Open-source ePub with Bookworm

Open source ePub

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Good afternoon. My name is Liza Daly, Iʼm a software engineer and the owner of Threepress Consulting. Iʼm going to talk about the Bookworm ePub reading application and its support for
publishers and developers.

In case youʼve never used it, Bookworm is a web-based ePub reader. Users can upload books in ePub format and then read them online, transfer them to Stanza on the iPhone, and search
and organize their library.

Bookworm
Allows users to add
ePub books to a
library in the “cloud”

Supports full
XHTML/CSS

Indexes full text and
book metadata

Launched June 2008, part
of O’Reilly Labs since
February 2009

The workflow is very simple: you add books via a web form, and then they appear in this library listing shown here. You can click on a book to read it, sort or search your library. Because the
books are rendered in your browser you get full support for all XHTML and CSS features. Itʼs not a book-sharing site; all books you upload are private.

Readers

I think of Bookworm as serving three audiences. The first is obviously the reader, or user of the site. Our users have uploaded more than 13,000 books.

Readers

There are lots of features to support a good online reading experience: one is a choice of different user interfaces. On the left is the default or “TOC” mode, where the bookʼs structure is
revealed. The second is Reading Mode, which provides a very clean, text-centric interface, and on the right is the UI thatʼs optimized for reading on a mobile browser.

Publishers

You can check out the reading features of Bookworm yourself; instead I want to focus on the other two audiences. The first is publishers. If you upload a book to Bookworm that has some
kind of formatting problem, Bookworm provides a lot of diagnostics.

“The file you “Did not get a docTitle from the
uploaded was not NCX, although this is required.”
recognized as an
ePub archive.”
“We detected a
problem with your
ebook that is most
likely related to it
being too big to
display safely in a
web browser.”

“It appears that you’ve uploaded a book that
contains DRM (Digital Rights Management).”
There are a dozen or more plain-English messages to help publishers understand what is wrong with a particular damaged ebook.

http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/

One of the tools that Bookworm leverages to do this is the EpubCheck application by Adobe. If you are producing ePubs and not running them through EpubCheck, well, start doing that.

http://threepress.org/tools/epub-validate

Bookworm talks to EpubCheck via this simple web interface I created. This validator is just a wrapper around EpubCheck for people who donʼt know how to install a standalone Java
program.

In addition to ePub validation services, there is a lot of content on Bookworm thatʼs meant to help publishers work with ePub. This text is from Bookworm; itʼs a list of questions you should be
asking when reviewing an ePub.

Developers

The last audience is developers. The most obvious way Bookworm serves developers is by being open source. It uses the BSD license, which is a so-called permissive license, meaning it
withholds very few rights. You can use Bookworm code in your own application, even if itʼs commercial, without asking my permission.

One of the most valuable pieces in Bookworm has turned out to be the test suite. Bookworm includes more than 100 automated tests which use 50 sample documents. These are sample
ePubs or parts of ePubs that exhibit various characteristics. Almost all of these are based on real books that people tried to upload to Bookworm.

People love to help
with open source

Iʼm going to give one quick use case here about the real economic value provided by open source.

This is a visualization of changes to the Bookworm source code over time. You can see in the upper right that some of these relate to other languages.

First to launch was German

Followed by Danish

Finnish

And weʼre almost done with Spanish, French and Italian.

German
Danish
Finnish
Spanish
Italian
French
Russian
Chinese
Japanese

These translations arenʼt a trivial task: there are 620 translatable phrases or sentences in Bookworm. Many of these were done by employees of publishers in these countries who were
excited about ePub and wanted to use a native-language Bookworm to get buy-in from their organizations to support the format.

$=0

So soon Iʼll have nine translations into major languages with a total cost to me of zero, and a much higher level of engagement in ePub around the world.

Other open-source ePub
EpubCheck
DocBook XSL
TEI to ePub
EPUBGen
AZARDI
Calibre

http://labs.oreilly.com/2009/03/epub-resources-and-guides.html

Of course Bookworm isnʼt the only open source ePub package: thereʼs many more and Iʼve listed some of the major ones here. Thereʼs an even more comprehensive list on OʼReilly Labs.

http://bookworm.oreilly.com/

Liza Daly
liza@threepress.org

Thanks.

Open-source ePub with Bookworm

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