Archives for posts with tag: BookGlutton
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Tell Us What You Think

By BookGlutton
January 31, 2012 //
0
Feedback Tab - Open

Feedback Tab - Open

We’ve added a feedback tab to the BookGlutton site – it’s something we’ve been meaning to do for some time, so it feels good to get it out there.

The Feedback tab just hangs out there on the right side of the screen. Act on impulse! Tell us if you run into problems on the site, right from that page. Share your suggestions for improvement. You can even automatically attach a screenshot of the page you’re on.

Every bug you track down, every recommendation you make, improves BookGlutton. Thanks for contributing to the experience.

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Categories BG News, BookGlutton, Features

Open-Source Stampede – BookGlutton’s PHP ONIX Importer Released

By BookGlutton
November 16, 2011 //

Stay tuned, this is about as publishing-geeky as we can get. You might have noticed we’ve been gradually open-sourcing parts of the BookGlutton platform as time permits. We want to share some of the tools we’ve built over the last five years to encourage development of reading systems, startup-technology, and, of course, the publishing revolution (underway now!)

Aaron Miller (@vaporbook), who built the technology running BookGlutton and ReadSocial, and who is now working with NetGalley, has open-sourced the PHP ONIX Importer we use on the BookGlutton site.

GET IT HERE
BookGlutton PHP ONIX Importer
https://github.com/Vaporbook/POI-PHP-ONIX-Importer

WHAT IS ONIX?
Most people probably haven’t heard of ONIX (ONline Information eXchange). ONIX uses XML to process metadata for book publishers. If you’re a publisher that wants to deliver all your titles and associated metadata (title, author, publishing date, price, cover image, etc.), you push it out in an ONIX feed for the retailer to pick up. There are a lot of variations on this — every publisher formats their ONIX feed differently, and they change them at will.

WHAT DOES BOOKGLUTTON’S PHP ONIX IMPORTER DO?
The PHP ONIX Importer is an easy way to import any kind of ONIX and make it available as JSON data structures. JSON interfaces well with web applications and can be served directly from Web APIs and consumed by various kinds of Web clients without depending on other libraries. It’s a small tug, but it gets publishing a bit closer to the web, so we can easily use vital metadata about book products.

WHY IS THIS GOOD?
We attended the Books in Browsers 2011 Conference at the Internet Archive and saw that people are speedily moving toward the web for reading experiences, publishing platforms, book catalogs and reading recommendations. This code will help some of those endeavors get a head start. The BookGlutton PHP ONIX Importer moves the conversation forward, because it is:

  • Based on the most widely proliferated and supported languages of web applications: PHP
  • Timely in the age of HTML 5 where JSON-interchange is replacing XML
  • Compatible with widely used CMS systems such as Drupal and WordPress
  • Battle tested in production on the BookGlutton.com site for several years

AARON MILLER’S OTHER OPEN SOURCE TOOLS
You can find some of Aaron’s other work on github under vaporbook. A lot of it has had a good workout on BookGlutton.com. He’s also involved with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and its Standards Development for E-Book Annotation Sharing and Social Reading committee. Here’s some of Aaron Miller’s other open source code:

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Categories BG News, ebooks, ONIX

Announcing ReadSocial

By BookGlutton
September 12, 2011 //

We’ve been doing the ebook thing for five years now. A veritable flash-in-the-pan for the publishing world. But like dog years, web years fly by at an accelerated rate. Five years is a lifetime in web-years. Five years should really get you fifteen years of street cred.

We’ve learned a lot. About building communities. Running destination sites. Integrating with publishing workflows. Reaching out to third party systems. Pulling content in from other sites. Creating online reading systems. Making people happy. This has all been a valuable, powerful, (sometimes painful) learning experience. But when we sat down and thought about what we really know, we know the most about Social, with a capital “S.” We know what people will and won’t use (which is not to say that we can’t be surprised). We know how baggage from other web communities figures in to people’s expectations for a digital reading system. We know what types of behaviors people bring with them from the print world, and what they really miss when they switch back to it from digital. We know about user experience, and the compromises that sometimes need to made of it in terms of schedule and technology. We know all about user-funnels, stickiness, and a whole host of other concepts that figure prominently into the digital publishing world, whether or not publishers realize it. But when it comes right down to it, we decided we should focus on what we really know. What we’re passionate about.

ReadSocial is launching soon.

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Categories BG News, Musings, readsocial

Happy 4th Birthday BookGlutton: A Short History.

