At the time I thought it was just a small discussion, but today I had a long conversation with one publisher that seems intent on moving away from XML to an HTML5 first workflow. Interestingly, they cited similar reasons discussed at LBF, that of over complexities and time-scales of their XML workflows.

They also mentioned that finding in-house XML expertise was becoming more difficult as their own technical staff had not been trained on the XML implementation and their two XML ‘experts’ were about to leave the company. Everyone else only ‘knew’ HTML!

I was not involved in their original move ‘to’ XML, but I do know that their XML workflow does have some issues, but none that are not fixable. However, they seem to have really focused in on HTML5 as the way to go to help them reduce and keep costs down in the future, for example by not having to bring in any future replacement XML expertise.

They are in the process of internally developing an HTML5 based workflow, which I hope to see soon, though of course they seem very guarded about the detail. I still feel that the XML workflow issues can be resolved. But in this case they seem to have lost all confidence in getting back on track with XML

With the abilities of HTML increasing I wonder if there are many other similar publishers that are thinking the same? We will see after some future discussions.

The post XML or HTML5 appeared first on Pubfluence.

It was also interesting to see that the Digital Zone had again increased in size and shows that the organisers have taken it to heart as a major area of the Book Fair – I remember the first attempt when they tried to copy Online’s (now sadly defunct as an exhibition) successful Digital Area. The Digital Zone is now really a big part of the London Book Fair.

There were quite large booths from Kobo, Sony and Samsung as well as a large booth given over to Amazons CreatSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing plus many of regular exhibition attendees. The London Book Fair and in particular the Digital Zone had quite a bit of coverage by the mainstream media this year with the BBC’s Rory Cellen-Jones talking with Kobo’s chief executive Michael Serbinis about the launch of their latest eReader. the Aura.

eReader Language Support

I spent quite a bit of time on the Kobo booth wanting to find out some more about the languages that they would support for content on the Aura in light of recent stories about minority language support on eReaders, in particular with regards to Welsh not being supported on the Kindle.

As can be seen from this screen shot, the Aura will initially support 10 languages including Canadian French and Brazilian Português. It is unknown at this time as to when they will increase support for other languages.

Taking this discussion across to the Sony booth, they seemed to be a step ahead of other eReader players as they offer language support for nearly 20 languages including all of the Scandinavian languages as well as Finnish.

I’ll be posting a more up to date list of eReader Language support in a later post.

Samsung Expands

Meanwhile at the Samsung booth they were showing off their Samsung Books and Samsung Learning platforms, they currently support similar languages to the Kobo and Amazon eReaders, but I am waiting for a more accurate response from them. The Samsung booth was quite interesting as they had a comprehensive display of their tablets and smart-phones, allowing one to compare the same content across the various devices as well as the different versions of Android that they support. Interestingly, Samsung stated that they have now withdrawn their eBook App from the Android Play Store and is now only available for download from within their content store and for Samsung devices only, however you can load it onto and share the content across 6 Samsung devices.

Samsung’s Learning Platform looked interesting, but they did not go into too much detail about that on the booth so will have to come back to that in another post.

More eReaders & Service Companies

TrekStor, a German device manufacture also introduced some updated eReaders and Tablets along with Power-Bank, a Li-ion based portable USB battery – in case you’re suddenly short of a local electricity supply for your devices.

There seemed to be fewer service companies at this years show, perhaps the numbers have reached a saturation point! However, those that were there offered the usual suite of services and conversion packages. An presentation given in one of the two Digital Zone theatres talked about a fully automated workflow for PDF content being transformed into fixed layout ePub3 eBooks. Of course, we did not get to see any of the actual work done to achieve this!

XML or HTML5

One interesting item that came out of discussions with a few of the service companies was that they were being told by some of their clients that they were thinking of moving away from XML first workflows to HTML5 first workflows. This has certainly got the service companies I talked with a bit perplexed. Some of their clients had cited costs, some had cited complexities and time-scales of XML workflows. It’s an interesting talking point for discussion in another post I think.

