Publishing Hackathon Pretty Much Ignores eBooks

The "First Annual" Publishing Hackathon was this weekend. As advertised, I participated and worked on an EPUB backmatter project. My awesome team consisted of me, Javascript/Ruby developer Max Jacobson (who's going to be even more highly sought-after when he finishes Rails school this summer), and TLC librarian Dianne Coan.

Here's our demo video:

 

Here's how we described the project:

Book Discovery INSIDE the eBook

When is a reader most receptive to reading suggestions? Right when they’ve finished a book of course! That’s why printed books have information about other books by the same author, the first chapter of the next book in the series and similar material at the end as part of the back matter.

Back matter has existed pretty much as long as books have. This includes the appendix, glossary, index, and bibliography. Back matter for digital books needs to be optimized to serve the needs of the digital reader. An informal survey by @suw indicates the most popular endmatter desires were other books by the same author and some information about the author.

Digital back matter for ebooks is not constrained by having to proceed the publication; unlike print, digital back matter can be kept up to date with the release of new content. For instance, if an author publishes a sequel, that title could be included in previously published ebooks.

It’s easy to insert a page listing an author’s other books at the end of an ebook, but how do you keep that list up-to-date? What if you’ve developed a great recommendation system to do “if you liked Pride and Prejudice, you’ll like X”? (or maybe “if you hated...”!)

The answer is to make use of the javascript capability of emerging ebook environments. Our project explores means of connecting to APIs from within an EPUB for the purpose of suggesting the user’s next read.

An existence proof is the “widget” capability of the iBooks iAuthor platform. It allows the insertion of html snippets into extended EPUB. Unfortunately, the javascript capability of ebook reading platforms, like the future, is unevenly distributed.

For this demo, we tested three reading EPUB environments, Readium, Readmill, and iBooks. We modified the Project Gutenberg EPUB version of Pride and Prejudice to include hooks and data to other books by Jane Austen.

Readium, which has been built as an EPUB3 reference environment, is the most capable for our purposes. It supports both javascript and connections to external web resources. In Readium, our EPUB displays the set of books by Jane Austen returned by the ReadMill API.

Apple iBooks has full javascript capability, but doesn’t allow connections to external resources (except perhaps via iBooks Author hooks- this deserves further investigation.) In iBooks, our EPUB displays a result page that we generated and embedded based on Jane Austen works published in 1813, when Pride and Prejudice released. We imagine that such embedded resources could be inserted at download time in a future production bookstore or library environment.

The Readmill environment does not support javascript at all at this time, so ironically, we’re not able to display the Readmill API results, or the iframe embedded resource.

Offline reading in Readium displays the resource embedded in the EPUB, similar to the iBooks version.

There were 30 projects in total presented at the end. Here's the list, along with my one sentence summary.

Banned Books in America

Website that maps book banning incidents and links them to Openlibrary

Book Discoverability: A Graphical Solution

Concept for browsing books as nodes on a graph.

Book Discovery INSIDE the eBook

This was us! Our demo crashed and burned. The popup screens from the wifi messed up the ebook reader display of embedded dynamic content.

BookCity Finalist!

Website that recommends books by connecting them to cities.

BookieGoer

Website that helps you lend the books you've borrowed from the library.

Booklvrs: Read. Discover. Meet.

App that advertises the ebook you're reading to the people around you.

bookmatchup

Website that multi-factor-matches you to books.

BookMob

Website that aggregates book recommendations from your twitter followers.

bookshelf.me

Website that displays books as if they were on a bookshelf. I'm pretty sure there was more to it.

Publy.io

Website that recommends books to users based on books they've liked.

Captiv Finalist!

App and Website that uses machine learning algorithms and your tweet about last night's party to combat the short attention span of Today's Readers. I may not have understood this one.

Coverlist Finalist!

Website that believes in judging books by their cover.

Evoke Finalist and clear judging favorite!

Pinteresty website that recommends books based on emotions categorization.

Happy Chapter

App that recommends books based on tags you click.

I read your Brain

Brain-sensing rabbit ears that wiggle depending on your response to a book from a website.

IGNITE

Website that lets users rate romance novels for steaminess.

KooBrowser Finalist!

Browser plugin that analyses what you read to better sell you books.

Library Atlas Finalist!

Mobile app that sends you geographically appropriate quotes depending on where you are. My favorite.

Literary Trinket with Book Wish

3D printed QR-ish code baubles. Cooler than it sounds.

Meadows

Website that turns reading into a game where you earn points.

Meme a book

Website that turns books into lolcats. (I may not have described this accurately.)

MovieReader

Website that recommends books connected to the movie you just saw.

NYPL Reinvent

Analysis of NYPL metadata advocating a divorce of the library from its classification system.

OkLetsRead!

Website offering crowd-funded serial fiction (ebooks).

Quiply

Website that recommends books based on a user's video viewing.

