Through these new features, our goal is to offer a new approach to our catalog. Editorial reviews for example, are a good fit for users who’d like to keep up with the latest news, while our exclusive interviews provide insights into the author’s mind.

Since March we’ve published three interviews in English (and more than a dozen in French), with British authors Peter Doggett and David Whitehouse, and best-selling author Harlan Coben.

Coben (c) Miriam Berkley	Peter Doggett	David Whitehouse

Despite the lack of a Pullitzer Prize for Fiction this year, you can find the other nominees such as the Pulitzer Prize for History, Malcolm X by Manning Marable, and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Autobiography, George F. Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis.

We are currently working on listing more awards such as the Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In Germany, you can find the latest winners of the Leipziger Buchmesse, the Kleist-Preis and past winners of the Deutscher Buchpreis.

Would you like to know what the press and blogs thought about a book before you buy it ? Every day, we follow the latest articles and reviews from major American, British and German newspapers such as The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel but also specialized blogs such as Dear Author, Kirkus Reviews and Litheart.de, and we select the best articles, whether they’re negative or positive.

A new block on our homepage labeled « Discover » for our English-speaking readers, provides a list of links to all of these new features.

But you’ll also notice these new features while browsing our store, or on the details page of a book (for example The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka).

We hope that you’ll enjoy these new features and that they will help you find exciting new books to read !

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.

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:

• the license clearly displayed on our full website (link + image) and on our mobile website
• human-readable and machine-readable metadata in our OPDS catalog
• machine-readable metadata in our ebooks

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:

• touch friendly buttons for iOS and Android users
• CSS3 effects for a smoother experience
• fully localized in English and French
• new subdomains: m.feedbooks.com and m.fr.feedbooks.com
• fully featured, with the ability to browse facets like on the full website
• designed for speed (according to Google, we’re now faster than 75% of the Web on our main domain, and faster than 90% on our French subdomain)

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:

• track downloads for the last 30 days
• pie chart for formats and clients
• full list of users with the book in their favorites or bookshelf

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.

These last few months, the OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) Working Group has made a tremendous job and we’re getting close to the point where we’ll have a first version of a stable specification.

For those of you who are not familiar with OPDS and the BookServer ecosystem:

The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.

Feedbooks contributed to this effort and continues to maintain an OPDS catalog following the recent developments on the specification.

While the spec isn’t fully ready yet, we already have a vibrant ecosystem of developers, softwares and services based on our OPDS. The purpose of this post is to give a quick overview of the ecosystem but keep in mind that things are still moving very fast.

Social Networks

• BookGlutton: BookGlutton is an online bookstore and community for reading groups. You can search and import public domain books from Feedbooks through our OPDS feed.
• Goodreads: Most popular social network for book lovers. Goodreads use our OPDS catalog to link back to Feedbooks and offer multi-format downloads of some of our free e-books.
• Librarything: Another very popular social network for book lovers with a clear focus on building a library. Provide links to Feedbooks on public domain books.

Search Engines

• Inkmesh: Inkmesh is a new search engine that makes it easier to find ebooks from across the web. Inkmesh uses the OPDS feeds from Feedbooks & The Internet Archive to index their ebook catalogs and make them available for searching and browsing on Inkmesh.com.

Reading Systems

• Aldiko (Android): Aldiko is the most popular e-book reader on Android and provides support for both EPUB and OPDS. Probably the best OPDS client at this point too.
• Bookshelf (iOS):  A multi-format e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• EPUBReader (Firefox): An EPUB reader and OPDS for Firefox. Browse, download and read EPUB books from your browser.
• FBReader (Multiple Platforms): An open source, multi-format and multi-platform e-book reader.
• Get Books Activity (OLPC XO): An activity for the XO by the One Laptop Per Children Foundation. Can search and download books on Feedbooks.
• Ibis Reader (HTML5): Ibis reader is the first HTML5 e-book reader. It provides a seamless reading experience both online and offline on modern smartphones and supports both EPUB and OPDS.
• Lovely Reader (Web/Flash): In early beta, but Lovely Reader can parse OPDS feeds and display EPUB files in a Flash widget.
• Lucidor (Multiple Platforms):  An e-book reader that supports both EPUB and OPDS.
• Ouiivo Reader (iOS): An EPUB reader and OPDS client for iOS devices.
• QuickReader (iOS): Speed reading application for iOS devices.
• Stanza (iOS): The most popular iPhone e-book reader. First reading system that supported OPDS.
• Wordoholic Reader (Android):  An EPUB reader and OPDS client for Android.

I’m most likely missing a few of them but it’s very exciting to see that some of the most popular social networks, search engines and reading systems already support OPDS.

Update: Added BookGlutton and Lovely Reader.

Update 2: Added Ouiivo and QuickReader.

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