Aldiko: EPUB reader for Android with Feedbooks integration

June 4th, 2009

Aldiko

What is Aldiko?

Aldiko is an ebook reading application that runs on any Android phone and which enables you to easily download and read thousands of books right on your smartphone.

We’re glad to announce that this new EPUB reading system, capable of downloading content directly from Feedbooks is now available. We’ve worked with our friends at Aldiko to make this experience as seamless as possible: it is actually based on the same Atom catalog format that we’re using for Stanza. I’m glad that we finally have a second reading system commited to implement the future OPDS standard, and Aldiko actually implements some of the recommendations that we recently submitted.

Once again, Feedbooks is the first platform available on a new reading system. We’ve been very successful with Stanza (Neelan recently announced that 8 million EPUB files have been distributed on Stanza. 75% of these files came from Feedbooks) and hope to have a similar success with any new reading system on the market. The Android platform is very attractive and with 18 new Android-based devices in 2009, it should get some significant share of the smartphone market.

Update: In-depth review at the Gadgeteer

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Posted in API, Android, ePub | 6 Comments »

Extending Atom: Thoughts on OPDS #2

May 28th, 2009

First of all, Roger Sperberg wrote an excellent comment about the current OPDS draft:

With blogging, the Atom feed entry ought to include either a content child — containing the full blog post or a link to it (and the link relationship identified as ‘alternate’) — or a summary child whose content is an extract, abstract or short summary of one of the three types above.

If OPDS is a catalog of books, then there’s a mismatch between the blog model and the catalog model. The content in the catalog is material about a book, and the feed therefore ought to have the full material in content or a summary of it. A link child of contentshould take the feed’s consumer to that “full material.”

So maybe the catalog copy shouldn’t be likened to blog posts.

Then content could contain a link to the epub, and the catalog description would go into summary. Of course, the full descriptions in the catalog might be too long to use as intended in this type of feed.

In that case, just create a new type of relationship link, as was done in the examples for cover image and thumbnail, that describes whether this longer content is a synopsis, review or just longer description.

I agree with most of this comment. It makes more sense to use content for the EPUB file and summary for the description. We should also extend Atom rather than describe everything in XHTML: using DublinCore to describe the language, copyright status, publication date and other metadata.

Partial entry/Full entry

The current draft is full of new rel values, a design choice that we should avoid as much as possible (most of the time, a type and a rel value registered at the IANA link registry would be enough).

To support entries with longer content, as recommended by Roger Sperberg, we don’t need a new relationship link. In AtomPub:

Clients MUST NOT assume that an Atom Entry returned in the Feed is a full representation of an Entry Resource and SHOULD perform a GET on the URI of the Member Entry before editing it.

In the same RFC5023 for AtomPub, the “type” parameter was defined:

This specification defines a new “type” parameter for use with the “application/atom+xml” media type. The “type” parameter has a value of “entry” or “feed”.
Neither the parameter name nor its value are case sensitive.
The value “entry” indicates that the media type identifies an Atom Entry Document. The root element of the document MUST be atom:entry.
The value “feed” indicates that the media type identifies an Atom Feed Document. The root element of the document MUST be atom:feed.
If not specified, the type is assumed to be unspecified, requiring Atom processors to examine the root element to determine the type of Atom document.

Thanks to this type parameter, it’s fairly easy to point from a partial entry to a full entry using a link@rel="alternate"

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" href="..." />

For sources with a RDF document available (such as O’Reilly, and Feedbooks in the upcoming weeks), the same link@rel="alternate" could be used with application/rdf+xml.

Controlled vocabularies

The publication metadata required and allowed in OPF, should have the same status in OPDS.

Once the goals for OPDS are clearly defined (oops), we might extend this.

Any provider should be allowed to use additional extensions in their full entries.

Relationship to AtomPub

To allow such things as comments/reviews, OPDS could also support AtomPub.  With both the Atom Threading Extension and the current work on Collection Discovery, it should be fairly simple to support.

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Posted in API | 5 Comments »

New Features in Web Publishing UI

May 26th, 2009

Along with our work on the API, we’re also releasing new features for the web publishing UI.

Re-order elements

Re-Order elements

You can now switch to the Table of Contents (ToC) of your book while editing, to drag & drop parts/chapters/sections and re-order them the way that you want. Nested ToC re-ordering is supported, which means that you could create a new chapter, move to the ToC and drag & drop several sections into this chapter.

