Archives for posts with tag: video

At BookGlutton we spend a lot of time thinking about what the future will look like. We’ve been building the current site for a few years now, and have pretty serious ideas about where that future is going. Like all prognosticators, we can’t take into account every surprise, but we’re sure about a few things.

1. The web is the future.
2. Connections to social networks are a significant, serious piece of our lives. They will continue to be important (Ze Frank had a great presentation at Internet Week New York on this point).
3. Books are an enduring way we transfer big ideas. They may become digital, but they’re not going away.

Last week Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, posted this video about what he’d like to see in the future of reading. For users of BookGlutton, many of the points may sound a little familiar (parts of 2, 3, and 5 are alive and well at BookGlutton). Good to know some great minds are in agreement.

You can use BookGlutton by opening Safari and heading to http://www.bookglutton.com.

Advertisement

We’ve updated our short video on How BookGlutton Works. You can watch it with the link below or via the BookGlutton homepage. In 3.5 minutes it shows how to get around the site, buy stuff, organize yourself, and generally tells you everything you need to know to get started.

Watch the video here.

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.