Read, chat and annotate on your laptop, then take the book with you via your phone. Read the press release: http://bookglutton.com/PR/bookglutton_goes_mobile_press_release_1202010.pdf

Here’s what we said in the January Newsletter:
BookGlutton has launched a mobile reading experience! Fire up your iPhone or Android phone, open a browser and head to www.BookGlutton.com to see the new, streamlined version. Access your books on the go and pick up where you left off on other devices!

The mobile site keeps you up to date: browse the catalog, see what others are reading, or jump into a random book.

READING ON THE GO On BookGlutton Mobile the maximum space has been cleared for text. Tap the right or left side of the screen to move through the book, tap the center to slide your menu up. Change font size, peruse the Table of Contents, and see where you are in the book.

READING ACROSS DEVICES Log in and pick up where you left off on your laptop for a seamless reading experience across all your devices. Instead of requiring you to download an app, BookGlutton has taken reading into the cloud.

COMMUNITY & COLLECTIONS Access your wall to stay on top of what people want to tell you – we’ve streamlined profile pages so just your wall postings show. You can also get to your friend list to see what books people have been reading

Yep. Now you can. We’ve started pulling in cover images for a number of our books, which may come in handy for browsers out there (human, not digital). They’re also bigger than our old placeholder covers. *Bonus* We’ll keep bringing them in, so keep your eyes peeled.

Due to some major annoyances with Leopard, as well as a system crash last week, all BG development now takes residence on a fresh install of Xubuntu. This means I’ve suddenly been made aware of some glaring differences between FF/Mac and FF/Linux, and took it upon myself to make the site bearable to look at in this environment.

When it comes to browser support, we work very hard to support the browsers that 95% of our users use. Time and resources for testing across many platforms, environments and browsers are limited here, so we generally do the best we can given all the other things we’re balancing.

Suffice it to say the site now looks pretty good in FF/Linux, and a few bugs in the Reader there have been corrected. When I get a chance, I’ll probably also turn these attentions to some of the WebKit implementations here, as WK variants will become important test beds in the near future.

Thanks to everyone for the enthusiastic feedback on the widget. We’ve made a few minor fixes here and there but I wanted to announce one important enhancement we just pushed. Now the script tag you embed in your site has an additional attribute called “ownwin.” This attribute is set to false by default, but if you want the reader to pop in its own tab instead of in the same window, just set this attribute to “true” instead. So the tag will then look like:

<script src="..." ownwin="true"></script>

This addresses some situations where sites are using framed content which won’t allow the reader to overlay properly. Thanks again for the feedback. Continue to let us know about layout issues, as we can’t predict or simulate the many environments this thing might be exposed to.

We think this is so punk rock! Embed the book AND the community from BookGlutton’s Unbound Reader directly into your site using BG’s new widget. “Embed the community,” you may find yourself asking, “Across domains?” Yep, chat with anyone reading the same book from any website. How cool is that? Officially the widget is called the “Book Launcher,” because you click on it to launch the book from your site (duh), but around the office we just call it THE PUNK ROCK WIDGET. Here it is in action:

You can log in from inside the widget to access your bookclubs or to mark your place, browse the catalog, switch books, and all manner of reading tasks. You really don’t need to visit the BookGlutton site any more (we’ll miss you), except to manage friends and reading groups. And the magic of technology makes the content as secure as it is on BookGlutton’s site, so we’re hoping publishers will recognize the opportunity to bring you even more content.

Here’s a youtube video that outlines 8 minutes of widget goodness:

The deal is that you can grab this code from inside the widget itself. Or, if you find a book on BookGlutton you can get the code from that book’s detail page. And it’s free, so what are you waiting for?

You can read the press release here.

Just an update on a side effect of some of the changes we’ve made: some books may take a long time to load and/or paginate. You will know you’re seeing the problem if you open a book and each section appears to require pagination of the entire book. This is due to a problem we’ve just found and should be working on today. Please be patient while we get a fix in, and don’t let this stop you from reading.

We appreciate the enthusiasm we’ve seen for the simple HTML to EPUB converter we launched last year. To date, the conversions measure in the tens of thousands. And since this uses our core EPUB class to do its work, we will continue to maintain and upgrade it.

The latest improvement is somewhat experimental. Now, by default, the converter splits HTML documents into separate documents. We’re curious to see how this fares. It could raise issues with linking in those documents, but it was needed to address the issue of making EPUB files more friendly with slow processors/connection speeds. If enough of a fuss is put up, we’ll put in an option to revert to the old way of linking to fragments in a single doc.

Among other changes we made, some validation errors have been fixed, all HTML is now processed according to an element whitelist, remote images are supported (use absolute URLS), and various other bugs have been fixed (most notably one that was causing invalid IDs).