Overall, it was a worth while trip, my meetings were partly productive and I also managed to get around outside of the Digital Zone to see some wonderfully illustrated books, plus it wasn’t over crowded.

Anyway, more to follow in other posts soon.

The post London Book Fair Update appeared first on Pubfluence.

It’s been a busy year for all in the Publishing business, not least from a technology point of view with various eReaders/Tablets appearing and a number of new publishing ventures – mostly Cloud based – being launched.

Amazon of course has had its share of focused commentary over the past few days with some interesting coverage, but Kobo seems to have received some good coverage for its launch of their latest eReader, The Aura. You can see an interesting interview with Kobo’s chief executive Michael Serbinis by the BBC’s Rory Cellen-Jones (@BBCRoryCJ) talking about the Aura. Does the world need another dedicated eReader? I suppose the market will tell us in a short while.

As an interesting aside, Serbinis mentioned that they now support over 70 languages on their eReaders, and on the list are? Interestingly, the Aura will only initially support English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese. More will follow according to the Aura FAQ’s.

There seems to be a good buzz about this years Book Fair so far as I can tell – I am visiting tomorrow – so will see what other new trends are appearing as the Publishing business continues to evolve in this ever changing digital age.

Part of my visit is to meet up with some potential new clients as my current projects are nearing their ends. Let’s hope for some good results.

The post London Book Fair is here again. appeared first on Pubfluence.

As the article goes on to discuss, a number of smaller independent publishers continue to champion the publishing of minority language Books across a range of languages including Tlingit (Alaskan), Manx (Isle of Man) and Occitan (Southern France) to name a few.  So it is surprising that the major eBook publishers have not done more to help with the support of minority languages through their eBook platforms, Amazon’ s eBook platforms for example do not even support the Welsh language!

From technical point of view it’s not a big task to support any language on modern day technology platforms so it is disappointing that the current batch of dedicated eReading platforms support such a narrow set of languages.

A quick search of relevant eReader websites seems to indicate that…

Nook supports – Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Kobo supports – English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese – though I understood that Kobo was now also supporting a number of R to L languages.

Amazon supports – English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Cyrillic (such as Russian), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Korean

Sony supports – Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. I understand that Sony also supports some R to L languages, which ones though were not clear to me.

As can be seen from the above quick list, not many of the 7,000 approx. world-wide languages are being supported and with Amazon pulling unsupported language eBooks from its Kindle store, a massive business opportunity is surely being seriously missed. However, one company, Snapplify seems to be making some headway in this direction. More on this is a later post.

The post eBook Supported Languages. Why are there so few? appeared first on Pubfluence.

What’s available?

We’ve had a look at various companies and have put together a short table to show what’s on offer from the most popular companies. There are of course many more companies offering Cloud Storage, however we have only looked at those offering introductory free deals (although these companies do charge a fee if you then find you need extra space).

We’ve included basic information such as what the entry level is and indications of the charges for increasing the size of your ‘Digital Cloud’. More information can be found by looking at the companies information pages – see the links we have provided.

Other factors to consider when looking at Cloud Storage

Max Individual files size upload?

You need to look at this in detail, if you are looking to upload large files including videos, their size may influence which Cloud Service you choose.

Where are your files stored?

Cloud storage means that your files are stored on file servers somewhere on the Internet, they could be located in any country in the world and that means your digital files could be subject to laws that are different to the UK’s own laws. You need to check that you are happy with the relevant Terms & Conditions (T’s & C’s) that you should read – we really mean that – before you upload any files to a Cloud Storage provider.

Longevity and other aspects of a Cloud Storage Provider.

How new is the company? How long has the company been in business? How stable are they. Some of the other questions that you need to think about before you place your digital files in their caring hands.

