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RT @dotepub: dotEPUB widget released! Insert a "Save as epub" button in your webpage http://dotepub.com #ebooks #download #conversion #i ... (About 19 hours ago by @badosa)
My current personal web project is dotepub.com: an automatic conversion service from web page to epub.
Badosa.com has been my main field of experimentation, a website in the Web 1.0 era that kept some editorial control but was made of user-generated content. Soon it offered e-books in the “standard” of those early non-standardized years (RocketeBook). Or dedicated e-books for MS Reader (e-books generated on the fly with a customized dedication). I always thought immersive reading was a handheld matter; that’s why Badosa.com was made available for some mobile devices (pocket.badosa.com).
In 1998 I played with random literature (“human-computer interaction” you might say) in the Poetic Browser, completely remodeled 10 years later with widgets and an API. Widgets weren’t new at Badosa.com. I tried them many years before in what I called our Content Server (this page is still online but it’s not linked and it’s not considered “active”). 2005 was the Ajax year: to try the technology I build Excerpta, a service that was introduced to the public in 2006. And because it’s always fun to play with APIs, in Map of fictions I couldn’t avoid putting my hands in the Google Maps API. Finally, December 2008 was the time to play with the Flickr API and machine tags (“tripletags”) to let people associate photos to texts.
Back in the 90’s I was full of energy. I thought some sort of literary directory was necessary and I build Inlibris.com. I think Inlibris was the first to offer random results. Or results from other user’s queries. Or the possibility to get a copy of the search results in an e-mail (this feature is gone; back then it seemed interesting considering there was no DSL). When Amazon.com introduced its Associates Web Service I couldn’t wait to build my own store. Inlibris Bookstore was made “à la 90’s”, and I haven’t updated since (sorry!). The store was designed PDA-friendly and tried to make sense of the Welcome tab by putting features instead of sections in the tab area (and failed). In the first quarter of 2009, I couldn’t fight the irresistible urge to put my hands on the New York Times API: I used it to add links to reviews of books in the bestseller’s list.
(Besides the aforementioned APIs, as you may have noticed, in the site you are viewing now I’m using the Twitter, Delicious and BackType’ APIs.)
Galeradas.com (galleys, in Spanish) was a platform for digital conversion services. But the e-book market wasn’t ready. I should be remodeling this site soon.
With Critipedia.com I learned how the Wikipedia works. It was meant to be a place for reviewing books and other content powered by MediaWiki. But it never took off (it wasn’t the right tool, actually, and once there was nothing else to learn I lost interest). I developed some tools to convert ISBNs, get related ISBN, find ISBNs... I should try to do something with those... Anyone with an interesting idea for this domain?
Widgets have a bright future, in my humble opinion. And that’s why I acquired the domain Widgetia.com. It sounds like the name of a directory of widgets. But I’m not planning on using this domain in the short term.
I’m the proud owner of more domains: accedo.org (on accessibility?) and leelia.com (on the reading universe?). I should try to find time to build something on them.
In no particular order:
E-books Are Not the Future of Books: On the concept of e-books. A follow-up to my presentation on "The Future of Books: Digital Literature & Market" (see below). Published in April 2010 but written mainly in the summer of 2009.
The Future of Books: Digital Literature & Market: I prepared (but didn’t use) this presentation for a round table given at a writers’ meeting on digital literature organized by Octubre CCC on October 2009 in Valencia. About e-books, e-readers and digital literature.
Statitistical Dissemination 2.0?: I prepared this presentation for a speech given at a course organized by Eurostat on Statistical Dissemination and the Internet in Madrid. The actual presentation was enriched with some web demos and had fewer slides: in this version, I have unhidden some slides that were not needed for the core of my speech and I have added some text to help following the line of argumentation.
