Liza Daly, ThreePress Consulting, discussed problems often found with current ebook production. Typical problems with current ebooks: plain text cover as opposed to photo; often have to step through blank pages, irrelevant copyright info, wrong ISBNs, table of contents with chapter numbers that are irrelevant content and readers hate this (if use samples then up to half of sample is often irrelevant pages), misspellings, bad line breaks (in some cases the pirated version is actually better than the professionally better one)....

The infamous Nook is Number Two on Time’s list of the year’s best gadgets. Number One is the Motorola Doid. Excerpt from the Nook write-up: “The screen is one you've seen before: the 6-in. E Ink screen in Barnes & Noble's new Nook e-reader is the same one in Amazon's Kindle 2. It's the stuff around and behind the screen that makes the Nook cool. Like that color touchscreen right below it, adding some flair and speed to go with the poky, drab E Ink display." Speaking of the Nook, software engineer Liza Daly has found...

Yep, video books exist with the proprietary Vook approach. But how about ePub books with videos embedded? Liza Daly, creator of Bookworm, had just shared some tips (via Reading 2.0 list)....

Liza Daly, a TeleRead contributor, has compiled a list of DRM free publishers such as O’Reilly and Drollerie. Help out “Liza’s List,” as I’ll call it---a kind of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval in the technical sense. Send her names to add. The definition of DRMfree can be tricky. I’d hope that little Twilight Times Books in Kingsport, Tennessee, the publisher of my novel, could go on the list. At the same time, yes, like certain other anti-DRM houses, Twilight sells through outlets that taint all books with “protection.” Twilight has no choice. Publishing is a brutal...

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...

Flexibility helps keep us healthy. We can better enjoy physical activity which, in turn, motivates us to exercise. Keep on stretchin’! Likewise, a flexible digital publication format is much better for the industry—and for readers—than a rigid, limited one. To be more precise, a flexible format is more likely to be embraced, due to business pressures. The IDPF’s new open standard e-book format, ePUB, is rapidly proving its flexibility. And ePUB’s flexibility is, of course, intentional by design. A little history of ePUB's predecessor as a consumer standard Five years, two months and eight days ago, I published the reviewed eBookWeb article: “OEBPS: The Universal...

"Three miles of books"---that's the caption on a Flickr photo of a Blackwell's bookstore. Someday could the books all be online? Imagine working on your thesis at the beach. Just how much progress are academic publishers and university libraries making?  Here in the States, at least, many trade publishers are buzzing about the Kindle. Academic publishers, however, along with their library customers, are not quite as excited about Kindle-style e-books yet despite growing interest in digital works. Leaders beyond the Kindle realm But in many ways the academic houses been the real leaders in delivering...

Moderator: Liza Daly, our newest contributor, runs threepress.org, an open source project. See her bio at the end. Welcome, Liza! - D.R. "Do one thing, and do it well" is the core of the Unix Philosophy. Unix is the third major flavor of operating system besides Windows and Mac OS (actually a certain-flavored Unix), and it's the platform that serves most of the content on the Internet. Whether you are aware of Unix or not, its software development ideology has had pervasive influence in making the Internet an open platform not dominated by any one corporate interest. ...