Recent Shouts, our new homepage section, helps you hook up with other Gluttons, PDQ. You can shout a request for people to join your group, shout out a recommendation for a book from the catalog, or just shout out something wise and beneficial to your fellow readers.
It’s super easy. After logging in just click the “Add a Shout” link just above the Featured Shouts. Then type. Kinda simple, eh? Shout away, we’re listening!
Our category, Website Community, may seem a little unusual for a book site, but we’ve built BookGlutton around discussions as much as the stories themselves. We’re up against some pretty big fish – some of the other competitors have years of experience, previous nominations, and millions of members under their collective belts. We don’t have millions of dollars or users, but what we have counts. Thanks for supporting the site.
There are two elements to the Webby Awards: one decision is made by the requisite judges. The other is the Voice of the People. Stand up and be counted! Vote here.
BookGlutton Nominated for a Webby!
We’re excited to say that BookGlutton is a finalist for a Webby Award in the Community Category! There are a lot of smart, driven people who also applied (apparently 10,000 of them), so we’re honored to be considered. Here’s the community category listing.
Here are a few lines from the Webby Awards Site:
Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile Websites. The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpson’s” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein.
Editor’s Note: for those readers who can’t suffer jargon, please skip this post. For those who thrive on it, read ahead. We welcome your feedback.
Uncertain DRM is one of the most-cited flaws of the .epub specifications, but it seems like more of a business problem than a technical one. The real technical challenge with using the proposed standards comes from a lack of direction on how exactly we’re supposed to link between books, within books, or within fragments of books. We’re calling this Deep-Linking.
What is clear is that we can use IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers) to link to an OPS structure, specify a path into it and identify a fragment with an ID. That’s great, but I wouldn’t consider it Deep-Linking. The W3C DOM gives us Range specification, Node collections, XPath, CSS selectors and Xpointer. Sounds like plenty of tools. So why not specify one or two in the recommendations?
Relying on unique IDs to point into documents may be the best way to create bookmarks that can reliably return us to the beginning of a chapter, or, say, the third paragraph of that chapter. They work fine if each annotation is associated with an entire paragraph or element, nothing more, nothing less. But if we want a user to be able to specify a sentence, a passage or a word, or a collection of paragraphs, we need something better. And what about specifying a collection of non-sequential paragraphs, such as the first paragraph of each chapter, or the first sentence of each of those paragraphs?
There is no firm imperative or recommendation on one method or another. No URI scheme is mentioned either. A URI scheme would allow deep linking via an epub:// link, a link which actually points to a location inside of a zipped file heirarchy.
The OpenReader Binder spec addresses this issue, the OEBPS does not (thanks, Jon!). OpenReader recommends using IRIs too, and doesn’t end up getting us too much deeper link-wise, but at least it takes a stance.
A URI scheme raises another question: would it be better practice to link through the NCX, or directly into the file structure? Direct URLs are certainly more open and Webby. But linking through the NCX allows a certain measure of content control (more appealing to the DRM crowd, and probably also to e-book authors). For example, the NCX or, more likely, the OPF file could specify rights and/or codec information, but only for the parts to be made openly accessible. Eg:
epub://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/UUID/chapter1#paragraph2
or
epub://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/UUID/chapter1#xpointer(/p[2])
The thought has obviously occurred to Microsoft, who’s either trying to patent it, or just protecting alternatives to Sun’s Java API. The jar:// scheme that Sun came up with for linking into zip files is used by Firefox quite extensively, though it’s not an IETF standard. A jar-style URL for epubs would look like this (substituting ‘epub’ for ‘jar’ in the scheme identifier):
epub://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/friendlyname.epub!/chapter1.xml#paragraph2
There is also a scheme for including data directly in a browser. The latest crop of browsers (IE8, Safari 3, Opera, Mozilla) all support it. The problem with it would be the length of the URIs needed to load an entire book. However, a variant of the epub spec could allow data:// URIs in the content.opf, which would allow it to be loaded and parsed by a browser, images and all.
For example, we’d all like to link to parts of a package with something like this:
http://bookishstore.com/austen/sense+sensibility/978-0-9767736-6-5/chapter1.xhtml#paragraph2
Perhaps there’s room for several methods of linking. After all, if we’re going to have both .epubs and OPS structures out there, we’ll need alternatives. We’re leaning toward the open, http-based options. Feel free to disagree. Dialog helps.
Safari Support
BookGlutton is now supporting Safari and looks excellent! Safari is available for both Macintosh OS X and Windows and outperforms both IE7 and Firefox. And it makes pages look great. The Safari rendering engine, WebKit, just got an A+ rating on the Acid3 test, something no other browser has done yet. What does that mean, to a non-techie? …That Safari is the most standards-compliant browser out there, and we officially recommend it for reading in BookGlutton.
BookGlutton Cover Page
We thought we’d add a little color and flair to the opening pages of BookGlutton books, so look for this stylish new cover page design in all forthcoming catalog imports. And remember, you can always find out what’s new in the catalog by clicking the Catalog Feed link at the top of any page. We’ve been importing Irish authors as of late, in deference to St. Patty’s Day. Why not read some Joyce or Yeats?
BookGlutton.com has taken the leap into officially supporting IE7 today. We have no idea what kind of miseries this is getting us into — no, just kidding, actually we understand the ramifications of developing for the world’s most used and most abused browser. We’ve been doing it all along. Today we can officially say that it has passed our tests sufficiently for public use. There are still some minor IE-specific glitches, but all the books in the catalog are now accessible, the chat is functional, the annotations work. Most of all, the pages look good in IE – except for one clearType related bug, we’re pleased with the typography here.
Along with this comes another important update to the site. We’ve removed the control which previously prevented unsupported browsers from accessing the Unbound Reader. This means any browser, on any device, can now access it–only we can’t guarantee that everything will work. We think this is a better way to do things, and we’ve improved the site messaging to give users ample warning if their browsers aren’t up to snuff. We’ll continue to roll out official support for other browsers as time permits.
BookGlutton’s Reader: Shared Annotations
Your laptop is in color, so why shouldn’t we be? You probably know we’ve upgraded the Reader to handle images and started importing image-packed books. They’re a mixture of color and black-and-white, depending on the source material. Here’s an example of a children’s story by Charles Dickens.
Some of you have requested this; we’ve been wanting it for a long time. Now anyone can read books in the Unbound Reader without having an account – there’s no requirement to log in. This is great because we believe in open access to public domain books.
For now, you’ll still need an account to post notes or chat with other users, but your privacy-prone friends are now free to browse all the public annotations in our catalog and read to their heart’s content, account-free. Tell the world!
In the three weeks since going live we’ve had to put out relatively few fires. For this we are thankful (and knocking on wood). However, we uncovered a bug today that we should share.
Apparently our Contact Us form worked fine for those BookGlutton’s already logged in, and many of you sent us feedback to prove it. However, for those visitors just passing through, your message might not have reached us if you didn’t see the word “Success” after you submitted. Luckily this didn’t effect anyone’s reading experience. But we might have missed a few comments coming down the pipe. The problem has been resolved, so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Contact Us and tell us what you’re really thinking!
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