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).

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 ePub-related horrors ranging from useless images of HTML anchors to hanging during the display of “multiple commercial, valid, battle-tested ePubs” and problems with font-face changes and Arabic and Chinese.

Yep, I’m thinking the obvious. In the Credibility Department, Liza certainly could have saved Time. Meanwhile check out her Nook unboxing photos.

Detail: As one smart-alec has pointed out, maybe the Number Two ranking is wrong for another reason: The Nook isn’t really being released in large numbers until 2010.

Liza Daly, creator of Bookworm, had just shared some tips (via Reading 2.0 list).

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 business.

Another issue is whether social DRMed books, a compromise approach, would qualify as DRMfree. Social DRM means embedding a buyer’s name into a book to discourage copying. It is not a perfect system, given the privacy risks. But it is rather different from traditional DRM, which erects barriers against copying, even the legitimate private kind for backup purposes and the like.

However Liza treats social DRM, I hope that her list can help, and that a publication like Consumer Reports will pick up her work, refine it and circulate it widely, just as she has openly built on the efforts of others. If you want books you can truly own, then think about buying from the fiction and nonfiction names on Liza’s list, especially if the titles are in ePub format, which I suspect virtually all of them are, at least as an option.

This is not just a consumer issue, by the way. It is also one for writers. I applaud Carina Press, a new imprint from Harlequin, for promising writers not to insist on DRM—a technology that diminishes the literary value of books by linking them to the survival of individual publishers and specific technologies. I want books to be a permanent medium. DRM—beyond the penalties it imposes readers, especially the disabled—is the enemy of that.

My other proposed addition, besides Twilight Times: Baen, which for years has shunned “protection” and probably has never published a DRMed book.

(Via @jafurtado.)

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:

• Provide a place for users to store ePub-format books, read them online and download them to other devices.  iPhone users can transfer their books directly to Stanza’s software for the iPhone, for example.
• Demonstrate advanced features of the ePub format itself. When I launched Bookworm in July 2008, there were no other readers that fully supported e-book stylesheets,

And I wanted to show off some of the design possibilities available in electronic books.

KM: As a developer, you are committed to utilizing OpenSource software. Why?

LD: Although I’ve been involved in digital publishing since 2004, my background is really in general Web development.  I’ve been writing Web applications since 1995—about as far back as the industry goes—and the history of the Web as a whole has always been a push-pull between open source and commercial interests.

The real genius of open source licensing is that it explicitly allows for commercial use.  In some strict licenses, commercial users are required to themselves redistribute their source code openly, but other licenses place virtually no limitations on use (this is true of Bookworm’s license, for example).

The dirty secret of software development is that is that code, by itself, has very little value.  Most of it is easily recreated.  There are exceptional cases where brilliant insight and R&D produce code that is truly valuable in and of itself, but that’s rare.  For every expensive commercial software product there’s at least one, if not many, open source alternatives.  The main difference tends to be better documentation, reliable support, and more polish.

Instead, code is valuable when it serves a specific business need. That almost always means custom work.  All of my client work uses open source tools to produce a commercial product, and most of those products have direct revenue streams associated with them, either through subscriptions or through e-commerce.

KM: You’re also an advocate of the ePub e-book standard. Why?

Standards are why everyone uses the Web now instead of AOL.  If there’s a common language of information exchange—for example, HTML—then many different players can compete in the same space. Standards level the playing field between big commercial interests and smaller upstarts.  This leads directly to more innovation and more consumer choice.

As a developer, standards mean I can jump right in and build something interesting rather than having to begin from scratch.  I got started with e-books because I wanted to write some software that could take content in one format and automatically export to multiple other formats. I stumbled on ePub, read the spec, and in just a few days I had working code.  The fact that ePub reuses other standards meant that many of the tools I needed to build my specific application already existed.  Without ePub as a standard, I might’ve still been wondering how to format a paragraph in the time it took to build a whole e-book platform.

