Add an eventBooks in Browsers 2011 schedule
Thursday 27th October 2011
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Introduction and Welcome
by Kat Meyer and Peter Brantley
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Elegantly On- and Offline
by Blaine Cook and Maureen Evans
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EPUB — out of the box
by Bill McCoy
EPUB is structured and semantically enhanced Web content, packaged for reliable use in interchange and delivery of digital publications. But, in an online/browser-centric world, monolithic single-file representations of content are increasingly out of step with the focus on delivering richer experiences over distributed data sources. And the very notion of an “eBook” or “publication” as a discrete entity can be questioned in the context of a future of socially and dynamically created, assembled, and consumed content. This talk will explore the future of distributed and networked digital publications from a content representation perspective: how will we get there from today’s single-file .pdf’s and .epub’s? Will there be a role for publication-level standards in that future world?
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The Ebook’s Ambit
Coming to ebooks as a web developer, my experience has been different from those who have worked on ebooks in the context of dedicated reading devices or software. The intersection of book and web is conventionally seen as a packaged core containing web technologies to provide a useful bunch of mixins and lingua franca on which to build a compelling standalone product. My perspective has been the obverse — at Booki.sh, we’ve come to see the notion of a book as an artificial but powerful set of constraints on the website. Asking “How can I make people think of this content as a ‘book’? What would make them enjoy it in a similar way?” has introduced me to a number of difficult and still incompletely-solved problems, tethered my thinking to the basics, and sharpened an understanding of what a book is not.
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The Network is Overrated
by Eric Hellman
What is a book, anyway? An examination of the EPUB 3 draft standard reveals that most of the differences between an EPUB book and a website boil down to one core difference: the book is self-contained. The fact of self containment is at the same time limiting and liberating. While some aspects of interaction are cut off by the self-containment, an EPUB book can be untethered from a website, just as a print book, once sold, is untethered from its publisher. The untethering of books supports new and old peer-to-peer and community interaction modes. Although network-based, tethered books can simulate these interactions, the tethering creates eavesdropping and censorship vulnerabilities. Business models such as Gluejar’s crowdfunding model have the potential to make the untethered ebook economically viable.
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Books in Browsers, 1994-2004
by Michael Jensen
Before the pads, before the apps, before even Javascript, there were Books In Browsers. Especially during the early years, audiences’ mental metaphors constrained what was effective (in terms of both reading models and business models), even when technologies enabled far more possibilities. An argument for constrained expectations of audience receptivity, even while laying the groundwork for future innovations, will be made.
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The Future Now: The Social Book
by Bob Stein
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Beautiful Books
by Craig Mod
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Electric Incunabula: progressive interactive book design
The transition from hand-scribed manuscripts to printed books was marked by a quarter-century interaction design lag. This stretch of the 15th century is known for the production of incunabula – printed books lacking the interface design advancements that have since become standard navigational features of book user experience such as page numbering, the table of contents, punctuation, and footnotes.
This lag may be attributed to market expectations – early book consumers wanted books that navigated like the manuscripts that preceded these moveable type facsimiles. Just as early book buyers expected books to work like manuscripts, modern eBook consumers expect eBooks to work like printed books. This has resulted in a wave of electronic incunabula – most interactive reading platforms lack interaction design innovations that take advantage of platform-specific features. Good brainstorming, user-centered design, and the application of basic interaction design principles can lead us out of the incunabula and into an era of progressive e-reading design.
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The Infinite Canvas
by Peter Meyers
Designers of web-based books face an elemental question: to page or to scroll? Might as well ask: Android or iPhone? This talk will help attendees understand the pros and cons of each approach. By looking at a handful of especially well-designed models from both camps (including Welcome to Pine Point and Inkling), I’ll show how each layout benefits different kinds of content and leads to different kinds of reading experiences. Along the way, I’ll look back at the historical transition from scroll to codex, review what was lost and gained during that epic change, and discuss whether the 21st century’s digital scroll is comparable to the one from ancient times. Finally, I’ll review an entirely different option—panning & zooming across an “infinite canvas”—that should prove thought provoking to partisans on both sides.
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Bookmarks: reports.
by James Bridle, Todd Carpenter and Rob Sanderson
Reports from the two recent NISO/IA meetings on bookmark and annotation standards at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2011 October 10) and BiB (2011 October 26).
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OPDS v1.1+
Update on the OPDS v1.1 revision with support for faceted browse and search, and indirect acquisition. Additional discussion of future retrieval options and serializations.
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Findings: Preliminary Days
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First Draft of the Revolution: discoverable narratives in digital works
by Liza Daly
Following the model of a content author paired with a technology implementer, I commissioned an interactive piece from game designer Emily Short with three constraints: it must be primarily textual, have a clear authorial vision, and use a simple touch-based interface that could be implemented in an EPUB3 device or web browser.
First Draft of the Revolution is an epistolary story set in a parallel history in which written documents are magically linked. At the time of this writing, First Draft of the Revolution is still being finalized, but we intend to publish it as a free EPUB 3 book: to put it distinctly among other books, not games.
The presentation will cover the above topics briefly: the problems inherent in interactive narrative, a demonstration of the work, and a release of an open source framework for creating further stories with the engine. I will argue that the joy of discovery, of uncovering hidden pathways through narrative, will be the key motivator for readers of future interactive works.
