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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

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

Attention Publishers: Notes on BookGlutton’s Publishing Platform

By BookGlutton
February 19, 2010 //

Publishers! BookGlutton has a free content management system that reads EPUB, incorporates Onix, and uses the agency model. The BookGlutton Publisher Program lets you:

* -Maintain your publisher profile page
* -Interact directly with your readers and customers
* -Maintain a catalog of your EPUB titles
* -Instantly publish on a per-title basis
* -Control whether your files may be downloaded or not
* -Set your own prices on titles, changing them at any time
* -See real-time sales reports across all titles
* -Receive notifications whenever a title is sold

The basic steps to selling books with us are:

1. After signing up for the Publisher Program, upload a DRM-free EPUB file (for those not using an Onix feed).

2. Set any metadata not contained in the file, including price and cover image. You can set an ISBN to pull in GoodReads reviews, adjust price at any time, flip on download-capability using this menu.

3. Preview and publish the title, from the same menu.

You’ll always have a page that tells you which titles have sold the most, how much you’ve made, and what you’re owed. You can also set different email address to handle sales notifications and follow requests.

You automatically get a Publisher Page: post a logo, use the wall for announcements, manage followers, and show recently added books.

Signing up to become a publisher is easy and can be done at the bottom of any page

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Categories Features

Downloading Has Arrived

By BookGlutton
January 29, 2010 //

Now you can download some files for backup purposes

Downloading is here! Grab a backup of the files you read socially on BookGlutton.com and store them for safe keeping. Most people prefer to read on online, via computer or phone – that’s much easier than dragging a file around. And of course, if you’re looking to talk to anyone about what you’re reading, BookGlutton is the best way to do it. But we get what you’ve been saying: it’s nice to have the option of downloading files. If the Publisher is game, so are we.

ISN’T THIS A STEP BACKWARD?
Not really. Most people are happy to read online and don”t really want to warehouse a file. But to the people who want to own something a little more tangible (well, as tangible as 1′s and 0′s can get), now you can feel like you’ve got things covered.

WHICH FILES CAN BE DOWNLOADED?
Most, but it depends on the publisher. If a publisher says it’s okay, we allow the download. Naturally if the book has a price attached you’ll need to buy it before that download button delivers.

WHAT FORMAT?
EPUB all the way, brother. It’s what we use on the backend, which is why we can flip it on like that.

WHERE ON THE SITE CAN I DO THIS?
Do this on any book detail page, right column; look for the icon that matches the giant one pictured here.

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Categories Features

Random House Bestselling Author Previews Book on BookGlutton

By BookGlutton
June 30, 2009 //

****

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Random House that brings authors and readers together. NYT bestselling author Sarah Dunant has a new book coming out mid-July, but you can read the first four chapters of it NOW, on BookGlutton. Even better than this early preview, you can read comments Dunant attached to the book about her characters, research and her own experiences. THAT’s something new, eh?

There’s a lot you can do with Sacred Hearts on BookGlutton beyond reading it: reply to Sarah’s comments, attach your own comments, visit Dunant’s profile page, basically interact with her THROUGH her book, weeks before it comes out in stores. Feel free to ask questions throughout the book for Dunant to answer, as she has a BookGlutton account.

There’s even a special note to BookGlutton readers included in the preview. Check it out!

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Categories Uncategorized

Video Inside the Book with Book 0

By BookGlutton
May 14, 2009 //

We’ve now added a short video introduction inside our books. You can find it in our default widget, a little something we like to call “Book 0.” As you can see above, we’re pulling it directly from youtube.

Most likely you’ll use Book 0 if you want to embed the widget but can’t decide which book you’d like to put on your site. It’s easy to go to our API page and grab the embed code for Book 0. Then you’ll be displaying the widget with instructions, and people can switch to any other book in the catalog using the catalog button at the bottom of the Reader. For those of you who’ve tried to grab the widget from the API page before now: our apologies for any errors you ran in to. It’s all good now.

We think video is going to become a popular element, and pulling the stuff in dynamically means it can be updated when needed. I should point out that video is not a core media type of ePub. This means we’re technically supposed to supply a fallback image; we don’t currently supply fallback elements, but we will in the future.

Try it: open Book 0.

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Categories BG News, Features

Read your BookGlutton Uploads on Stanza!

By BookGlutton
May 8, 2009 //

We’ve finally gotten around to this much-needed and much-requested feature. Now everything you upload privately to your BookGlutton library is available in the Stanza online catalog. We still have some polishing to do on the user interface front for this feature, so excuse the bumpy ride for now, but some improvements are on the way, along with additional personalized features like Shares, Reading History and Notes.