It doesn’t seem to work on IE8…
Un artículo que abunda en la idea de que los lectores de RSS son un producto para un nicho, por mucho que nos esforcemos en evangelizar
http://regulargeek.com/2009/12/21/rss-readers-are-fine-but-they-are-niche-products/
Y por qué la concepción de la mayoría de lectores de RSS es quizás inadecuada (incluido Google Reader) (cosa que también enlaza con la contraposición rss-twitter de más abajo):
http://realtimerss.org/post/293254708/google-reader-is-wrong
I agree with you: “dedicated” is an euphemism for “limited”, as I have argued here:
http://www.slideshare.net/badosa/the-future-of-...
E-book readers may work for older bookish generations but they will probably not succeed in the current and future generations used to the new web ecosystem.
Completamente de acuerdo. Los lectores de RSS han languidecido al mismo tiempo que Twitter explotaba y es posible que ambos hechos no estén del todo desconectados. Aunque se trate de soluciones completamente diferentes con características muy distintas es posible que muchas usuarias hayan encontrado en Twitter (simple) lo que de otro modo hubieran tenido que resolver con un lector de RSS (complicado).
La aproximación a la distribución de información agregada de Twitter es la inversa a la de RSS:
En Twitter la información está centralizada, pero se puede acceder a ella descentralizadamente gracias a su API. La información en RSS, en cambio, está descentralizada y para centralizarla es obligatorio que la usuaria eche mano de un agregador de RSS.
Fantastic Plastic, of course, because everyone attributes fantastic powers to a device no one has seen (except in picture).
I agree with #3. But not with #2: we shouldn’t be so obsessed with what we can or can’t do in the physical world: these are false analogies. Products (ownership) have become services in the digital world. And what was impractical in the physical world is not in the digital world. Let’s embrace the new world with all its possibilities instead of remembering what we could or couldn’t do in the physical world.
That said, the Terms of Service agreement should state that clearly (you are renting a service that sooner or later could become obsolete) and, accordingly, the price should be lower than that of a physical book (ownership, resellability, etc.). And of course Amazon should never delete the annotations of a reader (as it has happened in this case).
Tim, thanks for the transcription!
"Reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device..."
Bezos has said this before. I guess he means "IMMERSIVE reading". After all, we've been hyper-reading the web using non-dedicated devices all these years... and new products like tablet netbooks
will help us doing that sort of active reading in the future.
If current electronic ink technology wasn't limiting in terms of color and refresh rate, I'm not sure Bezos would be saying that. Fortunately e-ink with LCD hybrid screens (Pixel Qi)
are around the corner.
"First of all, they plan to allow consumers to read books on various devices with Internet access, be it Sony Reader (...) or any other device capable of rendering e-books."
Actually, according to the NYT, Google is more focused on non-dedicated devices with browser support than e-book readers:
"Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle."
And previewing is a form of publishing.
Pere, me gusta tu entrada porque demuestra que a la analítica web nada humano le es ajeno y concreta qué puede aportar a cada área de la organización. Un 10 por eso.
Sin embargo, estoy con Gemma en lo de dedicarse al 100% y con Jaume en lo del analista como proveedor interno. Tanto la fase de producción (creación) como la de validación (analítica) son importantes. Al devaluar la primera fase y considerar la segunda como la verdaderamente crucial lo único que se consigue es tener a todo el mundo en contra excepto al analista web: un discurso tan endogámico seguramente no favorece la implantación de la analítica web en las organizaciones. Creo que en general es conveniente que quien ponga a prueba los productos sea una persona distinta de quien los ha creado: no sólo porque puede adoptar una actitud más objetiva (distanciamiento) sino porque se precisan diferentes cualidades, son distintos perfiles profesionales.
Jon Hicks, of course: he’s the only one with no repeated letters in his name.
Thank you for sharing this, David. I discovered the Chris Anderson/Guy Kawasaki Conversation at SXSWi2009 via @guykawasaki’s tweets. Your notes were very useful to get an idea about that conversation. (Even though I follow The Long Tail blog, I didn’t know Chris Anderson was on Twitter! His tweets are not in his blog.)
