And speaking of listening, Travis will also be part of a free Webinar “Enhanced Ebooks and the Social Web” which will be webcast live on Wednesday, August 18 at 1pm EDT. You can find more information here. Richard Nash, founder of Cursor, will also be on the panel, and Richard always livens things up!

Great news! BookGlutton has been named a Webby Award Honoree in the Community Category. They tell us out of a whopping 10,000 entries submitted to the 14th Annual Webby Awards, less than 15% are awarded the status of Official Honoree. Entries came from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. It’s a big deal, and we’re humbled by it. Moreover, there are only two book sites listed this year – our partner Goodreads is the only other one we found. Represent!

This isn’t the first time BG has gotten a little Webby Love. In 2008 we were a bona fide finalist in the same Category (Community), against some of the heavyweights that are up there again: Flickr and COLOURlovers. We wrote about it here and here.

What else can we say, except THANK YOU! to our USERS and the folks at the WEBBYS.

Couldn’t happen to nicer people.

* -Maintain your publisher profile page
* -Interact directly with your readers and customers
* -Maintain a catalog of your EPUB titles
* -Instantly publish on a per-title basis
* -Control whether your files may be downloaded or not
* -Set your own prices on titles, changing them at any time
* -See real-time sales reports across all titles
* -Receive notifications whenever a title is sold

Read an E-Book Week is gearing up for the 2010 event – March 7 – 13th. An impressive list of participants includes Kobo, PocketBook E-Reader and BookGlutton. Also joining in the celebration of e-books is Smashwords, as well as Badosa.com, with a selection of e-books in Spanish, Catalan, English and French.

The Wright State University Libraries of Ohio will also recognize the week. They have created a special template that librarians can download from the Read an E-Book Week website to produce lapel buttons for library staff.

This year a section containing resource articles has been added to the site. The articles cover a range of topics, including an interview with Cory Doctorow and a review of several e-book devices. More articles will be added in the near future.

If you want to join a book club but can’t seem to find one, or if you’re in one and can’t seem to agree on what to read, there’s a Web site you may want to try.

BookGlutton.com is a site where anyone with a computer and Internet access can read and discuss a variety of books. Users have access to BG’s “Unbound Reader,” which displays books with two side panels for discussion. You can chat with other users about the book in real time via the “Talk Panel.” If you want to add a comment after the initial conversation you can use the “Mark Panel.” Last October, BookGlutton made a deal with technology publisher O’Reilly Media, adding more than 500 titles to its collection. That’s in addition to material from Random House, Feedbooks.com, and public domain books.

BookGlutton.com, an online reading website that integrates community with books, has launched an online bookstore featuring technology publisher O’Reilly Media’s newest titles. Beginning today, visitors to the site will be able to browse over 500 O’Reilly titles, read them online together, and share annotations about them.

The addition of an e-commerce platform expands BookGlutton’s catalog beyond public domain titles. “Since launch we’ve steadily worked on building out an e-commerce system that integrates with our social network.” said co-founder and CTO Aaron Miller. “We’ve also signed deals with a number of small publishing houses, and we’ll be rolling out new books from them over the coming months.” Previously, BookGlutton has partnered with other content providers like Random House and Feedbooks.com for free and promotional material.

To see the new BookGlutton store click on the “Books” link on BookGlutton.com. Genres include short fiction, technology, and science fiction, among others.

BookGlutton.com offers an online-only reading experience. Anyone can preview a sample section of a book and use the community features inside, which include chatting with others inside the chapter of the book or attaching margin notes to any paragraph. To access the whole book, users click a buy button embedded inside the text. “This creates
an interesting opportunity for people to discuss books – people who have bought the whole book and people who are reading a sample passage can communicate together in that preview section – word of mouth promotion can take place inside the book itself,” said Travis Alber, BookGlutton’s president.

“Our users are constantly requesting new material, so we’re always looking for new publishing partners,” said Miller. He added that BookGlutton is standards-based, web-based, DRM-free, and uses the new EPUB digital book format that the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Lexcycle’s Stanza platforms use.

I wanted to drop you a quick note – as of today we’ve rewritten and
re-released BookGlutton’s EPUB converter as a paid service. Emphasis
now is on providing EPUBs that validate, for maximum compatibility,
and also on the EPUB authoring process – providing feedback along the
way so that EPUBs can be created with common tools used in web design.

People who know HTML can now, fairly easily, make a valid EPUB after
authoring some source HTML using simple web tools like Firefox and
Dreamweaver. Our graphic designer has been using it, so it’s not too
technical for those who follow the directions.

Short Explanation:
http://blog.bookglutton.com/?p=599

Youtube Walkthru:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us_bgqe-VeE

Converter Address:
http://www.bookglutton.com/api/convert.html
(also in the BookGlutton.com footer)

The Converter supports images, external stylesheets, nested tables of
contents, and Dublin Core metadata. The cost of downloading the
resulting EPUB is $5, but the tool itself and the feedback process can
be used for free.

This tool is now geared more toward publishers that want an affordable
way to generate production-ready EPUBs, but it’s also still a great
tool for anyone who distributes EPUBs and wants to make sure they’ll
work in different reading systems.

And if there can be instant chat, then so much the better.

Well, even if the standards group isn’t paying sufficient attention to the importance of interactivity, others are starting to—notably, National Public Radio.

