of Sony's Digital Reading Division] emphasized that this program is part of Sony's commitment to an open platform, as opposed to the closed platform of its major competitor (hint, hint, the name starts with an A). The ePub conversion is being done by Google itself, as noted; and Sony and Google are exploring ways to make copyrighted ePub material available.

Catalog expansion and mobile devices are propelling recent ebook/e-reader announcements. Google Book Search opened mobile access to its archive of public domain books in February, and Amazon recently made its Kindle titles available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through a free iPhone app.

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At TOC: Bookworm Online EPUB Reader Now Part of O'Reilly Labs

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | | Comments (17) | Listen Speech Icon

Update: There are now 400+ shiny DRM-free EPUB books from O'Reilly if you want to give Bookworm a test drive. Much of what's on our complete list with a green "E" next to it is available in EPUB and is Bookworm-friendly (the rest is just PDF for now, but you'll get the EPUB as a free update when it's available). (And get an extra 20% off through Feb. 20 with code EBKDSC, which is 40% off the print price.) More about our ebook bundles (free lifetime updates! No DRM! Kindle-compatible!) over here.


Regular readers know we're big fans of the Bookworm online EPUB reader. With Bookworm, you upload and organize your ebooks, and can read them online as well as a variety of mobile devices (iPhone shown below). It's open source, and built on top of well-documented and supported frameworks and standards:




bookworm




IMG_0001.PNG


You can even pick up where you left off reading as you move across devices.


As more content becomes available in EPUB format, tools like Bookworm encourage standards compliance (by rejecting invalid EPUB), and offer an alternative to proprietary ebook management reading/management systems like Digital Editions or Sony's eBook Library Software. (There's also Calibre, an open-source desktop ebook management system, which like Bookworm is built with Python.)


We liked Bookworm so much that we invited principal developer (and TOC speaker) Liza Daly to bring it into O'Reilly Labs, the R&D space that we're re-launching at this year's TOC Conference. From her post on the Labs blog:



From the beginning, O'Reilly has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project. Uniting the two under the Labs banner is a natural fit.



What does this mean for Bookworm's future?



Most importantly, core Bookworm code will remain open-source. If you would like to use Bookworm code, even commercially, you're encouraged to do so.



As part of the Labs project, we may add some features that won't be part of the core open-source package. Most other changes will be free and BSD-licensed. We're just beginning to think about where we can take this project.



I'll remain as the primary developer of Bookworm, but I hope that the added exposure O'Reilly brings to the project will encourage wider participation, not just of code but of ideas. I'm looking forward to taking ebook innovation to new places in 2009.



In addition to Bookworm, we've also opened up an RDF-based view of the public metadata for our books. Nearly all of this data was already available in a scattershot way from our catalog pages, the book's copyright page, Safari Books Online, and other sources -- our new "O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface" brings it all together in a standard, computer-friendly format.


This is just the beginning of a variety of experiments and pilot projects we have planned for the months ahead.

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Popping the Hood on the iPhone Missing Manual App

Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app):

How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I learned things over the course of a couple of hours of reading that I never learned in months of iPod Touch ownership.

But the neatest part of the review is the tutorial Chris provides for popping the app open and getting at the EPUB content inside:

Once you've unzipped it, it can be read in ePub-reading software such as Adobe Digital Editions (looks flawless) or FBReader (formatting a bit messed up), or even synced into the iPhone version of Stanza by sharing from Stanza Desktop. (Though as the book is almost 9 megabytes in size thanks to all the illustrations, the Stanza app may choke and require a reboot the first time you load it, but after that it opens fine. I suspect the wrapper version of Stanza is optimized for the book's large size.)

Chris is right that the electronic version available from oreilly.com is $24.99, compared with the $9.99 app (on sale right now for $4.99 in conjunction with the TOC Conference), though our "ebook bundle" includes EPUB, PDF, and Mobipocket formats, along with free updates. That said, we're tracking sales and price data across formats and platforms, because it's clearly a critical issue. The App Store has provided an easy way to measure price elasticity of demand, and that's just with one app!

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Amazon Dropping Non-Amazon Ebook Formats (Sort of)

Andrew Savikas
January 27, 2009 | | Comments (12) | Listen Speech Icon

Via Publishers Weekly, Amazon announced Monday it will stop offering ebooks in formats other than Kindle and Mobipocket:

In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon.

A contact at Amazon has clarified that apparently this change only applies to the Kindle:

This does not apply to eDocs because they are not DRM-protected. This only applies to DRM-protected eBooks.

A follow-up question about Kindle support of EPUB resulted in a polite but firm redirect to "the Kindle team."

