Laura Sydell wrote an excellent piece about BookGlutton for All Things Considered last week. Called Chat While Reading: The Future of Books? it outlines our service and interviews professors who have used it in a classroom setting. It made our server hiccup – we were terribly excited!
You can read it, or, as we recommend, listen to it here.
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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!
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.
Yep. Now you can. We’ve started pulling in cover images for a number of our books, which may come in handy for browsers out there (human, not digital). They’re also bigger than our old placeholder covers. *Bonus* We’ll keep bringing them in, so keep your eyes peeled.
Thanks, interns!
Our summer intern crowd has been helping fix up a few areas of the site. That press page that was languishing in obscurity is once again seeing the light of day. See it, totally current, here.
The June Newsletter has been released into the wild. If you’re not a subscriber read it here. We talk about the new feed of annotations outside the Unbound Reader, our Publisher Program, and our new videos in a book. Naturally we also suggest a few things to read. 🙂
BookGlutton scored a mention in Clive Thompson’s article The Future of Reading in a Digital World, in the June issue of WIRED Magazine. If you’ve got the paper copy it’s on page 50, but you can also read it online. Thanks, WIRED!
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.
Due to some major annoyances with Leopard, as well as a system crash last week, all BG development now takes residence on a fresh install of Xubuntu. This means I’ve suddenly been made aware of some glaring differences between FF/Mac and FF/Linux, and took it upon myself to make the site bearable to look at in this environment.
When it comes to browser support, we work very hard to support the browsers that 95% of our users use. Time and resources for testing across many platforms, environments and browsers are limited here, so we generally do the best we can given all the other things we’re balancing.
Suffice it to say the site now looks pretty good in FF/Linux, and a few bugs in the Reader there have been corrected. When I get a chance, I’ll probably also turn these attentions to some of the WebKit implementations here, as WK variants will become important test beds in the near 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:
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