I’ve been using the iBooks app quite a bit on my iPad, and I’ve long hoped for an update which will wipe out that annoying faux-book border around the pages. So I investigated it, and was thrilled to find an easy way to modify iBooks to use a clean white (or sepia) page with no pseudo book border around it. I’m calling this the “clean” theme, although it really just cleans up the two existing themes in iBooks – “default” and “sepia.” Download it here: https://github.com/Vaporbook/iBooks-Theme-Clean-Up You’ll need the OS X desktop application called iPhone Explorer to...

Being at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference made me wonder even more what Amazon's really up to. One the one hand, there's the notion that all of this lock-in is going to eventually lead to a revolutionary magnanimity that will undo some of the consumer griefs and wrongs done to publishers and retailers. And that Amazon will ultimately adopt ePub when the format is more mature and other threats have been eliminated. This seems like wishful thinking. It's more likely that the long play of Amazon has no ultimate need for consumer formats, but instead recognizes something that...

It will be interesting to see how e-book reading applications evolve this year. They continue to move toward Web technologies for their rendering and connectivity, and the EPUB format continues to gravitate with them. The Web of Books First, publishers are moving books to the web, in EPUB format. Some publishers are selling them, others are giving them away. Some of the same players who fought Google over book scanning and whom Amazon wrangled over Search Inside are leaning toward more experimental approaches now. EPUB has become the vehicle for those approaches. Alongside this, the number of book-related social networks has multiplied exponentially....

Andrew Savikas over at the TOC blog has been lamenting the recent AAP letter to the IDPF, and rightly so. Publishers need to stop thinking of digital books as low-fidelity copies of print originals, and they need to stop thinking about reading as an act of solitude. Reading, whether done in solitude or with a group, always ultimately connects us to the larger world, and the ways we make that connection are changing quickly. Savikas also points out the lack, in the ePub specifications, of frameworks for social connection, and I think this hits on a bigger issue, which is...

I'm happy to announce the first tool in our Web API, the BookGlutton ePub Converter. It's a simple way to create the IDPF's open e-book format, ePub, from a basic HTML file. The tool can be used from anyplace on the Web, in back end scripts or front end pages, but the curious can play with it on our site, where we've put up some documentation and a test form. I've voiced concerns about the ePub format before, but I've been working with it for over a year and want to make it more accessible to independent, open-source Web developers...

Between Google and Amazon, a lot of books are going on-line every day, and while these two are not the only companies doing it, they're the biggest and the most aggressive. While many smaller outfits expect people to download a book and read it on the platform of their choice, both Amazon and Google fully expect you to read the books from the Amazon.com or Google.com domains, preferably on their Web sites. Google Booksearch and Amazon Online Reader are both fully functional web-based reading systems which allow you to read paginated text, annotate, communicate with other readers, bookmark and share, all...

Tim O'Reilly is a publisher and web entrepreneur who has proved himself in both worlds, and I always admire his dead-on observations of Web technology and its possibilities for entrepreneurship. Before this last Web 2.0 Expo, he did some nice checks and balances on the hype. It's always bittersweet to have someone reminding us that we have a long way to go. As an entrepreneur, this is the constant joy and lament. In the interest of getting past both hype and disdain, we should all take a minute to speculate about what Web 2.0 means for books. Some might...

Reminder: The TeleBlog offers many viewpoints, and I'm delighted to see Aaron not pulling any punches even if I disagree with him in places. - D.R. Recent posts and comments have carefully pointed out that what we call .epub is actually three separate specifications which evolved from the OEBPS, or OEB for short. These three specs are OPS, OPF, and OCF . . . Or is that OCS? What do each of those stand for again? The Web grew because smart people who were smart enough to understand SGML were also smart enough to know it was too complicated. What we...

Moderator: Aaron Miller is CTO of BookGlutton.com, a Web-based community for e-book readers. He has 11 years of experience building Web sites for startups and established clients, including WellsFargo.com, Playstation.com, and Macys.com. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Aaron, and keep the ePub criticism coming! Let's hope that the IDPF will listen to all sides. Also see Tamas Simon's essay. - D.R. Links, bookmarks and annotations all depend on one important thing: the ability to uniquely identify a specific passage or point in a book. And it's easy with paper. We put daggers and numbers where our notes belong....