I know Amazon is a big company, and I know all too well how difficult intra-office communication can be even at a much smaller company like O'Reilly, but with Amazon in particular it's really easy to get the sense that the left hand has very little idea what the right hand is doing (or perhaps "third left tentacle doesn't know what the right tentacle is doing" is more appropriate).

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Format Comparison: PDF, EPUB, and Mobi Downloads from Ebook Bundles

Andrew Savikas
January 12, 2009 | | Comments (5) | Listen Speech Icon

We've been selling PDFs of our books on oreilly.com for several years, but this summer began selling "ebook bundles" of many titles, which include PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket versions. Here's some weekly data (I can't share the vertical scale) on the relative breakdown of actual downloads from those bundles (PDF, Mobi, and EPUB are Light, Medium, and Dark respectively). PDF is still the format of choice for most people, though EPUB is getting respectable usage, with Mobi in third:

The numbers at the bottom are weeks (200901 is the first week of 2009). This is only among titles offered in all three formats -- the majority of our ebooks are currently still only available as PDF, though we expect to release several hundred more in bundle form over the next few months (not that you should wait to buy of course -- you'll get all the formats as they come available ...).

An important point to note, via Allen Noren, our VP who runs oreilly.com, is that a substantial portion of our electronic sales come from overseas, where getting a print version is often difficult or cost-prohibitive:

I know you've heard me say it before, but we became an international publisher, in a way we were not previously, when we started selling books in digital format. We're in a unique position vs most publishers, who only have US or NA rights, but it's worth nothing.

Duly noted.

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Random House Expands Ebook Offerings, Embraces EPUB

Peter Brantley
November 25, 2008 | | Comments (3) | Listen Speech Icon

Random House is pursing digital with a vengeance, recognizing a growth market. From the Huffington Post:

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

Also notable, Random will make all current and future ebooks available in EPUB format.

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Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza

Andrew Savikas
November 25, 2008 | | Comments (2) | Listen Speech Icon

UPDATE: The Stanza integration is no longer experimental. All of O'Reilly's ebook bundles are now available for sale in the Stanza online catalog.

Back in August, I showed how to read O'Reilly EPUB ebooks on an iPhone (or iPod Touch) using the popular (and free) Stanza reader app. I'm pleased to announce that you can now directly download EPUB ebooks purchased from O'Reilly on your iPhone to Stanza. The integration is experimental for now, as we iron out some kinks and work to make our own site more iPhone-friendly.

These instructions assume that:

To download one of your O'Reilly ebooks to Stanza, follow these instructions (if you're reading this post via RSS, you may need to click through to the original post to see the screenshots):

  1. On your iPhone (or iPod Touch) open Safari and go to http://members.oreilly.com

    mm_signin.jpg

  2. After signing in, navigate to the Electronic Media tab.

    emedia_tab.jpg

  3. If you zoom in, you'll see that among the download options, there's now a "Stanza ePub" button. Press the button to begin downloading (to scroll the list of titles, use a two-fingered vertical drag -- again, this is experimental, and we are working on a better iPhone UI).

    stanza_button.jpg

  4. Pressing that button will open Stanza and download the book.

    book_downloading.jpg

This kind of integration was simple and straightforward in large part because many of the moving parts around Stanza are based on open standards, including EPUB and the Atom Publishing Protocol (both successful and important XML standards that publishers should be paying attention to -- find out more at January's StartWithXML forum in New York).

Thanks to Marc Prud'hommeaux at Lexcycle for working with us on the integration, and to our own Nick Pilon for connecting the plumbing on our end. Marc will be talking about Stanza and about reading on the iPhone at February's TOC Conference.

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Slides from "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization" Webcast

Liza Daly
November 13, 2008 | | Comments (0) | Listen Speech Icon

TOC will be posting a complete recording of the presentation, but in the meantime I've posted the slides from yesterday's webcast, "What publishers need to know about digitization" on Slideshare.

Thanks to everyone who attended and especially to those who asked so many excellent questions.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: schema epub)

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[TOC Webcast] Tomorrow: What Publishers Need to Know About Digitization

Mac Slocum
November 11, 2008 | | Comments (1) | Listen Speech Icon

Webcast: What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization, with Liza DalyTools of Change for Publishing will host a free webcast tomorrow at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific). Digitization expert Liza Daly will discuss "What Publishers Need to Know About Digitization."

No prior experience is assumed in this overview of the conversion process. Topics will include:

  • What's XML and do you need it?
  • What's the cost-benefit analysis versus PDF or other formats?
  • What should you consider when selecting a vendor?
  • Should you use a centralized platform or go on your own?
  • How can you monetize your digital offerings?

