We just had some great news – BookGlutton is featured on Kim Komando’s website today. Even better, BG is her team’s pick for the Site of the Day selection. We’re excited to hear other folks talking about BG and glad to meet the new people that showed up and read something as a result!
BTW: Kim Komando, the Kim Komando stylized logo and the Kim Komando Weblink logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of WestStar TalkRadio Network
We’ve started rotating our cache of Featured Authors on the homepage. Jim Hanas and Abby Mims have just been added to the mix. Check them out!
You’ll also notice a new Featured Authors feed in BookGlutton’s Stanza Catalog. Some are excerpts, others are short story collections. We’ll be steadily adding to this so keep an eye out. To access BookGlutton’s ebooks through Stanza, install Stanza on your iPhone, go to the Online Catalog and scroll down to BookGlutton. This link will take you BG’s categories.
Check out your new Profile Page! We’ve added Table Talk – basically a “wall” where people can come by and leave you a note. It’s a good way to say hello after someone friends you, ask someone to join your group, or comment on someone’s uploads. A number of you requested it, so talk away. Head over to the site and try it! You can log in and leave me a note here: http://bookglutton.com/glutton/tdawg.html
Great news! We’ve partnered with Lexcycle to offer content through its iPhone application, Stanza. Starting today you can download select works from the BookGlutton catalog and read them in Stanza on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The Stanza app is free, as is the work BookGlutton is offering through it.
There are lots of categories under BookGlutton in Stanza’s Online Catalog to choose to read from, including Science Fiction Stories, Top Reads from the BookGlutton Site, Random Recommendations and Alphabetical Titles and Authors. We’ll be adding more as time goes on.
To access BookGlutton’s ebooks through Stanza, install Stanza on your iPhone, go to the Online Catalog and scroll down to BookGlutton. This link will take you BG’s categories.
Although you can’t read with your group on Stanza, it’s a great way to peruse some of BG’s cool books from your iPhone. So check it out!
We recently finished a massive under-the-hood effort to prepare for the next big release of the Unbound Reader. You’ll see some of the improvements right away. For one, we got rid of that pesky pop-up window. None of us has ever been a big fan of pop-up windows, but initially it bought us time to face some of the challenges with having a single-page app open up right in the midst of another navigation framework. Now the reader OPENS IN THE SAME WINDOW as the rest of the site, and conforms to whatever dimensions please you for reading on-screen. So RESIZE AWAY. We’ve scaled it down to fit on my tiniest laptop and up to fill my ginormous 24-inch flatscreen, and it looks great either way. We added A THIRD FONT-SIZE to the font-scaling for those who really want to bump up the dots-per-em.
For those into reading with Groups, we made it easy to SWITCH GROUP SETTINGS RIGHT INSIDE THE READER. So you can go from reading with the public to reading with your group without leaving your book.
You may also note that this release of the Reader loads content SCREAMINGLY FAST – much faster than the previous versions. We finally did the dirty work up upgrading from Dojo 0.4.3 to the 1.1 release, and that accounts for some of the speed, but more than that, we completely overhauled the way the Reader loads content and images. Interface elements are now done with CSS spriting, which reduces the number of requests by a factor of five. We also overhauled the HTML, so that the basic UI shows up almost immediately, reducing the amount of time you have to stare at a blank frame.
One thing that’s hard for people to see is a new plugin framework we created, which separates reading interface functionality from the wing activities, i.e. chat and notes. This will make it easier for us to improve the features and functionality of the annotative and communal aspects of the Reader. Among other things this opens the possibility for future third-party development.
Overall, the Reader is more MODULAR, PLUGGABLE AND EXTENSIBLE–nice buzzwords that mean nothing until they’re taken advantage of, but good qualities to have in the coming months as we head into new territory.
We’d be pleased as pie if you’d nominate BookGlutton for the Mashable Open Web Awards. You can choose any category, but Niche Social Network seems like a good pick to us. Nominations close November 16th, but it only takes a few seconds so we’re hoping you can squeeze it in before then!! Thanks!!!
VOTE HERE: http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/
Journalist Doug Hoepker does a great job interviewing the BookGlutton founders in his article on Smile Politely. Glad he likes our content, too. 🙂
http://www.smilepolitely.com/arts/2008/11/bookglutton-wrapped-up-in-more.php
Cool! BookGlutton won a W3 Award for Community! Here’s the skinny:
BookGlutton has received a Silver in the 2008 W3 Awards, distributed by the International Academy of the Visual Arts. Receiving over 3,000 entries, the W3 Awards honor outstanding websites, web marketing, and web video created by some of the best interactive agencies, designers, and entrepreneurs worldwide. BookGlutton.com won a Silver Award in the Community category.
“We were amazed at the caliber and quality of work received this year. Our winners continue to push the envelope of internet creativity and web design, and it is gratifying to see such great work from the smallest agencies to the biggest firms” said Linda Day, the director of the IAVA. “On behalf of the International Academy of the Visual Arts, we are honored to recognize our winners as they continue to set a high standard of excellence for Web development.”
You can read the full press release here. Thanks, community!
Over the summer we released a score of improvements to our Upload Feature. The WYSIWYG interface lets you make changes to uploaded material in a way that allows you to see instantly what it will look like in the Reader. We think authors will catch onto this. If you’re an author, we’ll be releasing a lot of interesting things for you in the coming months. Keep your eye on the site!
As for the video, which outlines all this and more, check here:
FrontMatters 
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