KM: Do the publishers with whom you are working share your concerns about e-book standards?  Is it hard to convey to publishers the importance of the issues surrounding e-books and standardized formats?

LD: With larger publishers, by the time they come to me they’re already on board.  E-books and digital publishing in general have a lot to offer to smaller publishers too, but they’ve been harder to reach.  Frankly, some publishing vendors employ predatory pricing, and that’s set expectations of cost well above the reality.  By using open source and open standards, employing very small but talented teams and setting modest goals, small publishers could be innovating online for the cost of a booth at a trade show.

A key advantage that niche publishers have is that obscurity is more dangerous for them than piracy.  They’re in the best place possible to meet the increasing reader demand for DRM-free content.

KM: Do you think all books make sense as e-books? Do you think any genres or niches absolutely do, or do not belong in e-book form?

LD: This question has come up a lot lately.  Right now, we’re not quite there with art books or books with unique aspect ratios.  I believe that e-book readers are going to bifurcate into two form-factors:

• Phone/reader hybrids which will constitute the majority of casual reading/
• Flexible, legal-sized specialty readers—the Kindle 3.0 and beyond.

I don’t see any limit on e-books once the hardware catches up, but that presumes large, color, non-glaring screens.  We’re at least 2-3 years away from my ideal specialty reader.

KM: Do the design and aesthetics of the finished “e-book” play a part in the work you do?

Even though I’m a software engineer I am also very interested in design issues.  I’ve worked with some really exacting publishers who care deeply about the look and user experience of their digital products, and that’s great. E-books have lagged quite a bit in this area, I think partially because there’s a wall between the consumer and the publisher, and because e-books don’t have the immediate transparency of the web.  I’ve complained to Amazon about the formatting in some Kindle books and they’ve refunded my money, but there’s no way to engage in a dialog with the publisher or author about the book’s layout.  I know this is something that people are starting to think about, though, and that’s an important step.

KM: On any of your projects, have publishers brought in the printed book designer to work with you on the e-book version(s) of their books? Do you see this sort of collaboration between print and digital designers taking place as e-books catch on with wider audiences?

LD: No, but I would love to do this!  For some reason, the real action in digital book design seems to be in the UK—good things have come from Penguin UK and Apt Studios, for example.  If anyone wants to fly me to London to work on some great-looking e-books, I’m game.

KM: Do you believe ePub will “win?”

LD: That’s a really good question.  I hope so—not because it’s my pet format, but because I believe that would be a win for consumers.

It’s important to remember that a format doesn’t have to be perfect to be right.  If someone had asked me to design a universal e-book format I would’ve made some of the same choices as ePub (XHTML for book content, definitely) but others would be quite different (ePub has three metadata files where one would do).

But a perfect format doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it’s free, has low technical barrier to entry, and everyone can potentially agree to use it.  Music consumers were lucky that MP3 arrived before the digital commodification of music and the inevitable DRM lockdown.

E-book fans are going to have to fight a little harder to have control over their legitimately-purchased content.

It saddens me that Amazon appears to be taking an anti-consumerist stance with its continued refusal to support ePub. They’re in a great position to monetize DRM-free content because purchasing with the Kindle is so hassle-free relative to finding pirated copies on the web.

I really hope they come around, but it may take pressure from publishers.

KM: What books are you currently reading—and how are you reading them?

LD: Ha!  For obvious reasons, friends and family gave me a lot of print books for Christmas, so I’ve got that stack.  Right now I’m a little over halfway through Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, but I’m taking a break from it and reading a romance novel on my Kindle.  Uh, for "research."  I’ve got a Sony PRS-505 too, which I use almost exclusively for checking ePubs.  In a lot of ways it’s superior to the Kindle, but I believe that any electronic device with no wireless connectivity is ultimately a dead end.

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 some of the opposition is just human nature and the tendency to resist change, it’s also true that publishers face some very real obstacles in going from a purely print-based production and distribution model to incorporating digital into the mix. Would you agree?