Despite all the improvements, we were dismayed to see that converted files have the invariable behavior of crashing Digital Editions, hard. It appears to happen when choosing any section other than the cover. I’ve run them through validation several times, pored over the package files with my own eyeballs and while there are some XHTML namespace issues reported by epubcheck, I can’t find anything serious enough to merit crashing the app as hard as it does. We’re small and have other pressing issues, so we’ve run out of time to troubleshoot it for now. It stands as is. That said, I will happily fix the problem if someone brainy can identify it.

Check out BookGlutton’s new Facebook app! We know there are a lot of ways to organize what you’re reading on Facebook. But how many ways are there to have a robot deliver vintage science-fiction first lines? Just one. BG’s app let’s you flip through a collection of space-related first lines and send them on to your friends.

Send someone a Futuristic First Line using BG’s Future First Lines. Vintage robot included. Find it on Facebook.

Mimicry is an accusation that’s freely bandied by print aficionados who feel that digital reading suffers from too many book-like interfaces. It’s an easy attack, and one without much tooth. For what is anything on the screen but mimicry? And for that matter, how is a printed page not a form of mimicry as well? By the same logic, one would have to argue, for example, that photographs are inherently superior to illustrations.

It would be a big mistake to think that all the lessons we’ve learned in the evolution of the printed book will apply to digital transformations. But it would also be a mistake to throw them out. Let’s run through some of the big ideas in book technology over the last several hundred years:

• Binding. Wonderful concept, and pretty hard to beat when it’s done properly. But our classics, cultural landmarks and histories are worth preserving for much longer than the life of paper and glue allow. So binding needs to be virtualized into a standard container format. Unless, of course, publishers are busily co-opting new indestructible materials with which to bind their books . . .
• Scrolling. Scrolls were a nice way to contain text: portable, extremely lightweight, self-protecting. However, pages have proved themselves. The kind of scrolling we’ve gotten used to in computer interfaces was a compromise from the very beginning. It’s not the best way to read.
• Typography. If there is any aspect of printed books which truly needs to be imported wholesale into our aesthetic and functional notions of digital books, it’s the art of typography. Why shouldn’t a digital book do it’s best to  imitate the best of print design? Kerning, leading, ligatures, orphan control, and other complex details of presentation need to be smoothly integrated with the searchable, reflowable texts that screen interfaces offer.
• Footnotes. These have been black sheep ever since they were birthed by academic fervor. Putting them inline in text destroys flow, marginizing them fouls necessary breathing room, putting them at the end of a section is incredibly inconvenient, and efforts to place them in footers fall apart when text is reflowable. If anything can be thrown out, it’s preconceived notions about footnotes. There are myriad ways to handle them in digital texts, and almost all of them are better than print.
• Covers. Who hates covers? No one. But no one’s figured out how they fit into digital texts. The physical requirements no longer exist, the pragmatic needs are addressed by metadata, and the marketing aspect just doesn’t quite translate (full bleed four-color process reduced to a jpeg thumbnail?)
• Spines. Really, historically speaking, just the inferior alternative to covers, designed specifically for physical constraints which don’t exist on the computer. Sorry, Shelfari, spines are one of the first casualties of digital transformations, and rightly so. No need for any more bookshelf metaphors.
• Table of contents. Doesn’t need to appear as a page in the book anymore. Bad imitation would reproduce it there, as many Gutenberg titles do. The table of contents is a form of navigation, and thus is metadata. This is not to say it can’t be nicely presented, just that it’s less essential to what a book is than we previously thought.
• Indexes and glossaries. What a wonderful invention, eh? Wouldn’t it be nice to jump to a spot in the book where a topic appears? Or flip to a section that defines key terms? Unfortunately, these are two concepts that are ready to seriously evolve, and no one should consider borrowing them as is. Hyperlinks, search, crowdsourcing, shared notes, author commentary, call the future of this what you will, it is, again, about metadata. Going forward, the accusation of outright mimicry will be reversed: this time leveled at print for trying to imitate what computers already do so well.
• Double-sided pages. Nice to trees, very economical, and reduces page turns. Dependent on physical rotation of the book object, or a good solid wood table at the proper height. Not necessary on a screen.
• Facing pages. Pages don’t read each other, unfortunately. A page ideally should always face the reader. Also, we only read one at a time. That said, while it will one day seem archaic to be holding a portion of unread pages in one hand and a portion of read pages in the other, the tactile feedback of the fatness of either portion must be respected in some digital equivalent. At BookGlutton, we have a fat little progress bar underneath the text. It’s fun in a tactile way to scrub along it, like feeling the edges of the pages you’ve been to, or the pages you’ve yet to discover. The filled portion increases as you fill yourself up with the book. Tasty.
• Margins. Though they’ve seen some shrinkage, it’s not because they’re less necessary. Space around text makes it easier to read. Many screens seem to ignore this, and they shouldn’t. Here at BG, we’d like to see margins get bigger than they are in most printed books.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And believe it or not, most people who contemplate reading on the screen want the screen to be somewhat like a book.