NPR’s Laura Sydell interviewed Travis Alber of BookGlutton. An excerpt from the text version:

Reading a book evokes solitary images of lying in bed late at night or sitting beneath a beach umbrella lost in a fantasy. But BookGllutton,, a Web site that permits readers to chat about books as they read, may be transforming a lone activity into a communal one.

The site was born out of co-founder Travis Alber’s desire to talk about books with friends who had moved away. Her solution? A Web site that allows multiple users to write in the margins of an online book.

"You can chat inside any chapter of the book, or you can click on any paragraph and attach a comment to it, and someone else can come past that point in the book later and respond," she says.

The site has been getting a lot of interest from teachers, including New York University English professor Jessamyn Hatcher, who asked her class to use BookGlutton to read King Lear...

BookGlutton is still a fairly small site, with about 1,500 public domain books and 120,000 readers a month. But the site’s founders are already having conversations with publishers that would expand their online library to include newly released books.

Congrats, Travis, on the well-deserved fame. And don’t forget that we knew you way back when.

Related: BookGlutton teams with Random House for promotion, in Publisher’s Weekly, as well as Kat Meyer’s interview with Travis.

The Random House Publishing Group has joined forces with the social reading platform BookGlutton to offer a chapter giveaway promotion of Sarah Dunant’s forthcoming novel SACRED HEARTS, on sale July 14.
Beginning today, the Random House imprint will make the first four chapters of SACRED HEARTS available to BookGlutton.com users. Special features will include an essay by the author and notes sprinkled throughout the pages about her extensive research for the book. Sarah Dunant will also log on to the site and answer questions from readers.

“We’re intrigued by the concept of social reading and want to give online book clubs the unique experience of reading and discussing our books in real-time.” said Avideh Bashirrad, Director of Marketing for the Random House imprint.

“We’re excited to offer Sarah Dunant fans a way to connect through her work. Books have always been a social experience. People love to talk about what they’re reading and BookGlutton lets them point to what they like inside a book just as they would in person” said Travis Alber, President of BookGlutton.

This promotion will be extended through the fall and will include more titles from the Random House Publishing Group.
Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a web-based reading platform that enables people to connect and chat about books, inside the books. 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. http://www.bookglutton.com

The app has one-touch highlighting, which is easier than on the Kindle because the G1 has a touch screen, and bookmarking and computer assisted speech. Currently, of course, its on the G1, but it will run on all phones equipped with Android.

I don’t have a G1 so I can’t check it out. If any of our readers do have the phone (I know Travis Alber of BookGlutton has one) please leave a comment here, or if you’d like to do a full review get in touch with me about publishing it.

They have started a new service, currently Twitter based, which will build a catalog of ebooks. Check out their epubcatalog info and here’s an excerpt from their write up:

How do I get started?

It’s very easy if you’re a member of Twitter. We plan to support many services in the long run, but for now, you’ll need a Twitter account. With your Twitter account, follow @epubcatalog. Once you’re a follower, you can tell epubcatalog about books you find on the Web. The only format supported for books is EPUB. Support for catalogs is planned through the OPDS recommendation.

How do I add books?

To let epubcatalog know about links to books, the books must be on the Web and publicly accessible. To get links, often you can right click on them in a Web page and select “Copy link” or “Copy URL.” Then simply Direct Message (DM) the URL, prefixed by a plus sign (+). It will be added to the epubcatalog.org catalog as soon as your message is processed. Normally, it happens in a matter of seconds, but it can take several minutes to an hour depending on Twitter network congestion.

A command to add a book looks like this:
+ http://catalog.feedbooks.com/books/1001.epub

The space between the plus and the URL is required. You don’t need to type in the title or author, these will be pulled from the EPUB file.

How can I see books I’ve added or books other people added?

The epubcatalog Twitter stream will announce new additions as they’re processed. Since you’ve followed epubcatalog at this point, you’ll see everything new as it comes in, including your own adds (although to protect privacy, epubcatalog won’t tell anyone who posted the items). It may take a few minutes for your additions to appear. Another way to see new additions is to simply subscribe to the epubcatalog.org Atom feed. This is a catalog feed that you can subscribe to with Google Reader, most Web browsers, and a lot of other tools out there.

The truth is the Web has evolved its own set of content controls, and a new approach to the problem is in order. To that end we’ve written up a short document on how BookGlutton approaches content protection. It hinges on two core ideas: 1.) in a networked society most people are interested in links – not downloads, and 2.) the Web runs on interoperability. BookGlutton didn’t come up with these things; they’re in the underlying structure of the Web.

Here’s a PDF for older browsers.

———-

Addendum
———-
Since the original intent here was misunderstood, I thought I’d add a few notes for clarification. The article is intended, ultimately, to benefit all of us as readers of digital text, by easing some of the fears about putting content online. Unfortunately, the responses to the article here and elsewhere, are doing a lot to perpetuate these fears. The point being made is not that unencrypted content in a browser cannot be copied, it is that is is much safer there than out in the wild, as files, even encrypted files. DRM and encryption are not reliable means of deterring content theft. Providing good content at reasonable prices, through familiar distribution channels (the Web), is the best approach. We want publishers to realize this as much as anyone else.

I hope you guys are doing well! I wanted to give you a heads up that
BookGlutton is releasing a widgetized version of our social reading
platform today. This is a leap for the publishing industry – now
people can share books and actually chat cross-domain inside them.
We’re hoping a viral, social approach to reading, soon to be coupled
with the ability to sell content, will give publishers significantly
better online distribution.