The following announcement is in French since it concerns exclusively the French section of our store.
Après Gallimard en Mars, Feedbooks ajoute un autre grand nom de l’édition française ce mois-ci avec l’arrivée de Flammarion à notre catalogue.
Avec plus de 600 titres exclusivement en EPUB, cette arrivée complète l’intégration des éditeurs de la plateforme Eden (La Martinière, Gallimard et Flammarion) sur Feedbooks.
The following announcement is in French since it concerns exclusively the French section of our store.
Après l’arrivée d’Immatériel, Editis, DeMarque et les éditions du Seuil, la section librairie de Feedbooks accueille aujourd’hui un autre acteur majeur de l’édition française avec l’arrivée de Gallimard.
Cet ajout s’inscrit dans la continuité de la constitution d’un catalogue complet en France et aux USA pour la librairie Feedbooks qui se démarque de plusieurs manières dans le paysage de l’édition numérique française:
For the last six months or so, we’ve been working on building a great store section for Feedbooks to complement our selection of free public domain and self-published books.
Building an eBook store, is nothing but trivial: finding the right balance between powerful browsing/searching and a clutter free design is a real challenge, and since Feedbooks is massively consumed through mobile devices (using our mobile website or our OPDS catalog), we had to find an answer to this challenge that also works on smartphones and tablets.
Feedbooks in its current form is fully internationalized in two languages: English and French. Launching a store where we have the majority of publishers for both markets (US & France) was an absolute requirement and we’ve reached that point.
US eBook Store
In December, Feedbooks launched a first version of our eBook Store along with eBooks from “non-agency” publishers, such as Random House for example.
Today, we’re adding three new “agency” publishers to the mix, and in the process vastly improving the selection of content: Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster & Penguin.
We’ll continue to add other publishers in the future including for example MacMillan and Wiley in the very near term.
French eBook Store
The French market is still in its infancy compared to the US market but we’ve already managed to build relationships with the top distribution channels for French books: Immatériel, Interforum/Editis, Eden Livres & De Marque.
Unlike the US market, a lot of eBooks on the French market are actually either DRM-free or watermarked, a very interesting dynamic to follow compared to the US market and great news for eBook readers in France.
New facets, improved browsing
With the full release of the Feedbooks store, we’re also pushing forward improved browsing through the use of facets on our full website, mobile website and OPDS catalog.
Any search will now return the number of results for each section on Feedbooks, along with suggestions for categories and languages to search for.
Aldiko 2.0, the top reading application on Android
On January the 18th, Aldiko launched Aldiko 2.0, the top reading application on Android with over 2.5+ million users and a higher ranking in the Android Market than the rest of the competition (including Kindle & Google eBooks).
With this new release, Aldiko users can now browse, search and buy eBooks from our store completely in-app.
Aldiko is the first application to fully use the potential of our OPDS catalog, providing one-click payment in-app, supporting facets and displaying featured books to provide the best shopping experience on Android for eBook users.
What’s next ?
The next few months will be incredibly exciting for us and our user base. Among other things, we plan on extending our support for other European markets (for both free and commercial titles), improve the discovery experience through more and better facets, but also build new ways of pushing forward interesting books to read.
A new redesigned version of our profile page is available.
Among the new features you’ll notice the ability to add a biography and various links (Twitter, Facebook, Blog and Website) along with a redesign that should provide better visibility for authors.
To add a biography and links to your profile, go to your settings and then select “Your Profile“.
Upcoming updates will enable authors to directly include this information in their e-books to drive more user-engagement directly to where they communicate the most.
We’ve redesigned how authors select and set tags on their books: the new selector features auto-completion using the most popular tags, tags with multiple words should be easier to add and you can remove a previously selected tag very easily.
Now that Feedbooks supports the same set of categories throughout the website, tags are still very useful but for a different purpose. Even with 2,000+ categories, we cannot fully express the subjects of every book, and tags are the perfect fit when you’d like to provide additional metadata about your book that will enhance search results and provide a more accurate description of your book.
Categories can be very tricky. We always provided the option to add tags to a self-published book, but the problem with tags is their lack of consistency (several ways to spell the same thing), the difficulty to browse through them (tag clouds are not exactly helpful) and their lack of hierarchy. Tags work best when categories are not specific enough and you want to provide more keywords that could be useful for a search.
For this reason, we decided to expand our support for categories and added BISAC categories on our books too. They’re not replacing our tags and will complement them nicely.
To browse through the hierarchy of categories, we designed a Javascript-based selector that you’ll find whenever you create a new book or edit the properties of an existing one.
We highly recommend adding categories to any previously published books: better metadata means more downloads. With categories, it’ll be much easier to get visibility in category specific lists and they’ll also return better search results to your potential readership.
At Feedbooks, we’re huge fans of the work done by the Creative Commons Foundation to provide an alternative to traditional copyright licenses. Ever since we’ve launched our service, we’ve had works published under a Creative Commons license available for download and we decided to go a step further and include their support as a core feature of publishing on Feedbooks.
Any book published on Feedbooks can now be assigned a Creative Commons license using a simple form, with only two questions to answer:
Any book published with a CC license will have:
We’ve also added the ability to search for books published under a specific license on our new page for advanced search.
For the last two months, we’ve been rolling out new features at an hectic pace: among the major ones, we fully redesigned our mobile website:
The most challenging part, was to design a system that would enable the same facet-based navigation than on our full website.
We took a clue from the new Google Mobile and adopted a button next to our search field to show/hide facets.
Thanks to CSS3, we can provide a smooth animation whenever the user toggle the facets (you’ll notice that the button rotates, and facets slide open), and provide a full featured navigation even on smaller screens.
With new mobile pages to register, access your bookshelf and in the near future, post comments, our mobile website should complement very nicely our OPDS catalog (Aldiko or Stanza) and provide a great alternative to our full website.
With the new page dedicated to analytics, both self-published authors and public domain contributors can keep track of several key figures about their books.
Key features:
Analytics for downloads and formats/clients are updated on a daily basis while the list of favorites/in bookshelf should be almost real-time.
To access the analytics, click on 
Analytics in the upper right-corner of the page for your book.
OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) was first launched approximately one year ago, and today the OPDS community is very pleased to announce a call for comments on the first draft spec version, 0.9.
The OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft is ready for public review and we are soliciting feedback and comments.
Please submit any and all critiques or comments to the openpub mailing list or add an issue on our project page by 19 May 2010.