“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...

Sad news from Quartet. In a blog post Kat Meyer announced that they will be disbanding. Here it is: For a variety of reasons large and small, Quartet Press has decided to discontinue operations. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, a hard-working team, and the support of the community, things just don’t work out. This is one of those times. It’s disappointing to all of us, but it’s reality and we will all move on. We are truly grateful to all of you who have wished us well.Your support and enthusiasm for our venture was humbling, and we hope...

Hundreds of galleys go out just to promote a typical new book from a large publisher. Bestsellers may require thousands. And expenses can add up. What’s more, consider the burden on small houses. So I was happy to see---buried in a content-related announcement from Sony---word of an alliance with a little company called NetGalley. Book reviewers with Sony Readers will be able to download Reader-friendly PDFs from NetGalley. DRM will be an option for NetGalley’s publisher clients. Because advance reading copies often reach reviewers months ahead of publication, publishers are often extra-security-minded. In time...

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...

Congrats to TeleRead contributor Kat Meyer and other e-savvy founders of Quartet Press. A news release follows. Notice how Quartet is avoiding DRM? A lesson for big publishers? Expect more DRM-hating book people to start houses with a built-in advantage---no reader-hostile “protection.” – D.R. Quartet Press announces it is open for submissions. Quartet was founded on shared goal of the principles to create a high-quality, community-centric, and reader- and author-friendly digital publishing house. First titles will be available in Fall 2009. PASADENA, California. June 25, 2009 — Quartet Press–a fledgling digital publisher formed recently by Kassia Krozser...

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'...

Kat Meyer, Q&A ace of Digitizers fame, has cooked up a list of independent book review blogs, such as Maud Newton's, and you can even get a widget. Below is how the widget  looks with a little tweaking (normally it's probably a narrow column). Congrats, Kat! Via your widget, we've added a review aggregator page to TeleRead. .fc__widget_box { width: 160px; text-align: left !important; border: solid #a0a0a0 1px !important; font-family: arial, verdana, helvetica !important; overflow: hidden !important; }.fc__title_box { background: #6070d0 url('http://images.feedcluster.com/images/vgradientblue16.png') repeat-x !important; font-size: 9pt !important; font-weight: bold !important; text-align: center !important; padding: 4px !important; }.fc__title_link { color:...

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...

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...

TeleBlog contributor Kat Meyer---see her interviews with Stanza COO Neelan Choksi and Bookworm ceator Liza Daly---cleverly captured the essence of the Tools of Change Conference on book technology. Details here. ...