You can also change the type of an element, for example if you don’t need a chapter header anymore, you can turn a chapter into a section.

Sub-sections

Sections can have several levels of sub-sections now. With sections & sub-sections it should be very easy to create any structure that you’d like for your book.

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Posted in Site | 2 Comments »

Hierarchy support for AtomPub

May 25th, 2009

Creating a powerful API for publishing is currently our top priority, and to improve our AtomPub service we recently added support for hierarchy in AtomPub.

Nikunj R. Mehta & Colm Divilly recently released 2 Internet-Drafts: one about collection discovery and the other one about hierarchy.

Internet-Drafts are still works in progress, but since the behavior for collection discovery was already described in a previous RFC, and the rel values used in the hierarchy draft are consistent with those registered at the IANA link registry, we decided to implement both of these drafts.

Collection discovery

Collections can be discovered in our feeds now (for example /book/id/contents.atom), and they’re not limited to the service document anymore. In the feed for a book you’ll find the following code:

<app:collection href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/id/contents.atom">
  <app:accept>application/atom+xml;type=entry</app:accept>
  <title>Add new entries</title>
  <app:categories fixed="yes">
    <category term="Part"/>
    <category term="Chapter"/>
    <category term="Section"/>
    <category term="Text"/>
  </app:categories>
</app:collection>

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is supported through:

<link rel="down" ah:count="2" href="..."/>

ah:count is used to count the number of entries in the child feed, and in the child feed you’ll get a new collection to add new entries.

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Featured Book: Suggested Oddities

May 16th, 2009

A Carnival of the strangest freaks, interstellar music critics and magical gibbons are just some of the oddities you’ll meet in this collection of 15 stories inspired by suggestions from members of Mobileread.com.

A collection of short stories by PJ Lyon.

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Posted in Books | No Comments »

Publishing an e-book with Windows Live Writer

May 12th, 2009

Several e-books self-published on Feedbooks started as blogs (or blooks ?) first, such as Mortal Ghost or obnoxious librarian from hades.

Thanks to our new AtomPub service, it is now possible to use blog editing softwares such as Windows Live Writer (on Windows obviously) or MarsEdit (for Mac OS X) to publish new chapters of your book both on your blog and on Feedbooks.

First of all, you’ll have to create the book on Feedbooks. While you can manage the content of your book with these tools, they’re not capable of creating the book itself.

Once you’re done, just add a new blog account in Windows Live Writer, and select “Other” for the type of the blog.

Enter http://www.feedbooks.com as the URL of the blog along with your username/password. Windows Live Writer will automatically discover our AtomPub service and list your books. Select the right one and you can start publishing new items in your book !

As we continue to improve and extend our AtomPub service, expect more and more integration for Feedbooks into various publishing tools.

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Posted in API | 4 Comments »

Best-selling author Paulo Coelho on Feedbooks

May 9th, 2009

Paulo Coelho, a brazilian author best known for his allegorical novel The Alchemist, recently published several of his short stories on Feedbooks:

It’s a very pleasant surprise to have such a well-known author publishing some of his works himself on Feedbooks, and it proves once again his commitment to e-books.

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Posted in Books | 5 Comments »

AtomPub on Feedbooks

May 2nd, 2009

Atom Publishing Protocol

To allow any developer to interact with its publishing workflow, Feedbooks is releasing a new API based on the Atom Publishing Protocol standard. Based on the principles of a REST architecture, AtomPub is used by companies such as Google (GData), Microsoft (Live Framework) or Automattic (Wordpress) as a standard way to manipulate resources.

Implementation on Feedbooks

Currently, the AtomPub service on Feedbooks is strictly compliant with the standard, but to improve several things, it’ll be extended through Atom’s standard extension model in the near future:

  • Support for hierarchies will be added, probably using the following draft proposal.
  • Currently, for each item, we create a section in the book. We’ll extend AtomPub to specify if the item is a part, a chapter, a section or a simple text flow.
  • We don’t sort the order of the items in our feeds based on the last update, but based on the order of the items in the book. We’ll add this information in our items, and enable the possibility to re-order elements through AtomPub.

Service document

Our service document can be automatically discovered in any of our webpages through the link element with service as a value for its rel property.

To avoid long service documents, we use standard Atom pagination.