NC: Totally. Often the very thing that has made you successful for so long often is the thing that makes it hard to handle chaos and change. I think it is one of the hardest things to do especially when the formula has worked for so long. Heck, in Austin where I am based, the exact thing that took Dell from nothing to what I think is now $60B dollar business is the thing that is stifling its growth. And that’s not even a company that has reached its 15th birthday. So it should not be a surprise that incumbent publishers are struggling a bit with the changes that are taking place.

And then publishers have to face upstarts like Smashwords who are completely putting the traditional model on its head. Eighty-five percent of what Smashwords receives go to the authors.

KM: What strategies would you recommend to publishers for proceeding into the digital age—what questions do they need to ask themselves to determine where they should start?

NC: I think the first place any publisher should look is to do an honest assessment of their ability and comfort level to change. Establishing those parameters for some span of time is very important to provide a framework and bounds to work within.

KM: Is there any one thing that all publishers should be doing, or is each and every publisher’s situation going to be different enough that they need to do it all from scratch?

NC: I fundamentally believe the one thing every publisher needs to do is to figure out their overall strategy and see how digital publishing fits into it.  Right now, the sense I get is that each digital group is not really part of the overall picture but more of a skunkworks, or side project.

I think a major publisher should go hire a McKinsey & Company or an Accenture or some other strategic change agent that the publisher CEO will listen to. Examining their traditional business for cost savings and determining how much to invest in growth areas like Digital Publishing is exactly in the sweet spot of most strategy consulting shops and the bottom line is it is human nature that the CEO will be more apt to listen to an outside consultant than internal employees.

For full disclosure: I worked for Accenture (at the time it was Andersen Consulting) Strategic Services, and my wife worked for McKinsey, so those companies weren’t random but whoever the CEO trusts is who should be involved.

If publishers aren’t willing to look at things in a strategic light, I think there are a few tactical things all publishers can do:

• Find a cost-effective way to convert their titles (backlist / frontlist) to electronic formats. Doing so gets the publishers in the game. I think many publishers are doing frontlist titles but maybe the backlist titles can be organized based on current popularity to prioritize which books get converted first and which ones get converted second and so forth. If the publisher has a relationship with a distributor, push the distributor to help more on converting titles and to charge less. If the distributor isn’t getting it done, or is charging too much for conversions, find a distributor who can get it done. Outsource it if they have to. It’s just not that hard to take a .LIT file, and with the tools that are available today, convert it to an ePub.
• Support ePub. The more successful ePub is the less work publishers have to do long term. Delivering books in ePub and driving vendors to support ePub will hopefully mean less conversion work for the publishers/distributors long term.
• Start cutting / adjusting deals with authors and agents to go DRM-free. In particular, with backlist titles, if you can get rid of DRM, you remove 3-5% of the cost which means either more profits or better pricing to the reader.
• Demand that their retailers price e-books properly. There is no world where an e-book should be priced at $24.95 when a reader can buy the physical book with shipping for $12.99 (often because the paperback was just released but the e-book retailers either haven’t been given updated pricing or haven’t updated their prices). How many people never come back to e-books when they try to buy an e-book and find the physical book is cheaper?
• Demand better reporting and better information from their partners (in particular distributors and retailers). Then make sure people at their firm do something with that information.
• Be willing to dabble. Try out different things with different vendors. See what works and what doesn’t.
• Have a budget for marketing e-books. One of the most shocking things I heard recently was that a publisher has a budget for doing storefront marketing in physical stores but doesn’t have similar budgets (even if much smaller) to help promote their e-book initiatives.

KM: Seeing how it may be some time before publishers have their e-book act completely together, do you have any suggestions for the reading public on what they should reasonably expect/demand as consumers?

