The BookGlutton people are really on a roll. As Roger Spergerg said in an email to me: The BookGlutton folks are just charging ahead madly! Wonderful! 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...

It takes about seven minutes into any conversation with a publisher before the DRM questions come up. Most publishers are very interested in hearing about new technologies and surprisingly familiar with new developments. But many are paralyzed by the DRM question and don't have an informed corporate strategy to deal with it, let alone a good way to integrate new technology. Some ask to turn each page into an image; others want to disable right-clicking and other essential browser features. Neither one of these is a good solution. The truth is the Web has evolved its own set of content controls,...

The BookGlutton people are consistently innovative.  Now we have a new book reading method from them.  Here’s an excerpt from their email, and then watch the video to see exactly how it works. 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. ...

Having met the Gluttoneers at the O'Reilly conference, I really had to smile when I saw their good fortune. I'm sure they won't mind my reprinting this from their blog: The May/June issue of Writer’s Digest has honored us in its new List of 101 Best Websites for Writers! This is great news - last year there were over 2100 entries to consider, so we know we’re in good company. BookGlutton is listed in the writing community section. The article isn’t currently online, but you can find it by heading to your nearest local bookstore and grabbing a copy. Heck,...

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. ...

Check out our long post on the above if you haven't seen it already. Exhibit One is Kat Meyer, the Q&A whiz and TeleBlog regular, who is a professional book marketer. Kat has more than 1,500 followers on Twitter, not a bad start for someone building a new business. Kat's latest interview, by the way, is with Travis Albers of Book Glutton. The BG interview will run later today or tomorrow....

TeleRead's Twitter Champ just might be Kat Meyer, in Tucson, Arizona, who's done those incisive Q&A's with Smashwords' Mark Coker, Stanza's Neelan Choksi and others. Kat has pumped out some 5,000 Twitter updates. She subscribes to messages from more than 1,000 fellow users and has attracted more than 1,500 "followers." I also track Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, now up to 54,807 followers, still a fraction of Barack Obama's 379,716 before the First Keyboarder apparently abandoned Twitter for more conventional media. Unlike Obama, Kat can't hold White House news conferences. Thanks to Twitter, however, more people...

From BookGlutton's Travis Alber. I can't say it any better than the email she sent me: BookGlutton has just pushed some major updates, some of which I think you might be interested in. BookGlutton now supports non-DRMed ePub uploads. We've released a suite of new upload features, including direct URL imports for HTML and ePub files, as well as the ability to upload ePubs from your desktop. We've also released private sharing - something we've been working on for quite some time. Now users can upload their private work and invite others to share it, without having it appear in the catalog. Features like this are great for...

DRM is probably E-Book Annoyance Number One for our savvy TeleBlog readers. They understand that if a publisher, store or tech company goes out of business, you eventually may not be able to access a DRMed book. You really don't own DRM-blighted titles for real. You're just leasing them. So who are the heroes in the anti-DRM struggle? Among the stars, as I see it, are Steve and Scott Pendergrast, the owners of Fictionwise, who offer DRM only because publishers insist on it. They really prefer that books appear in a bunch of formats...

How easy is it to produce an ePub book---either your own or a public domain work---and spread it around the globe? This topic is more than just grist for a post. I wanted to give the planet a quick preview of The Solomon Scandals in the standard IDPF format. And, if, along the way, people could also download Mobipocket and PDF versions of the three-chapter sample, not just ePub, then so much the better. Easy to learn Now, having tried the publishing tool at Feedbooks, I can say that it's as easy to master as I'd hoped---at least if...

After writing the post below I got to thinking about the sentence I used: ... volunteer work like this should be recognized every once in a while. It is really incredible how the e-book community is supported by a cadre of volunteers who seem to want to do nothing but make the reading world better. Some of these sites may be looking for investors or hope to turn into a business some day, but as of today they are free to the public. Here are a few that come to mind quickly. I apologize to those I...

The iPhone-friendly Stanza e-reader keeps on winning new friends. Book Glutton, known for its shared annotations on its Web site, is the latest publisher to partner with Lexcycle, Stanza's developer. Image is of a BG book seen in Stanza, and other pictures are here. Reminder: The ePub standard is Stanza's flagship format and can be read by other programs. But partner publishers are actually making their content downloadable from within Stanza---an important step toward easy-to-use Kindle alternatives. That is why I keep mentioning Stanza and will do the same for similarly useful products, especially those without DRM. BookGlutton...