Broadband Upload usage

You also need to check that the amount of data that you will upload and therefore at some stage download again will not break any of the Fair Use rules of your Internet Service Providers T’s & C’s. This may affect you, even though you have an ‘unlimited’ data broadband deal.

Backups – Do you still need to make them?

Am I not making a backup up of my data by using Cloud Storage? I hear you ask. Yes you are, but what about if you can’t get to the files through a broadband connection issue or you’ve lost your log-in details or your Cloud Storage provider is off-line? All plausible problems.

I have always been in favour of making local backups of my digital content. With the cost of USB external disks at very reasonable levels – typically a 500GB disk can be purchased for around £60.00 – I would suggest that you still need to keep a local backup copy of your data despite uploading them to a Cloud Storage location.

For me the benefits of Cloud Storage are the sharing of files amongst work colleagues, friends & family, access to the files from any location on any device when you need it and of course another place for a backup.

Conclusion

Cloud Storage options will continue to grow over time as more choices appear and as Broadband speeds continue to increase, their use will also increase (BT Infinity 160Mb). Here’s a recent discussion about Amazon and Google, both vying for your custom.

We hope that you find this short review helpful. If you have any comments or know of a provider that we should include, let usssss know.

Finally, what do we use? We use DropBox (now at 32GB free storage after a free 23GB gift from HTC for a One SV free smartphone upgrade!) for auto photo uploads from Android devices, Google Drive for large data/file storage & BT Cloud for sharing of large data files.

The post Free Cloud Storage for your Digital Data appeared first on Pubfluence.

The two that stand out for me, were the recent Goodreads Survey – What’s Going On With Readers Today which was presented at the recent O’Reilly TOC conference in New York and today’s Digital Book World (DBW) post – Five Shades of Book Discovery by Andrew Rhomberg one of the founders of Jellybooks,

I’ve had shown the Goodreads slides to a number of people at a recent book club meeting who are not involved in the publishing business and see very little of the daily ‘chatter’ that surrounds the subject of publishing. They agreed that Goodreads had the discovery responses more or less pegged except for the item in the survey/fact that only two out of eleven of them had heard of Goodreads! Perhaps that’s one of the differences between the USA and the UK readers. However, I can say that after that discussion, all eleven said they would join Goodreads.

The DBW post is equally as interesting in its detail – I suppose that is to be expected based on the authors background – that aside, it seems to plot a similar path in covering what is involved in a Multi-Step book discovery process.

I certainly fit into a number of these categories, i.e. looking for recommendations from friends, reading reviews in newspapers and looking at what books other people are talking about on social networking sites. I do also look at the recommendations on Amazon, based on previous purchases, (though not getting it always right) – my wish list (more of a holding area till I decide where to purchase) still has some 30 books in it; ready for when I have got through my current ‘to be read’ pile of 20+ books.

Book discovery is improving and there are now many more ways to find a particular book that you want – apart from that 1979 edition of Hugh Johnsons Pocket Wine Book that I want – and with more sites like Goodreads and Jellybooks appearing, let’s hope it continues that way.

The post Book Discovery – Still a multi-step process appeared first on Pubfluence.

It’s an interesting article that raises a number of good points and along with some very robust comments makes it a must read piece. The past few weeks has also seen the discussion about eBooks widening with the introduction of the subject of Books and API’s (see a previous post on the subject) which will also add to the discussion about ePubs and where they fit into the ever changing future of Publishing.

For those interested, this subject with be come up in the weekly #eprdctn Twitter discussion due at 4pm (UK time) this afternoon. The topic is sure to continue to generate more intense debate over the coming weeks.

The post ePubs – The discussion hots up. appeared first on Pubfluence.

There’s been some interesting posts of late about making books more open by creating API’s for them. Although I did not attend this years TOC conference in New York, the topic came up in one form or another in a number of different peoples presentations. Including Hugh McGuire/Alistair Croll – TOC Info, presentation on Slidesshare, and Laura Dawson – TOC info.