NC: I think consumers need to drive the publishers to support the behavior they want. If consumers accept the status quo, they will continue to get the status quo. I think the reading public needs to be active in letting publishers, retailers and anyone who will listen what they want:

• If titles aren’t in the format they want, they need to let the world know that. I bet nothing will drive a publisher to release a book to digital or to particular format than demand.
• I hope the reading public is vocal about standards (ePub) and vocal about DRM-free. Every time I ask about DRM, the publisher usually points to authors and agents as the culprits who want DRM, and the authors and agents point to the publisher. I think if the reading public (it’s got to be broader than Teleread) starts to ask for ePub and DRM-free, you will eventually see some movement.

I think the most that readers can expect in 2009 is a lot more books available digitally.

KM: What is your take on the Hachette territorial digital rights issue?

NC: I don’t know enough details about the specific issue to comment on it. In fact most of what I know has actually come from TeleRead.

I think the territory rights issue is crazy in the digital world. Whereas it made perfect sense in the physical world since shipping is so expensive anyway, I think it makes very little sense in the digital world where shipping costs are completely non-existent. That said, it is the reality of the world we live in. I think there are going to be opportunities for publishers who secure digital rights globally to have a role (like I believe Angry Robot is trying to do with science fiction).

KM: Are territorial issues something that could or do affect how Lexcycle/Stanza is planning to proceed with their larger publishing partners, and if so, how?

NC: Territory issues are clearly affecting folks who have catalogs for Stanza. Most of the information that I learned about the Hachette territory issue was actually provided by Bob LiVolsi of Books on Board. Fictionwise was mentioned several times in the TeleRead blog associated with it. From what I understand, the issue hasn’t completely run its course, and like you, we are anxiously awaiting more information from those involved.

I can comment on what Stanza has in place to address territory rights issues. We have an early internal prototype of Stanza that can use I/P geo-location to identify where a user is and using that information either display a particular publisher’s books or not display them in a given catalog. We haven’t had a reason to finish the development and complete the quality assurance to roll this out because no one has asked us for it yet.

Stanza currently does something similar with language—e.g., if a user’s language is set to Russian or Czech, we display different catalogs in our Online Catalog from what you see if your language is set to English.

KM: And, finally, what do you want publishers to know about Stanza and how it can be integrated into their digital publishing initiatives?

NC: I think the advantage that Stanza provides publishers is access to over a million users who are iPhone or iPod Touch users. Stanza offers multiple routes to get to the iPhone user (whether through the Stanza partner catalogs or direct through the iTunes App Store like we did with the iPhone: the Missing Manual Application which has been a top 3 paid application in the books category in the App Store since we released it). We will be expanding Stanza to other platforms like Google Android and Blackberry throughout 2009 as well as further improving the complete reader experience with Stanza. Finally, we are big proponents of standards as evidenced by our support of the ePub standard.

Moderator’s note: We’ve added hyperlinks to Neelan’s comments. – D.R.

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 Consumer eBook Format?” My article delved into some of the requirements an e-book format must meet to be potentially embraced by the digital publishing industry as the consumer standard. From the requirements analysis, I concluded that IDPF’s OEBPS specification met these requirements and could become, when the time is ripe, the industry standard.

And indeed we are now seeing a groundswell of interest in ePUB by publishers and application developers. The primary reason is its flexibility in a number of areas, some of which are only now being recognized. I’ll delve into a couple of them in this article. [Note 1]

Flexibility #1: End-use

Obviously, a publisher is not going to spend money formatting its content into ePUB just for the heck of it. Pubishers do so only if the ePUB-formatted content will be useful in their business—that there will be a positive return on their investment. That’s Business 101. Of course, they prefer that ePUB be re-usable in the future, and not be just another “format of the moment.” Using the jargon of digital publishing professionals, they want their content to be “repurposeable”.

There is a misconception still floating around that ePUB is limited for use as an intermediary format. That is, ePUB is optimized only for format conversion by publishers and distributors/retailers.