By BookGlutton
January 31, 2011 //

Photo Attribution: Will Clayton

Happy Birthday, BookGlutton! You were but a glimmer in our eye in Fall of 2006. A few months later, when the two of us started working on you full time (Jan 07), we knew we were doing something exciting – after all, who had heard of social reading then? In the last four years we’ve built a lot. We’ve seen the industry change right before our eyes. We were in private beta when the Kindle came out. The iPhone was brand new. We were early.

Looking at things from a startup perspective, early isn’t always positive. In truth, we would have done better to build less and start later – but then we wouldn’t have experimented as much. We spent a lot of time building for laptops, wishing tablets would finally happen. We had to build our own social network from the ground up because Facebook didn’t have an API (and then pivot when it did). And we had very little to base our interface on…so we made most of the user experience up as we went along.

What we built at BookGlutton includes:

BookGlutton grew to become a huge system, and has given us plenty of opportunities to geek out. Our initial plan was clear: we just set out to build a reading system with social features. As we moved through the process we found that, to do this, we needed to build a social network to use it…and then a publisher’s system, a content repository, etc. Not everything we built has been a resounding success, but we have learned about all the different aspects of digital publishing and where it intersects with the web in unique ways. Buy us a beer sometime…we can talk about it for hours!

    Over the years we’ve seen some cool uses of the site:

  • People in Iceland embedding Dracula with BookGlutton’s widget and reading it together.
  • Teachers in Phoenix using BookGlutton to teach English as a Second Language (ESL).
  • Japanese classrooms using it to read Jane Austen.
  • Grandparents forming groups with grandkids and leaving them notes.
  • NYU students logging on at midnight to meet as a class to prepare for class.
  • Authors embedding the BookGlutton widget on their websites and leaving comments inside for their readers.
  • Soldiers using it to read with people back home.

It’s been a good ride. We recently launched a new user-funnel with some social gaming aspects and tight Facebook integration (yes, I should send a newsletter out about it). With ebooks taking off, more people are starting to see things our way. We’re excited to see where that leads us next. Aaron and I have launched a separate endeavor, ReadSocial, which brings what we’ve learned about social reading to other reading systems. BookGlutton still has great things in store…

Thanks to all the people who’ve used and supported BookGlutton over the years!

-Travis
travis at bookglutton dot com

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Categories Musings

World Wide Web (of books?)

By BookGlutton
October 27, 2010 //

Aaron’s presentation at Books in Browsers had 3 fundamental points, and 2 product announcements, so I’d say he pulled his weight among the heavies of publishing present at the Internet Archive last week. It was an impressive guest list, and in truth we were honored to be presenting. His presentation, The World Wide Web (of Books?), is embedded below. I felt these were the three most important concepts:

  • The future requires a new kind of publisher, the Cloud Publisher, who asks “What else can we charge for?” This is a common way for people with web-development backgrounds to approach new markets – what can we create a market for using new technology? Think Foursquare. Think Twitter. It particularly makes sense when facing the Gorgon of online publishing and distribution.
  • Communities are different than Audiences. The ideal community for a book may not align with its current audience. This explains why some retail chains can’t make the jump to community, and why communities are best built from the ground up. This will be a blog post in itself, but it’s worth mentioning here.
  • There are many layers that will live on top of social books, including the metadata layer, hyperlinked layer, and, you guessed it, the social layer.

-Travis Alber

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Categories BG News, Features, Musings

BookClub in a Can

By BookGlutton
October 11, 2010 //

As a designer, you conceive your design with the core values of a project in mind; you strive to reflect the ideas and feelings behind it. Contrary to that, the first lesson in web development is always separate your design from your code. It’s important that projects be flexible. A myriad number of screen sizes and devices mean the “presentation layer” should be designed to change, particularly when you use web technology. Moreover, partnerships will impact your design.

Aaron and I have been making websites for 15 years, so we get that. Most people don’t know it, but what we’ve built at BookGlutton is flexible in many ways. Easiest to change is the look and feel. Over the years we’ve had a number of conversations about offering our “BookClub in a Can,” the ability to export the social experience to other sites, so they can curate their own book clubs. Business considerations and content deals ultimately kept these projects from launching, and BookGlutton remained a destination site. But it’s fascinating to see how associating the reading experience with a different brand affects your relationship to it.

ANSWERBAG

ANSWERBAG

GOODREADS

Skinning the Reader takes almost no time at all. However, it changes the experience significantly. The Reader takes on the trappings of that community.

TOR

ELLE

All the mockups listed here preserved the buttons and layout, but even that can change. It makes for interesting consideration. Sometimes these mockups were presented in meetings; sometimes the discussion ended prematurely. See more skins, as well as the original BookGlutton design on Flickr.