That said, let’s definitely have less page-flip effects and jpeg-wood bookshelves.

Editor’s Note: for those readers who can’t suffer jargon, please skip this post. For those who thrive on it, read ahead. We welcome your feedback.

Uncertain DRM is one of the most-cited flaws of the .epub specifications, but it seems like more of a business problem than a technical one. The real technical challenge with using the proposed standards comes from a lack of direction on how exactly we’re supposed to link between books, within books, or within fragments of books. We’re calling this Deep-Linking.

What is clear is that we can use IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers) to link to an OPS structure, specify a path into it and identify a fragment with an ID. That’s great, but I wouldn’t consider it Deep-Linking. The W3C DOM gives us Range specification, Node collections, XPath, CSS selectors and Xpointer. Sounds like plenty of tools. So why not specify one or two in the recommendations?

Relying on unique IDs to point into documents may be the best way to create bookmarks that can reliably return us to the beginning of a chapter, or, say, the third paragraph of that chapter. They work fine if each annotation is associated with an entire paragraph or element, nothing more, nothing less. But if we want a user to be able to specify a sentence, a passage or a word, or a collection of paragraphs, we need something better. And what about specifying a collection of non-sequential paragraphs, such as the first paragraph of each chapter, or the first sentence of each of those paragraphs?

There is no firm imperative or recommendation on one method or another. No URI scheme is mentioned either. A URI scheme would allow deep linking via an epub:// link, a link which actually points to a location inside of a zipped file heirarchy.

The OpenReader Binder spec addresses this issue, the OEBPS does not (thanks, Jon!). OpenReader recommends using IRIs too, and doesn’t end up getting us too much deeper link-wise, but at least it takes a stance.

A URI scheme raises another question: would it be better practice to link through the NCX, or directly into the file structure? Direct URLs are certainly more open and Webby. But linking through the NCX allows a certain measure of content control (more appealing to the DRM crowd, and probably also to e-book authors). For example, the NCX or, more likely, the OPF file could specify rights and/or codec information, but only for the parts to be made openly accessible. Eg:

epub://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/UUID/chapter1#paragraph2

or

epub://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/UUID/chapter1#xpointer(/p[2])

The thought has obviously occurred to Microsoft, who’s either trying to patent it, or just protecting alternatives to Sun’s Java API. The jar:// scheme that Sun came up with for linking into zip files is used by Firefox quite extensively, though it’s not an IETF standard. A jar-style URL for epubs would look like this (substituting ‘epub’ for ‘jar’ in the scheme identifier):

epub://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/friendlyname.epub!/chapter1.xml#paragraph2

There is also a scheme for including data directly in a browser. The latest crop of browsers (IE8, Safari 3, Opera, Mozilla) all support it. The problem with it would be the length of the URIs needed to load an entire book. However, a variant of the epub spec could allow data:// URIs in the content.opf, which would allow it to be loaded and parsed by a browser, images and all.

For example, we’d all like to link to parts of a package with something like this:

http://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/978-0-9767736-6-5/chapter1.xhtml#paragraph2

Perhaps there’s room for several methods of linking. After all, if we’re going to have both .epubs and OPS structures out there, we’ll need alternatives. We’re leaning toward the open, http-based options. Feel free to disagree. Dialog helps.

BookGlutton Cover Page

We thought we’d add a little color and flair to the opening pages of BookGlutton books, so look for this stylish new cover page design in all forthcoming catalog imports. And remember, you can always find out what’s new in the catalog by clicking the Catalog Feed link at the top of any page. We’ve been importing Irish authors as of late, in deference to St. Patty’s Day. Why not read some Joyce or Yeats?

BookGlutton’s Reader: Shared Annotations

Your laptop is in color, so why shouldn’t we be? You probably know we’ve upgraded the Reader to handle images and started importing image-packed books. They’re a mixture of color and black-and-white, depending on the source material. Here’s an example of a children’s story by Charles Dickens.

Some of you have requested this; we’ve been wanting it for a long time. Now anyone can read books in the Unbound Reader without having an account – there’s no requirement to log in. This is great because we believe in open access to public domain books.

For now, you’ll still need an account to post notes or chat with other users, but your privacy-prone friends are now free to browse all the public annotations in our catalog and read to their heart’s content, account-free. Tell the world!

In the three weeks since going live we’ve had to put out relatively few fires. For this we are thankful (and knocking on wood). However, we uncovered a bug today that we should share.

