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Posts Tagged ‘Management Tool’

All about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple’s iBookstore

Filed under: Odds and ends, Books

Overlooked in much of the hype about the iPad announcement earlier in the week was a comment by Steve Jobs in the Keynote presentation where he mentioned that the iBooks app for iPad would take advantage of the popular EPUB format for electronic books. Since we’re all going to get a lot more familiar with this format in the near future, we felt it would be a good time to provide our readers with more information about EPUB.

EPUB is the same format used by the popular Stanza [free, iTunes link] app for iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and it’s designed for reflowable content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. The IDPF has championed EPUB as a single format that can be used by publishers and conversion houses, as well as for distribution and sale of electronic books.

The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. It supports digital rights management, something that’s sure to warm the cockles of the hearts of publishers, but there’s no DRM scheme that is currently specified as part of the format.

Other ebook readers that currently use the format include the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story.

If you’re a budding publisher and want to get your ebook into the iBookstore, you’ll need a tool to help you create your document in the EPUB format. Of course, we don’t know if just anyone will be able to self-publish for the iBookstore, but Apple does note that they will have books from both “major and independent” publishers available.

For Mac users, the choice of tools is small, but good. First, there’s the free Calibre ebook management tool. Calibre converts a number of different file formats to EPUB, so it’s a good tool for doing an initial conversion. However, to do a lot of formatting, you’ll need a full-powered EPUB editor like Sigil. Sigil is a free open-source editor that runs on a number of platforms including Mac OS X.

Next, there’s the inexpensive (US$49.99 for a single license) iStudio Publisher. iStudio Publisher is a full-fledged desktop publishing application that can export text flows in EPUB format — while that’s good to hear, it’s unclear if iStudio Publisher EPUB files can include photographs or diagrams.

If you happen to be an Adobe InDesign CS4 (US$699) user, you’re in luck. The top-of-the-line tool for design and publishing supports EPUB, and it is possible to create files that will work on Amazon’s Kindle as well. Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, has a complete list of the tools for production and conversion of files here. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a future version of Pages develop into a way to create EPUB documents.

While EPUB is a popular format, it’s not without criticism. The format is great for text-centric books, but is considered unsuitable for publications that require advanced formatting or detailed layout, such as comic books and technical tomes. That could result in some issues for textbook publishers. The lack of a standard DRM scheme could cause the format to splinter into different factions unless Apple forces the issue by adopting an open scheme.

There are also issues with the lack of detail on links within EPUB books. This makes it impossible or difficult to link ebooks, or even provide links within an EPUB book. It appears from the keynote demonstration that Apple has come up with their own “standard” for linking, as there were very active examples of linking from a table of contents to individual pages within an ebook. The standards for annotating EPUB are also lacking, which means that each company using EPUB is coming up with their own way of handling this.

There’s a very good possibility that Apple has created their own in-house standards for DRM, linking, and annotation. If the iPad and iBookstore are the successful products that they can be, Apple could finally force the industry to adopt a more robust EPUB standard.

So, that’s it for our roundup of all things EPUB. As TUAW receives more information about how iBook and the iBookstore are going to work, we’ll be sure to pass it along.

TUAWAll about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple’s iBookstore originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spredfast: How to Keep Up with the Social Web

When we first looked at Spredfast, the social campaign management tool launched today by Austin, Texas-based Social Agency, we thought it looked like a less-flashy version of TweetDeck. Our first question to co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill was actually how the two programs differed and they took it in stride, given how far off the question really was. With big names like IBM, AOL, Cisco, Intel and Porter Novelli using the service, you better bet it does more than manage a handful of social networking accounts and microblogging services.

Spredfast wants to be a new player in the field of social campaign management, and it is set to compete with other big names like Objective Marketer and Radian6.

Sponsor

The entirely Web-based application is a full set of tools to not only manage and measure the message a company sends out among various social media, but also track the people who send the message. With fully customizable user roles and permissions, Spredfast looks like a great way to target multiple audiences on the Web from multiple directions. We think the key word here is multiple. This is a tool that can make a single person appear, to the average Web user, to be an entire community of people talking about your product.

Like single-user tools of this variety, such as TweetDeck or Ping.fm, Spredfast is set up to work with any of the standard social networks. In addition to that, however, it will work with a number of content management systems, from Drupal and Wordpress to Movable Type. And with its user-role management, you can not only say who can post to what, but whether or not it can go live or needs to be reviewed by another user before being published. On-site scheduling and voice management allows a single tweet to be sent out and then be retweeted, in slightly altered forms, by any number of other accounts over time, creating the illusion of a discussion. We may never trust what we see people talking about on the web again.

In addition to multiple users, roles, networks and blogging platforms, Spredfast is also set to handle multiple campaigns. So, if ReadWriteWeb were to suddenly start using the system, for example, we could track activity for ReadWriteStart and ReadWriteEnterprise separately.

That brings us to the last point – tracking and metrics. As of now, the system has already incorporated Google Analytics and is looking to work with Armature and WebTrends in the near future. But even now, it offers full reports on the effectiveness of your message.

Campaigns are judged with three primary measurements – engagement, reach and activity. Put simply, these look at your interaction with your audience, the size of your audience, and how much you are pushing your message out onto the Web. Beyond these basic ranks, however, the system will give you detailed reports showing you how many “likes” you’ve gotten on a specific message on Facebook, or how many times a tweet has been retweeted. But that’s even just the tip of the metrics iceberg, as it keeps stats on each individual tweet, blog post, status update, what have you offering a full variety of data on click-throughs, impressions and whatever you would expect from a traffic analytics service.

Starting today, the system is available on a monthly basis starting at $50 per month, per campaign, for a single user. The “Enterprise” plan, at $100 per month, per campaign, allows for multiple users. Social Agency plans to announce another plan in February that will allow for unlimited users and campaigns, but the details for that are not yet available. For a program with this many features at launch, we only see it getting better.

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Good karma: an in-depth review of Ubuntu 9.10

Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, climbed down from the tree last month with new features and updated software. For five years and eleven releases, the Ubuntu Linux distribution has delivered a capable desktop operating system built largely on open source software. The new version is another important step forward for Ubuntu and its corporate backer Canonical.

The new version offers a user experience that is incrementally better than its predecessors, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Some of the new software introduced in Ubuntu 9.10 feels incomplete and will need a lot more work before it can really shine. This review will take a close look at some of the most significant new features, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu One service and the new Software Center application management tool. We will also examine some of the upstream software from GNOME 2.28 that plays a role in defining key parts of the user experience in Ubuntu 9.10 and give you some technical insight into various architectural components of distro, such as Ubuntu’s unique CouchDB configuration.

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