Next time you log into BookGlutton.com you’ll find a “Recent Gluttons” bar, right on the homepage. People who’ve been on the site AND who have uploaded a profile image will show up here. For those of us at BG HQ, it’s totally addictive. Go upload a photo – give us something to do. 🙂
Why are we supporting .epub? Why not, for example, Microsoft’s .lit format, or PDF, or better yet, LaTEX?
The answer is: Web. The ePUB format is the most “webby” of all formats. Not that those .lit files of yours are not just a hop, skip and a breach of the DMCA away from being webbed-up books. After all, .lit is a kind of flatfooted ancestor to ePUB. Some would say it’s better suited to the publishing world because of its DRM attire.
But in evolutionary terms, that will become a mere nub on the anatomy of the ideal book format of the future. No, ePUB looks forward, toward CSS3 and the networked reading populace of the blogosphere. It sees “page” as a limitless concept and not a finite space. Documents in ePUB have reflowable text that can adapt to different screen sizes; like those little mammals that scurried through the brush, it adapts to the space it’s given, doesn’t crash through undergrowth like a big dumb lizard.
Oh, it has its drawbacks. Print purists will cringe at the limitations of CSS and HTML. Publishers will howl at the lack of DRM. Hypertext snobs will sneer at the “bookishness” of its assumptions. But developers will play with it. And apps will grow around it. And it will grow with the web itself, where more and more books are going to live.
Good news – now anyone can send a private beta invitation!
If you click “Invite a Friend” at the top of any page and invite some people, your friends can jump right into the site without waiting for us to invite them. So, get in there – read with friends, set up groups, and upload your work. The more the merrier.
Here’s a demo of BookGlutton’s Unbound Reader. It shows the reading layout as well as the community features, like proximity chat, that we think will be a lot of fun to use.
We’ll talk more about the upload capabilities and additional social features next time. BTW, maybe next time I won’t sound like I’m calling from the bottom of a tin cup? The fuzziness factor is, of course, youtube’s aesthetic choice. 🙂
Like most of the world, we were disappointed to hear that Amazon isn’t going to commit to the epub standard for its new hardware device. Lack of standards will obviously hinder adoption among users and create strife with publishers.
We were, however, relieved that the new reader, called the Kindle, will have some kind of browser and wireless access, as well as a keyboard. Our information on this is fuzzy, but since BookGlutton is browser-based, it could be possible to read and discuss on the BG site via Amazon’s device. Cool.
Speaking of the epub standard, BookGlutton’s upload feature allows users to save out an epub format of their work. We’re still tweaking it, but we’d like people to be able to upload their work to variety of places, not just our site, so in addition to uploading it at BG you can download a fairly standards-compliant file and share it with others. The more exposure a writer gets, the better the chances of fame and fortune (or at least some decent feedback). Being writers ourselves we wanted to adhere to the standard and see if we could allow our users intermingle with Digital Editions, or anyone else who’s taking a crack at standards compliance.
I did something unheard of in my house this weekend – I got rid of a book. It was a battered old paperback, probably an obvious choice for replacement. But that’s not why I tossed it. I got rid of it because I found I couldn’t read it. Surviving a mid-90’s Dreiser-Lewis seminar required putting my mark all over it, and you couldn’t look at the thing without getting distracted. I underlined every good sentence, valuable piece of information, or integral plot turn. I did all this in case I ever needed to search for something, particularly in class. And it worked. I could find almost any paragraph I needed to quote from, and fast. But ten years later I have little need for that level of search – I really just want to sit down and read the thing.
So what do most ebook readers want to do? Does everyone need to search and catalog a laundry list of details, or are there others, like me, that just want to read and discuss? UCD (user-centered design) is terribly important in website development, and to design around a user you need to define who she is. Goal-driven readers like researchers, writers and scholars will naturally want to dig around for specific information. That’s valuable. But it’s questionable whether the average reader cares if she has a robust search function. I’m pretty sure she needs a bookmark, and the ability to make notes. She’ll probably want something that looks nice. But when it comes to search I often wonder if developers throw it in there just because it seems like something you’d expect from a computer, rather than something that’s highest on the list.
We didn’t put embedded search in our list of core features for Bookglutton Launch, although you can search the catalog, and we’ll be adding additional search features over time. But sometimes the assumption that search tops the ebook features list strikes me the same way rear windshield wipers on cars do – nice to have but not something I really need.
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