In actuality, ePUB was designed from the ground-up to be optimal as both an intermediate format, and for direct rendering by consumers—full repurposeability. This explains the particular design of its XML-based framework, and the publication feature set it supports. [Note 2]

And, logically-speaking, one cannot really differentiate between the two. Even “direct rendering” requires internal conversion (in this case at the user-end) to present the content to the reader.

What we must not do is limit our thinking of ePUB conversion only to publishers and distributors/retailers (thus the end-user will never see or own an ePUB), but understand that ePUB allows end-users to also participate in conversion as their particular needs require, now and into the distant future.

For example, if I were a developer building an automated ePUB to “HappyBook” format converter so that the content could be viewed on “HappyBook” reading systems, then who mandates that only publishers or distributors/retailers can use my converter? The converter could also be incorporated into the “HappyBook” reading system to allow the consumer, who owns ePUB e-books, to natively read them on their “HappyBook.” Or, I could make my converter directly available to end-users, who will be able to manually convert their ePUB to the “HappyBook” format. [Note 3]

As reported here in TeleRead, a great demonstration of ePUB’s flexibility in empowering the end-user is bookworm, by Liza Daly at threepress. bookworm allows the user to read their ePUB e-books on their web browser. Simple, yet powerful.

And Opera, who I’m advising on ePUB (I plan to write more about this in the future), has made significant progress on a widget to natively render ePUB in their browser. (Hopefully native ePUB rendering will be included in their browser for mobile devices.)

Flexibility #2: Specialized applications (“verticals”) and accessibility

ePUB is not only designed as a general “trade” e-book format (which I define to be a format for simple, rigidly narrative/linear books like novels), but to also be used for other types of books and publications which have greater complexity and non-linearity. For example, ePUB supports graphics, including SVG, embedded fonts, and may include specialized markup such as MathML. Full hypertext support, plus the feature called auxiliary content, allows supporting more non-linear texts and documents. (I hope that future versions of ePUB will support fully non-linear content, such as web site structures—it could easily do so since ePUB is based on XHTML and CSS.)

With regards to accessibility, ePUB was designed from the ground-up to be accessible. Accessibility experts, such as George Kerscher, participated from the very beginning in 1999, and they have been a constant presence in the working group, making sure the rest of us understand their needs. Interestingly, the more accessible the format, the better the format is for the sighted (a topic I hope to write about in the future.)

For OPS 2.0 and OPF 2.0 (which underlie ePUB), the accessibility community played an even greater role, and as a result I am happy to report that OPS now supports DAISY’s Digital Talking Book document format (which has ties to NIMAS), and requires (because of my efforts) inclusion of the DAISY NCX (navigation control file) in all OPS 2.0 Publications (i.e., ePUB).

To make it clear that I don’t speak for IDPF and DAISY in any official capacity, I see it a distinct possibility that IDPF and DAISY will formally merge their efforts—it came pretty close to a de facto merger for authoring OPS 2.0 and in developing epubcheck. I hope this happens since, as noted above, the more accessible-friendly the format, the better the format is for everyone.

Publishers are now finally seeing the advantage to them of using high-quality, structural and semantic markup in their publications.

Jon Noring’s digital publishing bio

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 other kinds of online content, whether as standalone product databases or as part of library aggregators. Universities see E as a way to fight the growing costs of academic journals and, yes, books, too. One study of academic, public and special libraries showed that only 25 percent of library spending on e-books was with individual publishers, while close to 70 percent was with aggregators.

Such thoughts come to mind not only from various statistics but also from the time I spent on May 29 at the "Going Large with E-Books" seminar at the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston. Despite the name, e-books in the usual sense were just part of the agenda.

Two different strategies but a common skepticism of DRM

Life-science publisher CABI recommended starting small and diversifying with multiple platforms where feasible. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers chose a single vendor that could deliver online features like subscription-based access and full-text search, but also provide a print-on-demand service.  Both presenters stressed that DRM was something to be avoided or at least made unobtrusive.