Slots are limited, so register for free today.

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First Frontlist O'Reilly Ebook Bundle (Including EPUB) Now Available

Andrew Savikas
October 9, 2008 | | Comments (4) | Listen Speech Icon

iPod: The Missing Manual, seventh editionWith today's release of iPod: The Missing Manual, Seventh Edition, by J.D. Biersdorfer and David Pogue, we're beginning the release of nearly all new (frontlist) titles as ebook bundles. SharePoint for Project Management, by Dux Raymond Sy, will be available tomorrow, and Web Security Testing Cookbook, by Paco Hope and Ben Walther, will be available next Tuesday (Oct. 14)

As with our pilot program, each bundle will include Web-optimized PDF, EPUB (for your Sony Reader or iPhone), and .mobi (for your Kindle) files. These ebook bundles will generally be available up to two weeks before the printed book is on store shelves (most of our books are also available on Safari Books Online before they're in stores).

As always, these files are DRM-free, and customers receive free updates to reflect any published changes in the book (more info on the bundles here). There are several other ebook projects and experiments in the works that I can't talk about just yet, but stay tuned between now and February's TOC Conference for updates (I can say that we'll be rolling out bundles for most of our backlist titles during that time frame).

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How To Read O'Reilly EPUB eBooks on your iPhone with Stanza

Andrew Savikas
August 29, 2008 | | Comments (5) | Listen Speech Icon

Update 12/1/08: O'Reilly ebooks can now be downloaded directly to an iPhone or iPod Touch through Stanza. Learn more here.

Since we released 30 of our books as ebook bundles (including EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket format) as a pilot program, a steady stream of customers has been asking how to view them on their iPhone.

The quickest and easiest way is to use the BookWorm EPUB reader, which has a slick iPhone interface; however, that still requires you be online to read your books. We are actively exploring several options for deploying standalone iPhone Apps (Houghton recently did the same with several reference titles, like the American Heritage Dictionary), but in the meantime some recent updates to the Stanza iPhone App mean it's now possible to transfer your O'Reilly EPUB ebooks to your iPhone for offline reading.

This post will show you how I did it on a MacBook Pro with an iPhone 3G. My attempts to do the same with Windows were unsuccessful, and I haven't tried it with an iPod Touch. As always, your mileage may vary. These instructions assume you've purchased at least one O'Reilly EPUB ebook, and saved it to your Mac, and that your Mac and iPhone are on the same wireless network (alternatives described on the Stanza site).

  1. Install the Stanza iPhone App and the Stanza Desktop Reader.
  2. From the Desktop Reader, open one of your EPUB books
  3. From the Desktop Reader, choose Tools→Enable Sharing
  4. Again, make sure both your iPhone and Mac are on the same wireless network
  5. Fire up the Stanza iPhone App, which should bring up the main Library screen:
    photo.jpg
  6. Choose "Shared Books," which should display the EPUB book you have open on your Mac:
    photo-1.jpg
  7. Next, select the book you want to download to your iPhone. Once it's finished downloading, the icon will change from the green down-arrow to the blue right-arrow as shown above. You can now read your book on your iPhone, offline or on. Here's a screenshot from the iPhone Missing Manual:
    photo-2.jpg

    iphone_mm_screenshot.jpg

There's more info on the Stanza website, but a few things to note about reading these on the iPhone:

  • A lot of the formatting isn't (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.
  • Images, on the other hand, look great
  • Searching only operates on the current section
  • Internal and external hyperlinks are not active

There will continue to be improvements among iPhone-based ebook readers, and I expect to see even more experimentation and innovation around turning book content into actual applications. (And if you do manage to get this working on Windows, let me know in the comments.)

On a related note, the response to our ebook pilot has been quite positive, and we're working hard to get many, many more O'Reilly books available very soon as full ebook bundles (in the meantime, remember that if you buy the PDF version or print-plus-PDF bundle, you'll get all of the ebook versions as a free update as soon as they're available).

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Optimizing Web Content for the Kindle Browser

Liza Daly
August 13, 2008 | | Comments (0) | Listen Speech Icon

Amazon Kindle Amazon's Kindle store is convenient, easy-to-use and stocked with thousands of titles. But what about publishers and content distributors who want to reach the estimated 240,000 Kindle users without going through Amazon's program? And what about content formats that the Kindle does not directly support?

One selling point of the device is its free, ubiquitous Internet service and Web browser. Amazon has filed the browser under "Experimental" but it's quite usable as-is. With a few simple changes to a Web site's HTML code, it's even possible to specially cater to Kindle users.

