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¿Qué es Bookworm?
Bookworm is now available in Spanish! I’m thrilled to finally have this up as Spanish was one of the languages I was most interested in adding.
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Major Bookworm release
Details over at O’Reilly Labs: New features and bug fixes for Bookworm. Most of these are (by design) internal and not user-facing, but at least two are notable and possibly quite fun. Feedbooks...
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Bookworm now supports inline video
This is an experimental new feature but of course a very cool one: Bookworm can now display and play ePub books with embedded video. Whether the video will actually play depends on the epub file’s...
View ArticleUsing Flash video in ePub
Since Bookworm has support for video you may want to experiment with creating your own video ebooks. Here’s how to do it and still create a valid XHTML 1.1/ePub. Assuming you have a Flash movie called...
View ArticleBookworm API
We’ve been quiet about it, but Bookworm has had an API now for some time, which developers can use to write library management clients or external reading systems. If users trust your site, you can ask...
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How big is the average ePub book?
One of the great things about sitting on 30,000+ ePub books (as uploaded to Bookworm) is the ability to look at what’s happening in real-world ebook production. Today I’m examining file size, which is...
View ArticleWhat’s in an identifier?
ePub books are supposed to have a unique identifier: the Dublin Core identifier found in the OPF file. Unfortunately, the ePub spec doesn’t have any mechanism to enforce the uniqueness of the ID, so we...
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Vertical text in ePub/CSS: not there yet
Languages aren’t just written right-to-left or left-to-right, of course. They can also be written top-to-bottom, as in Chinese. How can you indicate that a block of text should be rendered vertically...
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Languages in real-world ePubs
We were curious about the distribution of languages for ePubs on Bookworm (Ibis Reader doesn’t yet have enough titles to be representative yet.) The following information is derived from the...
View ArticleBookworm: an online ePub reader
To coincide with the first launch of ePub books by a major publisher, I’m happy to announce the open beta of Bookworm, a web-based reader for the ePub ebook format. Unlike most other ePub readers,...
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Bookworm mobile screenshots / OSCON
I’ll be in Portland, OR this weekend for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, talking with people about future directions for Bookworm and other threepress projects. If you’ll be there and would like...
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Bookworm feature updates: sorting and pagination
It is now possible to re-sort books in your library by title, first author or creation date, and to re-order those in ascending or descending order: If the number of books in your library exceeds 20,...
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Recent posts to the O’Reilly TOC blog
On the O’Reilly Tools of Change blog recently: Processing the deep backlist at the New York Times, a report from OSCON Optimizing web content for the Kindle, using Bookworm screenshots The latter is...
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Bookworm feature update: remember where I left off
Bookworm will now remember and display the last-read chapter of each book, allowing you to jump right to where you finished reading. This feature applies to both the web and mobile versions of the...
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Bookworm library integration with Google Books Search
On September 22nd Google Books announced its expanded Google Book Search API, which includes the ability to preview and search Google Books content from other web sites. Bookworm now has integration...
View ArticleHow good are your ePubs?
Most of my work in maintaining the Bookworm ePub reader is keeping up with all of the variations of the format that people try to upload. There are some consistent problems that I’m seeing “out in...
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New release of Bookworm: improved user experience and public content
Bookworm’s public home page (the one you see if you’re not logged in) has a new look. This is just one of many changes in the largest update since the site launched in July 2008. Much more public...
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Bookworm now has full-text search and DTBook support
ePubs added to Bookworm are now fully searchable. When you add a book to your library, its text is automatically scanned and indexed in the correct language. You can search across all of your books...
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Bookworm in NISO Information Standards Quarterly
I was very pleased to be able to write an article for the Fall 2008 issue of NISO ISQ (volume 20, no. 4). The full text of the article is only available to NISO members, but here’s a quick excerpt:...
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