Apparently our Contact Us form worked fine for those BookGlutton’s already logged in, and many of you sent us feedback to prove it. However, for those visitors just passing through, your message might not have reached us if you didn’t see the word “Success” after you submitted. Luckily this didn’t effect anyone’s reading experience. But we might have missed a few comments coming down the pipe. The problem has been resolved, so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Contact Us and tell us what you’re really thinking!

We’ve corrected the issue and we’re back in business. Thanks for your patience.

We’re having a little bit of a problem with the site, nothing to be alarmed about, except that it will keep everyone out for a few minutes. Naturally it happened at the worst possible time. Monday morning at 3 AM would have been so much more convenient.

Any minute we’ll be back up and running, so stay tuned.

We’ve added an RSS feed for the Catalog so you can keep track of new work we drop in. Not familiar with feeds? Just click the RSS icon pictured here (at the top of most BG pages), and the browser will let you add it to your feeds.

If you’re waiting for a particular book, or if you’re watching to see what other users upload (we should have the upload tool back in business soon), you’ll see it in your feeds. Rock on.

BookGlutton has opened up the Beta. Now anyone can come on in and check it out (please do, and feel free to invite 5000 of your closest friends). We’re ready to get this thing going!

This savvy little highlight box is here to give you a snapshot of your account and a peek at what’s been going on since you last logged in. It’s going live on the homepage later today.

BookGlutton Adds Images

We’re about to begin importing a whole slew of books with images, folks! Keep an eye out for flashier-looking titles like the fine example above.

One caveat – the Upload Tool is going to take some time catching up, so for a while user uploads will remain text-only.

At any rate, these tasty little visuals should make it into the catalog in the next week.

Some of you using the “Remember Me” button on login may have had some problems with the Reader’s Talk feature. Come back and chat – we’ve happily resolved this one (and believe me, it was a real bugger to figure out where that was coming from)! While we were at it we did a little Reader optimization, so it should pages load faster, as well.

It's important that the community have a hand in developing the BookGlutton Catalog. Not only can users influence what public-domain works are included, but writers can get great feedback showing their work in the reader. This video walks you through how to upload a document (which you'll need to convert into .rtf or .xhtml – easy to do from Word or Dreamweaver, respectively). The video also shows you how to tag your document, download an .epub version (which you can later read in Adobe Digital Editions, although we'd much rather you just keep reading it here!), and read it in The BookGlutton Unbound Reader.

In-document Comment Links

Next time you’re in the Unbound Reader check out the MARK panel changes.

In the past, when you slid open the MARK panel, it would tell you how many comments there were on the book. That was nice to know, but not particularly helpful for finding them. Enter the new setup: slide the MARK Panel open today and it will tell you how many comments there are for each section. In fact, any section with a comment is listed (see the screenshot above). Moreover, you can click on the section icon ( § ) and it’ll jump you right to the section itself, where you can cruise for those little red asterisks. Quick and easy.

New Talk Panel

Next time you’re reading in BookGlutton you’ll notice a few changes. Now, when you move from chapter to chapter, the chat will update your position, showing where you are in the book each time you comment. That way, if other users have their filter set to “Whole Book,” they can see where you are. Talk away!

Just a word on where our content is coming from. BookGlutton is working daily to add more content to the catalog, and it’s coming from 3 directions.

First, there’s the entire corpus of human knowledge written before 1923. Obviously we’ll continue to import these public domain works as fast as possible. But we’re also looking to our community to try its hand at the Upload Tool. Show us what you’ve got! If you’re feeling shy you can make your uploads private, so only you can see them (you’ll have private groups to share them with – coming soon). Hopefully you’ll migrate them to the public catalog later on, so everyone can read your work. Finally, we’re checking into copyrighted sources and looking for ways to bring you contemporary writing, ASAP. There’s going to be a little red tape involved in all of this, so be sure to “Make a Recommendation” on the site whenever you think of a work, a genre, or a type of community you’d like to have on BookGlutton.com and we’ll add it to our list!

It looks like our system got a little overzealous and re-invited a few of you! No worries — your old account will still work. This was due to a backend migration of old-style logins to new-style logins, which are now based on user email address.  Sorry about that — we’ll reel our robots back in ASAP!

I know we’ve been a little silent over here at BG HQ, but we’re really had our heads down trying to resolve the last few bugs standing in our way of private beta. Beyond fixing up the code, patent work and other tedious business-type housekeeping has filled our days from dawn to dusk. You may have noticed the site itself is ready for beta, what with the new login page and all, and we’re going to be rolling people in slowly. But there are a few tweaks that need to be made first, particularly with reading groups, and we’re figuring on about two weeks worth of changes before the beta emails start going out…although I’d love to be pleasantly surprised…