Feedbooks : Blog

When Yahoo announced that it would support RDFa in the near future, I started including RDFa in Feedbooks (DublinCore & FOAF) and attending various events about the Semantic Web in Paris.

As soon as Techcrunch announced the private beta of SearchMonkey, I registered and was lucky enough to be selected immediately.

Although this is still a rough beta (I had to use XSL and XPath instead of the ressources defined in RDFa), the overall result is pretty impressive.
Take a look at the difference between a normal search and my SearchMonkey application:

Instead of a very generic search result, you get direct links to the files, and some elements describing the book (cover, date etc…).
I’m not sure yet how and when Yahoo will start to include these new SearchMonkey applications. It reminds me of what Google did, including images (Google Images), videos (Youtube) and books (Google Books) in its results. But unlike Google, this is an open search environment, something very developer-friendly and which could potentially turn Yahoo into a very attractive search platform with a better presentation of search results.

After 2 beta releases, Adobe finally launched Digital Editions 1.5 yesterday: http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/#download

Digital Editions main goal is to replace Acrobat Reader for e-books reading. The 2 most important features are:

• ePub support, a new standard for e-books
• DRM support from Adobe

Feedbooks is the first platform who fully supported the ePub standard, and we’re glad that Digital Editions will enable millions of users to use this standard.

I remember very precisely my first day with an e-ink device. Instantly I realized what a difference it makes to read on a screen that looks like paper. But for some reason, the whole experience still felt like reading on a screen, instead of reading a book. It took me a few days to fully understand this impression: typesetting. I’m used to hyphenation, kerning, widows/orphans etc… in a book. On a screen, the typesetting is usually very limited. While the screen looked like paper, the text looked like something that a screen displayed.

I managed to avoid this problem very quickly, using PDF files created for the device, but it’s still something that no reflowable format, no reading system solved yet.

Why should EPUB add support for hyphenation then ? Customers expect the same quality of experience with an e-books than a book. Publishers are very picky with typesetting too.

Let’s see how EPUB could add support for hyphenation…
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EPUB as a standard (it’s actually 3 standards, OPS, OPF & OCF) is a real step forward for e-books. I really like how flexible the OPF standard is: with proper fallbacks you can very easily support all sorts of devices, and extend the document. But there’s still room for improvements and the best way to support EPUB is to discuss how things could be improved.

In the official document for OPS there’s a section named “Future Directions:”

“This specification is designed to take advantage of current practices while preparing for future developments. Although details of subsequent versions of this specification remain to be determined, it is the expectation of the Publication Structure Working Group that continued evolutionary development will occur. The themes driving the creation of version 2.0 of OPS are: standards compliance (e.g. full namespace support), accessibility support, support for any XML document typesupport for a wide-range of XML document vocabularies, enhanced navigation support, and improved content presentational fidelity.

Other themes deemed important for future versions include: more rigorous separation of content and presentation, greater accessibility, better support for international content, Reading Device-specific presentation control and/or Reading Device profiles, enhanced support for inter-Publication linking, layering and managing markups (e.g. inking, highlighting, notes) within Publications, application-specific markup (e.g. math, chemical), multiple reading orders, and support for active content (e.g. multimedia, scripting), all while maintaining alignment with relevant standards. Additionally, maintaining backward compatibility to this version of this specification ought to remain a high priority. Future directions can be tracked at http://www.idpf.org. “

For my first post, I will focus on how we can annotate markup with semantics, and why this is useful in a book through 2 examples:

1. linking to another EPUB document
2. a travel guide on a GPS-enabled device

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A mobile version of Feedbooks, dedicated to PDA/smartphone or Kindle users is now available at: http://feedbooks.mobi/

The current focus of this mobile version is on public domain and creative commons books, but we’ll add support for user generated content and RSS later.