Collections/Items

A book can have several megabytes of text, and for this reason we don’t list the full content of each item in a collection but rely on GET requests on the item as recommended in the specs:

Clients MUST NOT assume that an Atom Entry returned in the Feed is a full representation of an Entry Resource and SHOULD perform a GET on the URI of the Member Entry before editing it.

What it means for publishing on Feedbooks

The main goal for this first release is to provide a service that’ll work with any AtomPub client. This way, the same software could both publish a post on a Wordrpress blog and a new section in a book on Feedbooks, without any additional work to support Feedbooks. While the next release will extend AtomPub to add things that are specific to books and publishing on Feedbooks, we’ll always be compatible with any AtomPub compliant client.

One of the first use for the API will be to make conversions from various formats easier. In our team, Benoît Larroque is currently working on a script to divide an HTML file and send it to Feedbooks through AtomPub. Such scripts will focus on properly dividing the text into parts/chapters/sections that the user can finetune afterwards in our Web UI.

Integration into other platforms such as blogs (Wordpress) or Wiki will be another focus, and dedicated desktop or mobile tools for publishing could also use this service.

But the main goal of course, is to provide a service that any developer can use to build innovative tools.

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Posted in API | 3 Comments »

Thoughts on OPDS

April 14th, 2009

For several months, we’ve been distributing books to Stanza through our Atom endpoints. While the idea of using a standard format (Atom) as a catalog format was a good one, Lexcycle quickly had to extend things through new rel values or additional markup to support things such as thumbnails, search or links to similar books. OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) is an attempt to standardize these extensions and create a solution that any reading system or content provider could use.

But aside from using more standard rel values and mimetypes, we need to think beyond the current implementation in Stanza if we’d like to create a great browsing and shopping experience.
The AppStore on the iPhone is a good example of what we shouldn’t do: it’s almost impossible to discover new applications and strictly limited to search and a few lists with the most popular applications.
At first, the Atom catalogs in Stanza didn’t have a way to list similar books: as soon as this feature was introduced, the way users browsed through Feedbooks rapidly evolved. People don’t go through pages and pages of books: they use a few books as an entry point to a graph and then explore things, jumping from one book to another untile they’ve found what they’re looking for. Best sellers, customized recommendations or search are ways to find these first books, but what the AppStore currently lacks and OPDS should extend is the way we can sort/filter this content, and jump from one book to another. 

The current specs define a generic way to access sub-catalogs while viewing a book, through the <link> tag and the application/opds+atom+xml value for type, which works well for things such as “similar books” but is a bit too vague at this point. Is it a requirement for every OPDS-enabled reading system for example ? While browsing books, how do I filter or reorder things ? Constantly going up and down in the hierarchy of the catalog can be very cumbersome, and the ability to go back to the home catalog (rel=”home”) or to filter content without pressing “back” should be available.

The current specs seem to rely too much on a browser too. A dedicated reading system might lack such a browser and we should make sure that most things can be done without one. How do we support comments and reviews ? How can we integrate the act of buying a book into OPDS and OPDS-enabled reading systems ? The current draft doesn’t answer any of these questions. To display a price, you have to include text or images in the description of your entry.  To handle a transaction, most catalog providers redirect the user to their mobile website in a browser. To create an optimal experience, OPDS needs to go beyond listing books, and define standard ways to handle all these interactions required with a retailer.

More technical details about the draft after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in API, Thoughts | 7 Comments »

Reading ePub on the XO with FBReader

April 11th, 2009

The Age of Reason on the XO

The XO-1 from the OLPC project has a great potential as an e-book reading device: it is the first device with a dual-mode display and you can turn the screen to use it like a tablet. It can work either like a normal LCD screen, or like an epaper device that you can read in the sunlight, featuring the 1st generation of the technology that Pixel Qi is working on. Unfortunately, the “Read” activity was limited to document formats mostly (like PDF) rather than real e-book formats.

Sayamindu Dasgupta is currently working on a port of FBReader to solve this problem, with full integration into Sugar. The second test version was recently released, and now that the circle/square/cross/tick buttons are mapped to change pages and the size of the font, reading ePub files on the XO is a very nice experience overall. E-books might be the real killer app for the XO, and the XO-2 with its book-like dual display seems to be heading in that direction too.

XO-2

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Posted in XO, ePub | 3 Comments »

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