From the Feedbooks blog: For the last two months, we’ve been rolling out new features at an hectic pace: among the major ones, we fully redesigned our mobile website: touch friendly buttons for iOS and Android users CSS3 effects for a smoother experience fully localized in English and French new subdomains: m.feedbooks.com and m.fr.feedbooks.com fully featured, with the ability to browse facets like on the full website designed for speed (according to Google, we’re now faster than 75% of the Web on our main domain, and faster than 90% on our French subdomain) The most challenging part, was to design a system that would enable the same facet-based...

I’m a big fan of Feedbooks, both as an author and reader. Analytics, a newly added feature, proves that for a self-publisher this service is a great landing page to bring new readers – and an ever improving way to learn who they are. There are self-publishing sites which offer statistics of a book (f.e. Smashwords), but this one sets a completely new standard in how much info you can get from the facts accompanying book download. Five sections collect data by: :. downloads – number of downloads per day :. clients – which application or browser a book was accessed from :. formats...

Been following Hadren's tweets and I see that new analytics have been added for self-pub and public domain contributors on Feedbooks. The new analytics cover visulaization of monthly downloads and pie charts for formats and clients. Data is currently available for the last 15 days and older data will be migrated later. The analytics can be accessed on the upper right corner of the page of your book. Hadrien just sent me the screen shot above....

While many libraries, both public and academic, have implemented digital resources for their patrons in bits and pieces, I would argue that now is the time for libraries to work on putting together a comprehensive digital branch approach, offering millions of books, millions of newspapers and magazines, and open acess 24/7.   Given the facts of mass digitization of titles, free-to-use API's,  and social sharing of resources, the digital library branch is a reality that can be implemented.  Here's how.... Every library needs a place to start, so our digital branch will be created on a branch of the current library web...

There are numbers, and then there are numbers that mean something. Engadget has reported that 1.5 million ebooks were downloaded to the iPad in the first 28 days after its introduction. Wow! the press says. "It shows that the iBookstore will rule the world". Not. I picked up a Tweet from Hardrien Gardeur of Feedbooks, the site that specializes in public domain and original books from new authors. Get ready ..... here it comes .... Feedbooks distributed 2.6 million books during the same period!! Enough said. ...

I’ve already looked at the other two of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps. The third of these apps is Stanza, the EPUB reader from Lexcycle. Stanza has a lot in common with eReader. They’re both great apps for the iPhone, their reading models are similar, and Stanza even shares the ability to download and read eReader-format e-books—even those protected by DRM. And like eReader, Stanza’s future in the iPad era is uncertain. Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi said in a comment posted on Lexcycle’s forum on March 15th, “Currently, there is no work being done to customize...

Classics ($2.99) was a great-looking iPhone app for its day. An extension of the “appbook” concept in which programmers took public-domain books, built an app framework around them, and sold them in the app store (see my review of the appbook of A Princess of Mars from this post), it bundled a number of the most well-known public domain titles together and prettied them up for iPhone-screen reading. As an implementation of that idea, it worked all right. In fact, it looked nice enough that Apple featured it in a TV commercial—and subsequently proceeded to steal its...

The last few e-readers I’ve reviewed have been corporate-, or at least company-created—crafted by teams of developers, with a very smooth and polished look to them and, with the exception of eReader, all relative latecomers to the iPhone platform. It’s time to switch things up and take a look at a much older, largely solo effort: Zachary Bedell’s iPhone/iPad universal application BookShelf (v2.3.2968). If any app could be called the original iPhone e-book reader, BookShelf certainly qualifies. A predecessor, Books 1.0 (not written by Bedell), actually pre-dates Apple’s first iPhone software development kit—it was in one of the unofficial...

This article reminded me of the NPR piece on e-books we mentioned the other day. In that piece, various talking heads suggested that e-books were changing the way in which we read, and hence the way in which authors would have to write from now on. On O’Reilly Radar, Sarah Milstein talks about the similar assumption that Twitter, email, and other instant, small-chunk communication methods are something entirely new and different and changing the way in which we communicate. Milstein reminds us that in the 19th century, the mail was delivered in Victorian England as many as...

Wired Correspondent Erin Biba, daughter of TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba, saw the new “Sherlock Holmes” movie and went on to download public domain books from the Holmes series. Smart move. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Here are Holmes-related listings for free e-books at: --Feedbooks. The Kindle-friendly mobile site is here, its Holmes section here. New Nook owners can read the ePub versions of these books at Feedbooks and the other sites. --Google books. Works with the Nook and with the Sony Reader. --Manybooks.net. --Project Gutenberg. You can also find free and paid Holmes books...

FBReader 0.12 improved the presentation of the library and worked better with sites such as Feedbooks and Smashwords. Now comes word of FBReader 0.12.1, aimed at Linux and Windows users. In the developer’s words: Integration with LitRes.ru has been improved. A link for signing up has been added. A browsing by authors and by genres has been added. Scrolling preferences have been simplified. Tap scrolling has been fixed. Lithuanian localization has been added (thanks to Stanislovas Zacharovas). Open file dialog behaviour has been fixed in...

Ahead are the five most popular freebie originals at Feedbooks, right now---followed by some commentary. The "most popular" is from last week, not all-time totals. Black Silk, by Jan Gordon: “Victoria Hudson is 29 and lives in the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone else. She has two great loves in her life -- her cat, Mister, and reading books from her used bookstore. She doesn't see her life changing much in the future. She's stuck. Until one night when she's saved from probable danger by a mysterious stranger... A light romance with a paranormal twist.” ...