The screenshots used in this article are from the mobile version of Bookworm, my Web application for reading ebooks in the EPUB format. Although what's being displayed is ebook content, it's being delivered by the Kindle's browser, not the Kindle ebook technology, which does not yet support EPUB.

Because the mobile Web version is already heavily optimized for small devices, the layout is simpler than a traditional Web site. What works for an iPhone or other wireless device will also be a good starting point for the Kindle, although we'll see there are some special considerations that don't apply to any other device.

Default or Advanced Mode?

When the Kindle ships, its Web browser is in "default mode." It will not load images or CSS styles, but it does render basic HTML tags like the italic tag <i>. Personally, I prefer "advanced mode," which displays Web pages more like a traditional browser, but some sites can be unreadable in this mode.

When optimizing for the Kindle it's best to consider that most users will not change from "default mode," or even realize that the option exists.

How different are these modes? Here is a comparison shot of the same screen from Bookworm in both modes:

kindle-4.jpg kindle-6.jpg
My list of books in Advanced mode, showing tabular layout and more advanced font styles My list of books in Default mode

In Default mode, all the information about the books runs together. It would be better to present this as a simple vertical list, the way the Amazon Kindle store does, rather than as a table.

Font Size Considerations

You can choose from six font sizes in the Kindle browser. As a content creator, you can provide a wider range of font sizes in your Kindle-formatted Web page, but take care that they aren't too small. The device doesn't clearly display fonts that are smaller than its default six sizes.

In this screenshot, the table of contents for a Bookworm book is not readable, even though this page has already been tailored for the small display of mobile phones:

kindle-3.jpg

This problem is only likely to occur in Advanced mode where stylesheets are activated.

Usability

The Kindle's method of selecting and traversing hyperlinks is unique. The user activates links by selecting along the vertical, or Y-axis, using the scroll wheel. When multiple links fall on the same line, the Kindle will open a dialog box so the user can clarify which link is the target.

In Bookworm, users move to the next or previous chapter by selecting navigation links lined up horizontally (see the top row of the first image). In the Kindle, this presentation forces the user to click a second time to select the appropriate one:

kindle-2.jpg

For commonly-used navigational items like this, line up the links in a vertical row:

  1. Next
  2. Contents
  3. Previous

Now no second click (and accompanying page refresh) is necessary.

It's also important to remember that the Kindle is a black-and-white device. If your site uses text color to convey any useful information (such as what is or is not a hyperlink), re-work the design to accommodate a grayscale display.

Finally, keep pages short. The Kindle cannot scroll; long Web pages are paginated like books. Pagination with E Ink devices is slow relative to scrolling on a computer screen. If possible, keep all your content on the first Kindle "page" when viewed at the default font size.

Targeting the Kindle

Web browsers are identified using their "user-agent" string. The current version of the Kindle is broadcasting this user-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Linux 2.6.10) NetFront/3.3 Kindle/1.0 (screen 600x800). It's beyond the scope of this article to describe how to set up your Web site to deliver different kinds of content to different browsers, a process that varies considerably with your site's technology.

How do you test your layout if you don't have a Kindle? There's no substitute for having the real device (tell your boss it's for "research"), and currently Amazon does not offer any kind of browser emulator. Some possibilities:

  1. Disable stylesheets on your browser and look at the output. Does it still make sense? (Instructions for disabling stylesheets; Firefox users should install the Web Developer add-on)
  2. Use a text-only browser like Lynx

Some Last Advice

Don't spend too much time on this process. The next version of the Kindle is expected soon, no doubt with an improved browser. Indeed, Amazon could offer a new version of the existing browser at any time. Most of the changes recommended above should take little time and money to implement, and can make a great difference in user experience.

In addition, optimizing your site for small-screen browsers can have other benefits: they allow an increasing number of mobile users to get quick access to your content, and aid accessibility for screen-readers and other non-standard browser types.

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Tech Publisher Asks "Are Ebooks Ready for Technical Content?"

Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2008 | | Comments (4) | Listen Speech Icon

Dave Thomas from the Pragmatic Programmers is mulling whether to make their books available on the Kindle, and encountering many of the same issues we faced here at O'Reilly regarding technical content and the limitations of current ebook devices:

In fact, we've had a prototype form of that capability for a while now, but we've always held back. Frankly, we didn't think the devices worked well with our kind of content. Basically, the .mobi format used by the Kindle is optimized for books that contain just galleys of text with the occasional heading. Throw in tables, monospaced code listings, sidebars and the like, and things start to get messy.