It’s pretty simple. You’ll just need to log in and then refresh the cattalog.Here’s how:

  • In the Stanza “Library” view, select “Online Catalog”, then select the “Books From BookGlutton” feed, then “My Uploads”
  • Log in with your BG credentials. When the page refreshes to the homepage, you’ve done it successfully. Before you can access your feed though, you’ll need to refresh the catalog.
  • To refresh the catalog, usie the back link at the top of the screen, go back as far as you can, to the “Library” view again. It’s important you go ALL THE WAY BACK! Otherwise, you won’t get a catalog refresh.
  • Repeat the initial steps. The catalog should refresh, and now when you select “My Uploads” … voila!
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Categories BG News, Features

BookGlutton Content Protection: A Recommendation for Evaluating New Services

By BookGlutton
March 24, 2009 //

It takes about seven minutes into any conversation with a publisher before the DRM issue comes up. We’ve counted. And we get it – protecting content is important and we don’t take it lightly. But the web is different. It has evolved its own set of controls. To that end we’ve written up a short document on how BookGlutton approaches content protection. Here are a few hightlights. Download the PDF or, even better, Read and comment on Bookglutton.

EXCERPT:

We are headed quickly into a future where almost all intellectual commodities get distributed through the web. Instead of fearing this, we need to face the reality that the web is the one network that empowers people to find exactly what they’re looking for, and enjoy it with others. That’s something people are willing to pay for. The “long tail” of publishing will be on the Web.

The nature of sharing on BookGlutton’s service is linking, not copying. On the web, consumers would much rather have links than files. They would also much rather share a clipping or snippet of text than an entire book. That said, the illegal copying and redistribution of text is still a concern for publishers and authors. Steps taken to address this concern usually involve some combination of the following measures:

  1. Dynamically generating the HTML to display pages, so “viewing source” doesn’t reveal it.
  2. Chunking files into smaller segments to prevent outright copying of an entire file
  3. Chunking text to prevent outright copying of long passages
  4. Disabling right-click mouse actions or key presses such as CTRL-C
  5. Disabling the ability to select text
  6. Using Flash or some other plugin to protect text when it’s displayed in the browser
  7. Creating images of each page

BookGlutton uses  some, but not all of these approaches.

An important point to remember: encrypting files protects them “in the wild,” but it does very little when they are already in a highly secure web system. Using Adobe’s form of EPUB encryption, for example, in a web system would require decrypting book content before sending it to the browser, which would defeat the purpose of the encryption. Besides, the web already offers strong encryption for securing that content in its path from server to browser, and it’s the same encryption used to transmit passwords and credit card numbers: SSL.

New criteria are needed for evaluating the risks of web-based services. Instead of vetting a service based on whether it licenses and uses a particular form of file encryption or DRM, it’s far better to require the following:

  1. Users identify themselves before purchasing, sharing or consuming content
  2. Content is chunked, and the entire file is never available to the consumer
  3. The platform is based on linking, not copying
  4. The service and the content are tied together, so that one without the other represents a significant drop in value for the consumer
  5. The service’s network architecture meets the same stringent requirements for the storing of credit card data and other sensitive information…

Download the full 3 page PDF

Even better: Read on Bookglutton

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Categories BG News, Features, Musings

Travis Alber joins The Digitizers

By BookGlutton
March 12, 2009 //

Our own Travis Alber, co-founder of BookGlutton.com, had a chance to talk to Kat Meyer for her series The Digitizers. She adds her two cents on the ebook market, digital book design, the epub format and BookGlutton’s plans for the future. Check it out on Teleread!

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Categories BG News, People

December is Off the Charts: 88,000 Visitors!

By BookGlutton
December 31, 2008 //

This year has been good to BookGlutton. We launched eleven months ago and enjoyed steady growth. We’ve created partnerships, like the one with Stanza. We’ve had the honor of being a Webby Finalist and won a W3 Award. We released the first online HTML to EPUB Converter – the first of our APIs. We’ve worked hard to enhance the Reader, the Community, and the Catalog. We’ve nursed a Facebook presence and gotten some really great feedback.

All this is rewarding, but what’s really getting us to crack a smile around here is the 88,000 PEOPLE WHO CAME TO BOOKGLUTTON THIS MONTH. Thanks for using BookGlutton, generous Readers. We have some big plans and some significant pushes planned for early 2009, so stay tuned.

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Categories BG News
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