Reading Tollbooth: A Gateway to Book Discovery

Website to match kids to books.

Something2Read

Website that recommends books based on tags you click.

Valerie's Baby App

App that promotes literacy to a girl named Valerie by making sliding block puzzles and defining words at her.

Visibrary

Website that uses library data to make graphical book circles.

Vookstore

Website that turns ex-bookstore owners into book curation engines.

Interestingly, only 3 of the 30 projects addressed ebooks at all, which seems a bit odd to me, considering the industry's ongoing transition from print to digital. The emphasis on apps (7) and websites (21) is partly due to Hackathon's theme of book discovery, but it also says something about the tech industry. Apps and websites are what the NY tech industry is doing in 2013, not ebooks. Clearly, the publishing community developing ebooks and ebook standards needs to do more outreach to developers; the hackathon was a good first step.

It's also worth noting the growing importance of geo-tagging and other non-traditional metadata. In the new world of publishing discovery, readers want books that fit their mode right where they want to be. Neither MARC nor ONIX know enough to help.

My library friends should rest assured that the hackers did not at all ignore libraries. Although $1000 prize from NYPL was a factor, the ease of connecting to NYPL and OpenLibrary helped a lot. The RDA prize, it should be noted, went unclaimed.

Update: Sorry, Coverlist, I omitted your finalist status. Corrected!

Structures to Build

Being a scientist means asking good questions. A good question is one that you don't know the answer to, but the answer has consequences. In designing experiments, a good scientist can't worry so much about the consequences of the answer, because the truth is more important.

Being an entrepreneur also means dealing with questions you don't know the answer to. But the consequences matter much more than the answer. The entrepreneur does experiments too, but the object is to obtain a good outcome, not to learn the truth.

Experimentation has never been more important for the word of books and the stories they tell. We don't know how books will be distributed ten years from now. We don't even know if public libraries will exist. We hardly know how verbal stories will be told in 10 years. The answers to these questions are of great import to our societies and to the generations that will come. Since I think of myself as both a scientist and an entrepreneur, I have a lot of questions to answer.

The Uni Project- Home Stretch

While I'm busy with the experiment in the business of books that is Gluejar, I can't help but be fascinated other sorts of experiments that are in progress, and which are worthy of public support. While I'm sure that interesting experiments are being conducted in academic and government institutions and that many of these are being supported by foundations and research agencies, the most audacious experiments I know of are being conducted by passionate individuals and being funded by in non-traditional venues such as Kickstarter.

One of these is the Uni Project. Last year, I wrote about the Chinatown Storefront Library. Never intended to be more than a temporary installation, it has left a legacy of understanding of the ways a space designed for reading and books can interact with and enrich a community. The team behind that project, Sam and Leslie Davol, wondered whether structures could designed specifically to be temporary, itinerant libraries- quick to deploy, easy to operate, and dramatic to see. Working with Professor J. Meejin Yoon of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, they came up with a concept for a modular system of stackable cubes, each of which could contain a micro-collection of library materials.

I don't know whether this idea will work. But I do know how to help them find out: support them on Kickstarter. The project is currently 90% funded; they have 6 more days to raise another $1900. Update 8/11: The Uni achieved its goal with 3 days to spare!



I learned about another compelling experiment last week. This one aims to have people all around the New York City area contribute to a location based story, using an augmented-reality view of the twin towers as a unifying theme. Founded by Brian August, a New York technology executive who describes himself as "obsessed with the twin towers" 110 Stories will be an iPhone app that aims to both inspire and document the stories of the millions of us who saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center almost every day until they were destroyed on 9/11 almost ten years ago. Although the augmented reality feature gets the buzz, I think the story-telling aspects will be a lot more interesting in the long term. Imagine a location-aware ebook using the technology that Liza Daly demonstrated last year.

110 Stories

As of tonight, 110 stories has blown through its goal of $25,000 with the help of 423 backers, and the fundraising campaign has 4 days to go.

As we build Gluejar's ungluing books website, we're trying to work out whether the "only six days left" aspect of Kickstarter projects is a necessary ingredient for a crowd-funding site. Since we'll be working to "unglue" books that have already been written and published, they won't disappear if a fundraising goal isn't reached by a given cutoff date. A rights holder that's willing to release a creative commons edition of a book for $10,000 on July 31 will probably still be willing to do so on August 15, so there's not the same time-pressure in an ungluing campaigns.

Questions to answer. Towers to build.

New Buzzwords: Geo-Aware eBooks and Sub-text Annotations

In the magical world of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, true names are very powerful things. Her wizard-protagonist Sparrowhawk is able to gain power over a dragon by virtue of knowing its true name. The "true name" is a recurrent theme in mythology and fantasy literature, not just in Le Guin's work.

To some extent, the enchantment of names and words is a writer's conceit; most authors never get their books published and fewer get their work read, so the idea that a writer's craft has magical power is quite seductive.