Dave's post has sparked a great conversation within the comments, including one from Shelly Powers, whose book Painting the Web was among those included in our pilot program:

I think that providing the package deal that O'Reilly does (with PDF, epub, and mobi), in addition to downloadable code is the way to go. If you sell Kindle books, you definitely need to make both your figures and your source available, separately. For instance, I have my Painting the Web figures in an online gallery and the examples are available at O'Reilly--takes care of a lot of issues related to Kindle. Another approach could be to make available (for no additional cost) a PDF of just the figures, or the figures and code.

Preparing a book for the ebook market may seem like a lot of work, but you have the potential to reach a new audience of book buyers. Buyers used to the internet and having access to immediate information; who may not want to order a book and wait a week for it to arrive, but who will buy a book if it means they can have access to it now. I wouldn't have considered myself an "impulse buyer" when it comes to books, but I have probably at least a dozen books I bought because the ebook format was cheaper (that's a key element), and I could get the book _right now_.

On one hand, merely working to replicate a print experience isn't the right way to exploit the benefits of the new platform; on the other hand, publishers (and as usual, I use that term quite loosely) should be able to expect at least minimal rendering of common elements like tables, along with support for at least the same core 14 fonts available in Acrobat (speaking of fonts, if you're looking for a laugh check out this mock "font conference").

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News Roundup: Sony Reader Now Supports EPUB, Esquire Using E Ink on September Cover, What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley

Mac Slocum
July 25, 2008 | | Comments (0) | Listen Speech Icon

Sony Reader Now Supports EPUB and Digital Editions

The new firmware for the Sony Reader (model PRS-505) supports EPUB and Adobe Digital Editions. From MobileRead:

I can now confirm that this particular speculation seems to have proved out: the new firmware (available sometime today, July 24th) will include support for both epub and Adobe's Digital Editions. It will also include support for PDF reflow, which is something we've long been looking for. As an extra added bonus, the new firmware will support DE's DRM system for both epub and PDF. However you may feel about DRM, this support for it, along with PDF reflow, means that all those PDF e-books available from many public libraries are now in play on the Reader for the first time, so dust off those library cards, folks!

First E Ink Magazine Cover Coming in September

Esquire will use E Ink technology to declare "the 21st Century Begins Now" on 100,000 flashing copies of its September issue. David Granger, Esquire's editor in chief, discusses the first E Ink-driven magazine cover with the New York Times:

... on its own, the magazine will run out of juice after 90 days. Mr.Granger knows some will see the cover as a gimmick -- but he says he thinks the technology behind it, which has been used for supermarket displays but never embedded in a magazine, speaks to the possibilities of print. (Continue reading)

What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley

Sramana Mitra of Forbes.com sees parallels between author Elle Newmark's grassroots audience development and Silicon Valley's software process:

In Silicon Valley, we do alpha and beta products -- small prototypes of our vision -- and recruit a small number of customers to gain early validation of the products' viability. These alpha and beta products, along with early customer validation, help us sell our ventures to investors and raise millions of dollars in venture money.

In Newmark's case, she spent less than $10,000 of her own money to "bootstrap" her self-publishing effort, she found customers online, and then she recruited William Morris agent Dorian Karchmar as her "investment banker," who then got her Simon & Schuster as a "venture investor." Newmark's deal with Simon & Schuster is widely rumored to include a seven-figure advance.

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Sony Reader Now Supports EPUB and Digital Editions

Peter Brantley
July 24, 2008 | | Comments (1) | Listen Speech Icon

The new firmware for the Sony Reader (model PRS-505) supports EPUB and Adobe Digital Editions. From MobileRead:

I can now confirm that this particular speculation seems to have proved out: the new firmware (available sometime today, July 24th) will include support for both epub and Adobe's Digital Editions. It will also include support for PDF reflow, which is something we've long been looking for. As an extra added bonus, the new firmware will support DE's DRM system for both epub and PDF. However you may feel about DRM, this support for it, along with PDF reflow, means that all those PDF e-books available from many public libraries are now in play on the Reader for the first time, so dust off those library cards, folks!

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30 O'Reilly Titles Now Available as Ebook Bundles; Many In Kindle Store Later Today

Andrew Savikas
July 15, 2008 | | Comments (36) | Listen Speech Icon

Update: According to Amazon, the O'Reilly Kindle books can now be pre-ordered, but won't be available for download until Friday. The 12 titles listed below are now available in the Kindle store.

O'Reilly Ebook BundlesAs promised last month, O'Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price. And for a bit more than the cover price, you can get the print version too along with the ebook bundles.

Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) do not include any DRM, though we continue to experiment with custom watermarking options.

With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).

Twelve of those 30 titles will also be available through the Kindle store later today are now available.

Ebook Bundles Now Available

The titles now available as ebook bundles are:

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