Outside academic publishing, Allen Noren of O’Reilly Media presented a high-level view of the company’s online content offerings, including e-books. Disclaimer: I write for O’Reilly but do not work for it.

Curiously, Noren did not stress that O’Reilly e-books (in PDF format) are DRM-free, but did emphasize their repackagability and flexibility, two traits that come in handy for the Safari service. In a TeleBlog comment, Tim O’Reilly (photo) has described Safari as "our third largest reseller, behind only Amazon and Barnes & Noble."

For some titles, users can choose to buy only relevant chapters, download whole e-books, or read content online—or, naturally, continue to buy print editions.

Island-style books not as urgent for academic publishers

So e-books as portable, discrete entities aren’t quite as urgent for academic publishers as they are for trade publishers, but that could change as device adoption spreads.  The Kindle already comes with the Oxford American Dictionary installed, and Oxford University Press has enjoyed good sales of Kindle books. It will be interesting to see if the rigorous scholarly products which began appearing in digital format with CD-ROMs in the 80′s and 90′s—and are now online behind institutional subscriptions—can migrate to e-book devices.

Very large, search-intensive applications may never be able to live on e-readers, but always-on wireless devices like the Kindle certainly could access them remotely. Marrying touchscreens and e-ink with rich online content databases could be quite attractive to college students who’ve dreamed of working on their theses from the beach.

Moderator’s note: Blame moi, not Liza, for the misidentification of the book room mentioned in the post’s lead (based on the Flickr caption). The photo is of a bookstore, not a library, and I’ve made a correction. – D.R.

Image credits: First photo CC-licensed from RTPeat. Second licensed from Del Far.

"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.

I’d like to see this philosophy of loosely coupled, single-use tools applied more widely to digital publishing, and e-book development in particular. This is the time for publishers to look beyond the monolithic, closed-source frameworks that have defined conversion and digital workflows to date.

Three tenets in software development can apply here:

1. Most technical problems have been solved before. Start with those solutions and customize only when necessary.

2. Less code is better than more code. Specialized ("domain-specific") languages such as XSLT can dramatically reduce the amount of code that one has to write because they are so tightly coupled to the source XML.

3. Find ways to make all these different programs work together. If a better one comes along, make it easy to switch it in.

A lot of this philosophy was reflected in the thinking about the ePub standard:

1. XHTML and CSS already have the vocabulary and software support to display reflowable digital content.

2. ZIP has dozens of implementations in different programming languages and is widely understood.

3. Import from other formats where XHTML and CSS aren’t a good fit: DAISY NCX, SVG, DTBook.

Of course, reader support still lags, and some concerns remain about the ePub standard itself. This is where vendors can meaningfully contribute.

4. Mistakes or omissions at the specification stage don’t have to be the end of a technology. At some point it’s time to just start writing code. Early versions of HTML were terrible: they didn’t address non-textual media at all, and there were dozens of arbitrary semantic tags and no clear distinction between semantic and presentational markup. Yet here we are today.

5. Commercial interests help as often as they hurt: Netscape introduced JavaScript (but also the blink tag); Microsoft released the first major browser with CSS support and invented Ajax (and then left us with IE).

6. Open source is great at low-level tools, server software and standards, but rarely has the same end-user focus that commercial software does.

Both camps contributed to the runaway success of the web.

The goal for e-book developers, then, is to innovate without forgoing standards, address problems with an agile, "fix it in the mix" approach, and above all, keep things flexible. Moving fast will be best way to prevent the market from being locked up by a single company that may not have the best interests of readers and publishers in mind.

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Liza Daly is a software engineer who specializes in applications for the publishing industry. She was the lead developer on major online products for Oxford University Press and has designed reference sites for Columbia University Press, Rosen Publishing and SAGE Publications. Currently she runs a publishing consulting company and is the developer of threepress.org, an open source platform for experimenting with e-books and online reference material.