A similar thing is going on in the W3C semantic web effort; it has promoted a conceit that bestowing a proper (http) identifier (URI) on a thing imbues it with a first-class objectness.

There are times however, when the act of giving something a name is more than a conceit, it animates something previously ill-defined by allowing attachment of attributes. It allows people to talk and allows talk to become buzz. In the past two weeks, I've twice come across novel literary constructs with names that promise new substance: geo-aware ebooks and subtext annotations. Only time will tell if these will end up as flimsy toy widgets or will give rise to new forms of creative expression.

The sub-text annotation is something being explored by blog pioneer Dave Winer. The emergence of the "blog" as a literary form is an interesting example of how a name can emerge alongside the substance of the thing it names. The name "blog" derives from a joke generally credited to Peter Merholz, that the correct pronunciation of weblog (apparently a 1997 coinage of Jorn Barger) was "we blog".

Winer has been blogging since before the blog had its name and was an important early advocate of the form. By adding syndication to the blog's set of standard features in late 1997, Winer helped shape the substance of the weblog from out of a website morass.

I met Winer after an event on citizen journalism that he organized last week at NYU; he is very engaging and a true New Yorker, although he has only recently come home from a lengthy California sojourn.

A subtext annotation is some text hidden below a paragraph that that can be expanded and collapsed by the reader. This feature comes out of a line of thought about hypertext and reading that includes Rich Ziade's work on the "Readability" bookmarklet. Are hyperlinks good for the reader, or are they distractions? How can annotations be included in electronic text so that they optimally engage the reader while leaving the text with as much impact as possible? Readability strips out inline hyperlinks, replacing them with numbered endnotes. Winer point out that collapsing the annotation into the text makes the rest of the text easier to read.

If there's one thread that has pervaded Winer's work over his entire career, it's the application of hideable, hierarchical text. From the ThinkTank outlining application for the Apple II and PC to the Frontier content management system with its collapsible Usertalk scripting language to weblog syndication itself, it's clear that Winer loves collapsing text. Go over to Scripting News and see a cleaner implementation of sub-text; I struggled a while with Blogger.com getting it to work here, and it looks a bit funny.

Yes, there's a subtext annotation above this paragraph (and below it). Click on a little plus to expand it. I think you'll agree that it's not something so new that it's inexplicable. You've seen collapsing outlines in all sorts of user interfaces before. Blogs often use collapsed text to implement "below the fold". But what happens if the subtext annotation becomes standard on blogs, and gets included in ebook authoring toolkits? Will authors and readers find the subtext annotation more natural, more versatile, and more usable than the endnote annotation or the hyperlink? Will the subtext lead to new forms of narrative or better ways to present information? Doesn't collapsable text seem more natural than a table of contents for ebook navigation?

In a fascinating 2005 interview with Robert X. Cringely, Winer describes his non-magical view of names- he thinks they don't matter!

And, you know, and later on, in 1998, actually, earlier, sorry, I had a - I did work with Microsoft on something called XML R. Then it became XML RPC. Later became SOAP. And we actually had a rule during the collaboration that we're gonna always go for the worst possible name for every element. And that ended all the arguments where people would say, "Well, I've got a better name." I said, "Well, but that's not the point. You could tell me you have a worse name and I would listen to you. But if you've got a better name, I don't wanna know about it."

Speaking of ebooks, Liza Daly is a practitioner of ePUB magic. ePub is the emerging standard delivery format for ebooks; it's based on HTML, so developing an ePUB ebook is a lot like developing a website. In her talk at IDPF two weeks ago, she described the geo-aware ebook for an audience of ebook technologists. The geo-aware ebook is not Liza's invention, but she certainly summoned it into being for us from out of the HTML5 protoplasm. HTML5 includes new scripting APIs that expose system hooks to a an HTML page's javascript. Of particular interest here is the interface to geolocation information.

Try it.

Yes, this annotation knows that you are in your underwear, wondering what this is. Congratulations, you have just experienced the world's very first geo-aware subtext annotation. Or maybe you haven't, because your browser (IE?) doesn't support it or because you've declined to give this page permission to access your geographic position.

A nice chapter on HTML5 Geolocation is in Dive Into HTML 5

My implementation isn't as sophisticated as Liza's. Feel free to leave a comment if you're using current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari and the sentence above still shows "your underwear".

It's an open question as to whether geo-awareness will be widely get used for art as opposed to commerce, but there are sure to be some amazing applications.
The applications to guidebooks and in-ebook advertising are obvious. I imagine a news site akin to Hacker News that ranks stories according to the coordinates of the reader and the contributor.

It's becoming clear to me that the ebook will assume many new forms. Participants in the book industry- publishers, merchants, libraries, editors and of course authors will need to learn how to manage an increasingly diverse and dynamic product. Even if they don't have "true" names or identifiers for them.

The sorcerers of the "Vook" have many dragons to worry about.