I agree with Stubbornella that sometimes fluid is better, sometimes fixed and I’m happy to hear OOCSS does both. Even the same page can benefit from the two layouts depending on the environment (resolution, window size, etc.), so it’s not necessarily a matter of choosing one or the other: @Nosredna is right (the browser window is an information space; the user doesn’t want infinite white space), and @ywg is too when he points out the legibility problem. We need a layout that goes beyond fixed vs. fluid: what about “flixed” (fluid+fixed)?.
Here is a simple example that tries to use a “flixed” layout: if window size is wide enough max-width avoids further reflowing; if screen size is too narrow, the right column is hidden and the the layout is fluid (mobile devices).
Nice. Unfortunately it doesn’t parse that well the TYPE inside a TEL. Try it for example on
Xavier
Ben,
Congratulations for the improvement of the MediaWiki markup. The use of an hAtom entry + an hCalendar event for the last-modification date of the page is an idea Tantek suggested to me back in 2007 in an informal conversation in Asturias. It’s good to know the microformats.org applies that idea and thus there’s a public model for that general need.
And I agree, API Kits is a promising concept.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (1): WWW for publishers (1). Introduction. Hypertext. Books, CD-ROMs and the WWW. User experience. Usability. Accessibility. This is part I of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (2): WWW for publishers (2). Hypertext and software. Information arquitecture. Interaction design. Navigation design. Interface design. Categorization, nomenclature, structure. Orientation tools: sitemaps, indexes. Search engine. Conceptual model, metaphors. This is part II of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (3): WWW for publishers (3). Addresses: URL (URI). Domains. HTML. XML. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This is part III of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (4): WWW for publishers (4). Text. Writing for the web. Typographical resources for the web. This is part IV of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (5): WWW for publishers (5). Web 2.0. This is part V of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (6): WWW for publishers (6). Web 2.0. Digitization. XML. RSS/Atom, ONIX, BookDROP, papiNet, XBITS, TEI, ePub, DocBook, DAISY. API. Widgets. Webservices. Mashups. This is part VI of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (7): WWW for publishers (7). Creative Commons. This is part VII of the material I prepared for my 2009 sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá.
WWW para editores (y más allá) (y 8): WWW for publishers (and 8). E-books. This is the last part of the material I prepared for my sessions on online publishing for the Masters Courses on publishing by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editrain/Universidad de Alcalá. Due to the important changes in the electronic book sector between 2009 and 2010, I updated this presentation in 2010.
La difusión estadística en el contexto de la web 2.0: This presentation was the original starting point for my speech at a round table concerning Web 2.0 in a Spanish regional statistical offices’ meeting. Due to time restrictions, the actual presentation I gave was shorter: I was forced to hide many slides. In this version all those slides are visible again.
Proyecto E-book 2001: My 2001 e-book project. Interesting for historical reasons. We might learn something from the past.
TOPLAX, the right approach to Ajax: This presentation was really a test, or a joke, or a neologasm (the pleasurable feeling from having coined a new word). There are more neologisms than ideas these days. I was trying to prove that a new word in the Ajax semantic field even with no promo whatsoever could get a significant number of views.
I have studied Economics and Philosophy. A result of those studies is for example my very old article La metrización y las ciencias sociales: introducción a la teoría de la metrización para investigadores sociales. Not that it matters. For many years I have been teaching online publishing in Masters Courses by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and EdiTrain. I have worked in the software sector (SAS Institute), but that was short: I have been working on statistics for the government for many years. Fruit of those years is for example the old article Estimation of sampling variance of the Spanish Labour Force Survey (with Montserrat Guillén Estany). Currently, I am the manager of Statistical Institute of Catalonia website.
On the net, I’m known as Xavier Badosa. Other possible variants: Xavier M. Badosa, Xavier Martín Badosa, Xavier Badosa Martín.
You may contact me by sending an e-mail to my first name (Xavier) at my main domain (that happens to be my family name, too). If you are human, I guess you understood. If you didn't, use the form at Badosa.com.