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Categories Features, Musings

Cleanly Digital

By BookGlutton
September 26, 2010 //

A good reason to go digital?

Bed Bugs at the NY Public Library

I moved to NYC four months ago, and not a week goes by without a warning about the bed bug epidemic. Beware movie theaters! Avoid used-book stores! Leave abandoned furniture where it lies! I hear all these warnings, and I often think of the library.

I’m a library person. Growing up, I spent rainy Saturdays wandering the poorly lit stacks of vintage sci-fi. I loved it. When I was planning my move, I specifically thought about the New York Public Library. I imagined myself beating the summer heat in a cool corner, flipping though a book I surreptitiously happened upon.

With all the hype, I haven’t visited the library at all. It’s a shame. I’m sure the library is doing everything it can to combat the outbreak. Maybe all my information is hearsay and conjecture. Either way, considering my options has made me aware of one benefit digital books have over their print counterparts: they’re bug-free. (Well, at least the infectious-kind.)

One last note: since I work in the start-up world, I’m obligated to break my moratorium on movie theaters this weekend, in order to see The Social Network (even if I have to stand up the whole time). I’d imagine the library is only a matter of time.

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Categories Musings

The Holdout Theory of Book Evolution

By Aaron Steven Miller
September 16, 2010 //

Add this into the mix as one more theory on the future of the Book. Following the evolution of current distribution channels along to an interesting and somewhat sustainable outcome, and forgetting the notion that printed paper pages will somehow endure, let’s suppose that “bird books” and landlocked books continue to exist in harmony, except with landlocked books being essentially shells of what we think of as paper books.

Propelled along by Moore’s Law, the landlocked book sheds its paper interior, which is also the bulk that makes it so costly to ship and produce, and gains instead a slim flat panel display, mounted on a cardboard structure to give it a certain width. This may be the day such a display becomes cheaper to produce than its packaging — 7 cents, to be inexact.

The system contained on the chip in such a device is harder to predict. Perhaps it will be KindleOS, or iPhoneOS, or Android. It doesn’t matter to anyone, because you won’t download other books onto it, or jump on the web, or even be online. It will be engineered to deal with one specific book. If that book has video, it will be compiled to handle that, or if it needs to pull in web feeds, it will have basic network capability. Etcetera.

The binding, hard cover, and jacket will look and feel just exactly as book readers would expect it to look — and no print book designers will be harmed in this evolution, they will all just become jacket designers. The thickness of the packaging will even allow for a spine, so you can continue to clutter your shelves with these shiny objects, and when you want to read, select your title by looking at spines, pull one out and sit down and read in your cozy chair just as if you were reading an old fashioned print book, sans Kindle, sans iPad, sans anything that remotely feels like a “device.”

So the Holdout Theory posits that, since publishers and hardware manufacturers both have enough vested interest in distribution methods they already understand, rather than ones they can’t seem to figure out, that creating a future like this is a matter of deliberately holding back the evolution of the ethereal, un-landlocked, “bird book” in favor of one that ships and sits on retail shelves and feels like an object and not an intangible bunch of data.

I have to admit, it’s not too bleak a picture, to imagine that one day we will have both the iTunes or the Netflix of digital books as well as an option to buy something very object-like, even if it’s just a package with a machine inside. After all, it’s working pretty well for software manufacturers.

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Categories Musings

TweetStreams Alongside Most Media, Except Books

By Aaron Steven Miller
September 15, 2010 //

Those who follow the tech world probably spent yesterday afternoon anticipating the big announcement at Twitter, which turned out to be a few new features, slightly different UI, and a bunch of improvements on the back end that no one can really see.

Ninety million tweets a day is nothing to cough at, but it’s no surprise we’re seeing major feature-convergence between Twitter and Facebook. The one thing in common seems to be the experience of sharing and talking about media. From links to videos to pictures, anything and everything we come across online can now have a near real-time stream of global conversation associated with it. Except books.

Twitter got on this trend by adding a pane on the right hand side of the tweet stream where embedded media can be viewed without ever leaving the site or missing new posts to the stream itself. The only thing missing, which most tech people probably don’t notice or care about, is books. You can see excerpts from articles and web pages, or watch videos pulled in from YouTube, or see shared images, but it seems odd that one of our most interesting, vibrant and compelling forms of media is missing. Why can’t we embed an excerpt from a book in our tweets, and have it display in the right hand pane for our associates to comment on? What do we blame for this omission? Lack of user demand? DRM? Formats? Lack of available content?

