“Good design is invisible”---Peter Collingridge Lucky me! After just a bit of Twitter pestering and email harassment, I had the good fortune of virtually meeting and chatting with Peter Collingridge. Peter is the co-founder of Enhanced Editions---tailorers of feature-packed bookish iPhone apps. Peter's varied background includes 12 years experience in trade publishing, web, film, and digital marketing, working at Canongate Books, Screenbase Media and Apt Studio---all of which turned out to be quite handy experience for the Enhanced Editions venture. He's really smart and talented, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, as the...

Hugh McGuire, co-founder of Book Oven, is Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series. Book Oven is a Web space for making, collaborating on, and selling books. Hugh is also the founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project that creates free public domain audiobooks, now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, and several other Webby projects. McGuire photo by C.C. Chapman. KM: For those readers who don't know about it yet, can you give us the elevator speech version of what Book Oven is, and what it does? HM: We're calling it "cloud-publishing," an online...

Moderator's note on Hadrien Gardeur: Years ago I urged Project Gutenberg to come up with a truly slick program to download, manage and display Gutenberg books. "A book tuner," I called the idea with radio in mind. Hadrien at Feedbooks had similar dreams and acted on them. Hadrien's technology now helps various e-reading apps serve in effect as book tuners. These include such programs as Stanza (the iPhone reader shown at left) and FBReader (a possible candidate for official use on the next OLPC laptop). From within those apps, his technology lets you directly search and call up items from Feedbooks'...

Travis Alber, Kat Meyer's latest interviewee in her Digitizers series, is co-founder of BookGlutton. See more on Travis at the end. Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a computer and a book group---a Web-based reading platform that lets users discuss books from the inside. People around the world can connect and chat about books inside the books themselves. The Unbound Reader is built entirely on open Web standards, is free to use and allows both shared comments and real-time chatting on a chapter-by-chapter basis. BookGlutton's upload feature allows writers to share their own work. ...

Moderator's note: Alan Baxter's RealmShift, the SF-and-fantasy novel shown here, is one of the five-star-rated titles on Smashwords, a site for self-published writers and their fans. "Samuel Harrigan is a murderer," reads part of the plot descrption. "He used ancient blood magic to escape a deal with the Devil." Mark Coker, CEO and himself a self-pubbed novelist (photo), sees Smashwords as a chance to help the Baxters of this world to bypass publishing's gatekeepers and connect directly with readers. Down in Australia, Baxter is also working through his own small press, putting out a paper editon, as Mark would encourage him...

With the right e-book designer, your Kindle books can stand out from typical homebrewed jobs. Joshua Tallent, with eBook Architects and KindleFormatting.com, excels at making this happen. Kat Meyer interviewed him recently for her Digitizers series for TeleRead. Josh works not just with self-published writers but also with some major players in e-publishing such as LibreDigital. - D.R. KM: As a self-professed geek and a technophile, what about the Kindle and formatting ebooks for it do you most dig? JT: I love that the Kindle has the e-book buying experience wrapped up. Wireless book downloads and an easy-to-navigate store are two...

Liza Daly is a software engineer and president of Threepress Consulting Inc., developing applications for publishing and education. Recent work includes online products for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Oxford University Press, and O'Reilly Media.  She is a frequent writer and speaker on publishing technology issues and will be appearing on two panels at the O'Reilly Tools of Change 2009 conference. - K.M. KM: You are the developer of Bookworm. Can you easily sum up exactly what Bookworm is and what it does for us? (No pressure!) LD: As a project, Bookworm has two goals: ...

For her new TeleRead series, The Digitizers, Kat Meyer will talk to developers and designers who are forging the future of e-reading. Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle, the creators of the Stanza e-reader for iPhones and Touches, is her first interviewee. He handles Lexcycle's marketing, business development and strategic management. Kat is a book marketing professional who, in her spare time, blogs at The Bookish Dilettante. Welcome to the ranks of TeleContributors, Kat! KM: It seems that there is a certain amount of resistance among book publishers to going full speed ahead with e-books and other digital publishing options. While...