Want to see what people are saying inside a book? Get a feel for it on the book detail page. We now have a LATEST NOTES bar on the right, which pulls out the two most recent public comments. Click on it to get inside the book and say something.
For those of you interested in stats we’ve added another number for you to follow: VIEWS. Now on every book detail page you’ll see two numbers under the book cover, categorized by OPENS and VIEWS. OPENS shows you how many times people have, well, opened and read the thing. VIEWS represents the number of people who’ve looked at the page and considered reading it, but for whatever reason, didn’t.
It’s a nice way to track activity, and of course if people are logged in and reading publicly their profile picture shows up, so you can connect accordingly.
Check out the healthy helping of customization we’ve added to Groups. Now you can upload a profile image for your Group – isn’t a picture worth a thousand words, after all?
Also, we’ve taken a page from profiles – now Groups have their own wall. Leave a note on the Group Wall about what to read next, or when to read, and even who else to invite. Wall postings generate an email to the rest of the Group members, so you can make plans.
Log in and hit your Groups link in the header to start using this today.
We’ve made some huge updates to the site! (Don’t worry, we think you’ll be pleased.) Now on the homepage you’ll see that featured books are accompanied by recent comments. It’s now much easier to see what people have been posting…and totally addictive. Here’s what it looks like:
Over the last year we’ve released several iterations of our EPUB Converter. At first this was a side project – we updated it when we had a chance (which wasn’t often). But then we noticed something: people used it. Actually, a heck of a lot of people used it. Every day. This was encouraging and we were glad to give something back to the community. After all, getting things into EPUB format wasn’t easy and we wanted to help, not to mention encourage people to upload work to our own online EPUB Reader.
We also noticed something else – people uploaded a million different permutations and got mixed results. So we made a decision to rebuild the EPUB Converter. To give it more guidelines and more documentation. To spend time making sure it worked correctly and that we could support it. This is what we’ve launched today.
Now all you need is your book in .html format and to use our index file. Well, that and to follow a few easy steps.
Start with a folder that contains your book in html format. It can include up to 4 MB of images.
Save each chapter as a separate .html file – not required, but easiest. As you save these .html files make sure their formatting is set to XHTML 1.1 (Dreamweaver > File > Convert > XHTML 1.1). To avoid getting question marks in your files, make sure they’re set to UTF-8 (Dreamweaver > Ctrl + J > Title Encoding).
Download our example file and use that index.html file as a template for your own by copying it into your folder. It includes detailed instructions about how to modify it – put in your own title, author, description and more.
Create the table of contents using the default list in the index file, again following the comments. When you’re done, test the index file in a browser, then zip up the folder and upload.
There are plenty of advanced details on the Converter Page as well, but the above instructions spit out a decent EPUB file. The great thing about this is you don’t need to be a digital book expert or even a developer; if you have the ability to make a webpage you can make an EPUB book. And there are a lot of people that know how to make webpages. Put in good html (following the guidelines above) and you get a good book. Simple.
In addition we’ve built in validation. Developers know validation is important, but in layman’s terms validation gives consistency across epubs, and makes sure people who are building Readers know what to expect.
With your feedback we’ll continue to refine the Converter, so let us know what you think. You can find the Converter here.
At BookGlutton we’ve got New, some more New, and then some subtle New mixed in. (As you can see we’ve been working hard.) One of the most obvious bits of Newness, and the one we’re most excited about, is the integration of Goodreads Reviews!
Now when you visit a book page you’ll see the top two reviews GoodRead’s users have created for that book, with a link to pop it in a new tab and read more. We’ll also be pulling some Book Descriptions in from the GoodRead’s folks as well, so you’ve got a bigger helping of information served up with each book.
Check out this book page, or this book page, to see our GoodReads integration in action.
Beyond the new GoodReads content, Book Pages themselves have also undergone a redesign. Center stage is a Recent Readers feed that shows who’s recently opened that book (unless you read in private, of course). We’ve tightened the layout up a bit as well – and made the pages wider, to make more room for all the new info.
If you’ve been reading lately you might have noticed something missing…like the control panel at the bottom!
There’s nothing like a little more reading space, is there? If you leave your mouse alone for a while these buttons get the heck out of your way. They slide back up when you move your mouse.
This is even cooler if you use our handy spacebar shortcut (You remember that you can move forward using the handy spacebar key, right?). This newfangled buttonbar fanciness works in Firefox and Safari, so read comfortably, with all the room you crave.
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.
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!
Sometimes we write features because WE want to use them…not in the name of business, but because we think it will be cool. We think that it will make things BETTER. Thus we’re announcing BookGlutton Keyboard navigation. Unofficially we’ve had it live for some time for our own use; some of you may have come across it. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here are the details.
Depending on which browser you use one or all of these will work. Navigate back and forth through the books using PAGE UP / PAGE DOWN on your keyboard. You can also use the UP and DOWN ARROW keys. Oh yeah, and SPACE BAR will drive you to the next page, too. The Reader buttons will miss you. Gaming keyboards have long been creating such shortcuts for the gamer community, it’s about time the normal users like us get some attention.
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UPDATE
We’ve disabled these controls for some browsers – we were getting some funky issues with the annotations. It’ll be back shortly; we’ll update here and our Twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/bookgluttonNEWs.
FrontMatters 
Shortcut to Latest Comments
Want to see what people are saying inside a book? Get a feel for it on the book detail page. We now have a LATEST NOTES bar on the right, which pulls out the two most recent public comments. Click on it to get inside the book and say something.