It’s not true that book content is lacking online. Amazon’s Look Inside preview, Google Books, Feedbooks, the list of sites with full and partial books available in browsers goes on. And plenty of small technology companies (like us) are making books fully integrated with the Web, giving each paragraph its own URL. Smart people have built software that unpacks and renders Epub files right in the browser. Epub itself is an encapsulation of Web technology. So why should books lag so pitifully far behind other forms of media, to the point that they’re completely ignored by one of the most important communication tools we’ve invented in recent years?

People may not know that they want book content to be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the Web, but once it’s there, they’ll see a new dimension to what the Web actually can be, and they’ll never want it to go away. The permanence of books is something entirely fresh among the billions of temporary URLs meant to last only a short time. How useful it would be to allow them to start accruing social capital in the form of Twitter and Facebook discussions, the way we’re already doing with other forms of media! That kind of data, built up over time, will stay relevant much longer than the latest Tweet stream about the latest YouTube meme.

The answer seems to require an entire book to explain. My gut feeling, after having struggled through discussions with publishers, is that not enough important authors, agents, and publishers want to see this happen. They see no value in it, and are simply afraid of the consequences. Publishing is an old and powerful empire in decline, and stupidity reigns supreme among the top decision makers. Couple that with a willful ignorance and contempt of Web technology, and you have a deliberate sabotage of an almost perfect container for human thought, while in the meantime other media and technology advance in step to further the irrelevance of our beloved Book.

It’s quite possible that we’ll see, over the next fifty years, a strain of thinking we could call “Web thought” overtake what might be called “Book thought,” eventually eliminating it completely. The idea that any work created by an individual needs to be monumental and self-contained is already under attack, and generations to come might consider it a fairly primitive concept worth ignoring in the name of progress. Some people, especially among Web-savvy communities, already think this way.

Someday the majority of authors might simply consider themselves “Web authors” who don’t want to be contained and aren’t concerned with the permanence of their own work as much as they are concerned about making a lasting contribution to the hive. As an aspiring author myself who has completed many short stories, two novels, and other works I consider things that stand on their own, attributable only to me, and as a reader who appreciates great writing that also stands on its own, I don’t want to see this happen, and I think I speak for a lot of people on that point. But as a technically savvy person, a programmer and web designer, I see it happening already. And I see it manifested in the rapid advance of companies like Facebook and Twitter. Ultimately, I think the responsibility falls into the hands of the users of these services: if they don’t see books as a potentially vital and important part of the Web, the Web will replace them with something else. And if publishers continue to assert that books can remain relevant while disconnected from the rest of the flow of human thought, discourse and experience, then they too will be replaced.

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Categories Musings

Paper Backups and First Sale Vindication

By Aaron Steven Miller
September 12, 2010 //

There’s a new service out there that allows anyone to send in their paper books, whole boxes of them, and get them fully digitized and OCRed, where they can then be accessed in a personal archive in a multitude of digital formats.

Doesn’t this sound great? I’ve got these old Bantam Classic paperbacks–pages yellowed, glue desiccated–and I’d love to send those in and have them forever as files in the cloud, transferrable to any device I want. There’s something inviting about shipping out all that silverfish food and a week later seeing it pop up in the cloud.

The only problem is that this service is not for consumers, it’s for publishers. And it’s not likely that Google will offer it to us, ever. The likely outcome will be that eventually every mouldering tome in our decrepit paper collections will already have been scanned and available — and we’ll have to pay for it again to get it that way. We’ll still have all this decaying paper and not know exactly what to do with it.

If there was any sense in the publishing industry at all, there would be some big publisher or distributor who marketed permanent backups of your paper in the cloud. With all the rights, plates, and digital masters, there would be no laborious unbinding and scanning to cut into profits. And surely there are enough people feeding a $50B sector to ensure a pretty large number of lifetime subscribers. This would be a new, renewable source of revenue for thirsty giants. And unlike the pulping of newly minted titles, this would be some kind of sweet vengeance on the first sale doctrine, as used copies were destroyed and taken off secondhand markets forever.

But the problem with that scenario is that big publishing, when it comes to digital distribution, tries to force the print process and model on it, over and over.

Which is why they’re like the kid on the playground who loses a fight slowly, getting up every time and blindly trying the same moves that got him knocked down. This is despite the fact that they’re outnumbered: Google is punching them in the face while Amazon holds them and Apple gives them a wedgie, and still they don’t seem to learn. How much more milk money will be lost? How much longer do we have watch this happen?

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Categories Musings
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