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Libros sin fronteras
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EPUB4: Engineering the networked experience
by Bill McCoy
Friday 28th October 2011
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Networked books and networked reading
by Kevin Kelly
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Adaptive Web Design
How can we apply the tenets of adaptive web design to the design of networked books, in order to ensure a highly-polished presentation in as many devices as possible? This is particularly important to explore when working with highly-designed books such as children’s books, cookbooks, etc., as well as comics and graphic narratives.
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Honey to Bees
by Eli James
If we assume that the networked book is the book of the future, how are we to get there? Today’s publishing world is nothing at all like that – in fact, most writers and publishers are turning to ebooks as a next step. This talk will focus on a few necessary things we’ll need to have in place before we achieve our ideal of the networked book. I’ll also talk a little on what I’ve found to work (and not work) while pushing Pandamian.
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The Beauty of Web-first Workflows
by Hugh McGuire
Making a book should be no harder than making a website. What is a book, after all, but a special class of website that happens to have a history of being displayed in purpose-built, paper-based browsers?
Why do we expect frameworks for building websites to output websites that are compatible with multiple browsers, whereas building books … is still a giant shambles as soon as you need to satisfy interoperability with multiple paper and non-paper browsers.
It shouldn’t be any harder to make a standards compliant book that will work in paper and non paper browsers, and some solutions to this problem should be found in the success of web-based web building frameworks, and CMSs.
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Crowdsourcing Enhanced Ebooks
by Ricky Wong
We’re acting as a broker between the author and a group of visual artist/readers to help make any book into enhanced ebooks through crowdsourcing at scale. We’ve created an automated process to turn any epub file into an IPad/smartphone app with social and interactive feature included. The core is based on HTML5/JS with PhoneGap as a framework to package any book into a native application.
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It may be a mob, but it’s my mob
by Richard Nash
I’ll offer comprehensive analytics on RedLemona.de the site, as well as on our sales data, and provide an overview of the responses to the site by users regular and casual, giving the BiB audience a picture of a new model publisher in action. The magic of books sometimes is very quotidian, just the day-to-day accretion of comments, purchases, submissions, of writing, of reading, of editing… However the changes in expectations brought about by these changes on the culture of publishing should prove to be very far reaching, the net effect over several years being quite transformative.
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Self Publishing Tools and APIs
by Miral Sattar
BiblioCrunch.com is a digital platform that empowers writers and publishers to create and market their own digital books and bookazines. We’re working on a crowdsourced model where anyone can create a book and get help from the community to create the best possible book. We recognize that good books not only need good content, but also superior editing, strong marketing, a well-designed and eye-catching cover, and an interested audience.
We are exploring the value of socializing the interaction between readers, bloggers, authors, students, writers, journalists, publishers, editors, and designers. We are also exploring the value of digital book clubs for a specific author, genre, publisher, or topic. The cloud is where the future of the books lie.
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Digital books: a new chapter for reader privacy
by Nicole Ozer
As books go digital and it becomes increasingly possible to capture detailed information about reader identity and habits, new reader privacy issues are emerging. This presentation will discuss the latest legal and policy issues and opportunities for book industry professionals, policymakers, and public interest groups to work together to create a climate for digital books that is good for business and good for reading.
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Readers and Accessibility
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Beyond the Encyclopedia: Non-linear reference works
by Gordon Mohr
Should an online reference work aspire to the ‘encyclopedic’ standards of printed volumes? How should reference text change when modern search is assumed as the primary interface? If opening the scope of a reference work to everything ‘true and useful’, what other constraints on contribution and exploration might prove necessary? Can a reference work that seeks to offer canonical information on many topics use the techniques of social news and social question-and-answer sites to encourage casual, incremental contributions?
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Books as Data
by James Bridle
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Unlocking stories
by Valla Vakili
Stories and books. Is their future the same or different? I can’t tell you what the future of the book will look like, but what I can tell you is what’s happening to stories as we move into the digital world.
We’re unlocking them. This is a world where stories, which have always openly influenced each other, now openly connect to each other. And where they reach outward into the world that created them; into the network of people, places and things that spur writers to write, and readers to read.
At Small Demons we call this network The Story Graph, and it’s a beautiful, distributed, coherent thing.
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Beautiful Art (Books)
by Greg Albers
I am the publisher of Hol Art Books and I hate art books. Art books are expensive (not accessible), heavy (not mobile), and no one reads them (not social). Our reverence for them is misplaced. Today, a book shouldn’t be beautiful for the way it’s packaged and sold, it should be beautiful for what it says and for the encounters in creates. Encounters not only with other texts and ideas, but also with people, places and—for my field especially—objects in the real world. I hate art books, but I love art.
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COMA Voyager
by Toshiaki Koike and Daihei Shiohama
COmmunity Media Archive: COMA. Voyager’s departure to browser based eBook reading experience! After the 20 years of digital book voyage through its own file format for Japanese, dotbook and the viewer, T-Time, Voyager is now shifting to more open/web driven content experiences. Maintaining the integrity of “book”, integrating access to visual and music and other kinds of rich content to the “book” with social reading extensions.
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Books in Browsers 2011
United States United States, San Francisco
26th–28th October 2011
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