Screenshot: This is the mobile version of Feedbooks running inside the Android emulator. The FBReader team is working on FBReaderJ for the Android platform. Using the mobile version of Feedbooks and FBReaderJ, we can expect full support for e-books on Android, as soon as the first device is available.

Update: Added support for uploaded materials and RSS feeds. Currently, only PDF output is available for those subscriptions but the mobile website is fully ready for the upcoming Mobipocket/epub support.

A few weeks ago, we added Mobipocket support for public domain books. This file format is now available for every e-book available on Feedbooks.
iLiad and Cybook users can now select between PDF (not reflowable, formatting is better) or Mobipocket (lighter, reflowable). Kindle, smartphone and PDA users can now use any of the e-books available on Feedbooks.

If you’d like to try an amateur book in Mobipocket format, I recommend reading “Mortal Ghost” from L. Lee Lowe.
With support for PDF, Mobipocket and especially epub, Feedbooks is now one of the easiest way to distribute your book.

Another feature based on our new Mobipocket support, is the Kindle download guide, that I highly recommend for any Kindle users (easiest way to get public domain books on your Kindle).

Upcoming features for our Mobipocket output:

• Covers (your library on the Cybook will look sexier once we support this)
• RSS/Newspaper support (Yes, this will basically be a free way to read blogs on your Kindle)

While we’re working on a mobile edition, Feedbooks is already available for Kindle users. Add a single file on your device, and you get a full library, on-demand public domain and creative commons books through the EVDO connection: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/kindle

Thanks to the “Give 1 Get 1” operation, people started receiving their brand new OLPC.
With its dual mode screen, the OLPC is a pretty good alternative to dedicated readers. Using the reflective sunlight-readable monochrome mode, you can easily read everywhere, and you can use the display for much longer than a normal laptop.

Using both the browser and PDF reader available on this device, you can easily download and read content from Feedbooks on your OLPC. It seems that the iLiad template works very well on the OLPC (Screenshot, thank you Paul Moews !), but as soon as I get some extra information, I’ll add an option for this device on our custom PDF page.

First of all, thank you David for the post about our plans for the future.
A help page for our NewsStand API is now available: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/newsstand_api

This API is what we’re currently using for our iLiad application.

Here’s a few examples of what you could do with this API:

• A downloader for your newspapers: auto-sync your files to your device
• Make a Flash widget, displaying your favorite books
• A book search engine and downloader for your favorite e-book reader
• A book recommendation system for your website
• A Facebook application
• etc…

We’ll continue to improve this API in the future. A few examples in C, C# and Ruby will be added in the upcoming weeks, showcasing how anyone can interact with our service.

Feedbooks launched its second file format supported: ePub. This new format is an initiative from IDPF, supported by companies such as Adobe, Amazon, Sony or Harper Collins, to create a standard for e-books. Feedbooks is the first website to massively support ePub, and the only service currently capable of generating ePub files on the fly.

In the near future, ePub support should be available on e-paper devices (the new Sony PRS-505 will support it), but also on smartphones, PDA, PMP etc… For additional details on ePub support, I recommend reading this post from Nick Bogaty on Teleread: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=7108

There’s a few ways you can already use ePub files, the most commonly used software is Adobe Digital Editions, a new application that might replace Adobe Acrobat Reader in the future.

For those of you looking for a mobile enabled software or using *nix based OS, FBReader can also read .epub files (no table of contents or CSS support yet). FBReader is available on the iLiad (Adam B. is working on a new port) and also on the Nokia N770/N800.

Finally, for those of you using Firefox, an extension allows ePub support directly in your browser: OpenBerg.

All of our public domain books are already available in ePub, and we’ll add ePub support for user generated contents and RSS feeds in the upcoming weeks.

We’ll keep working on improving and adding diversity to our technology, and our next “output” should be quite different, something for casual readers and not for e-paper devices.

Update: Added our “similar books” to the ePub files. We’ll add the ePub output for user generated content in the upcoming days. RSS to ePub support is the next milestone on our to-do list.