API’s for Books are a relatively new appearance (though API’s for all sorts of systems/data etc. have themselves been around for many years). As can be seen in this listing by Wendell Santos at the ProgrammableWeb- 53 Books APIs: Google Books, Goodreads and SharedBook, (via @hughmcguire) there are quite a few for Books already. Pearson have also published information about the Penguin Classics API as referenced in aTweet from Anthony Levings (@SketchyTech), of course many of these API’s are behind many of the Mash-ups/App’s that people use on a daily basis.

Where to start with a Book API? Hugh McGuire had posted this interesting article earlier this month about how an Index of a book would be a good starting point for a Book API and expanded on that in his TOC presentation.

I can certainly see this technical path working as a way of presenting more detailed information from within a book as content for exposure to the outside world via an API. One example of why is based on some work I did a while ago; a large regulatory publisher who had started to move from paper to digital had populated their new subscriber only website with the digital content. The website had a very sophisticated text and keyword search engine and really delivered a new way of looking at the regulatory content for the subscriber.

However, because the subscribers had used the sophisticated Index sections of the paper books so extensively before the website version came along that wanted to see if it was possible to add this to the website as another way of searching/viewing the digital content. To cut a long story short, the plan was to extract the index files (which went to four/five levels) from the original typesetting software and after some additional technical work, upload that into the website. Unfortunately, I was not involved with the end delivery, but I understand that the ‘online’ index information has allowed the website subscribers to ‘view’ the digital content in a number of new and very specific ways.

The discussions about the use of a book index as the basis for a Book API seem to be gradually expanding as can be seen by these comments to Laura Dawson’s (@ljndawson) recent post, as well as these recent posts from (@SletchyTech) – Go forth and API: Three Steps to Monetising the Book of the Future and Hashtags not Hyperlinks: The index of the future.

This is a subject well worth following over the coming months. I know I will be.

The post Books and API’s appeared first on Pubfluence.

Well, I now know the workings of a WordPress website a lot more than I did a week ago. I woke this morning to find that the website had been suspended by my hosting company because they had found some malicious/hacking code in one of the .php files belonging to a WP plug-in. Ironically it was a plug-in that is supposed to stop spam comments from overloading WP sites.

Originally the website had been hacked over the last weekend and although I thought that I had (with my then level of WP knowledge) found all the messed up files, according to the hosting company the hackers had kindly left copies of their stuff in other locations on the server.

What fixed it?

There were a number of steps I needed to do (after talking with Tech. Support at the hosting company) to get this finally sorted out and in case anyone is interested I’ve listed them below.

• Restored my last backup – The WP site is not a big website. However, I do have some other sites on the same shared server at the hosting company, so I have always run an automatic full backup at the end of every week along with daily incremental. I have also always exported the WP files using the default WP export tool – that gives you an XML file of all the Pages/Posts and WP Database. The Techie at the hosting company restored my full back after I had uploaded it via FTP.
• Changed all the login passwords and the FTP/MySQL passwords on the website/server.
• Changed the WP Secret Keys that are discussed in this WP document, apparently even if you change your log-in passwords, you might still be vulnerable. Changing this information means that everyone that needs to  access the site has to log in afresh again.
• Deleted and reinstalled all the WP Plug-in. I had a long discussion about this with the Techie at the hosting company as they would not guarantee that there might not be any malicious code still lurking around the WP Plug-in directory even after restoring the main backup. I only have 10 plug-in’s so it was not a big job to do it, but I can imagine on a large WP site it would be a nightmare! Another tip, take a lot of screen snaps of your Plug-in settings before you delete any, you’ll never remember all of the settings from memory.
• When you’ve done all of that and the site is back up, plug-ins running okay etc. Make another full back up and reset the incremental backups again.

Further reading

Another set of information I was pointed at by the hosting company, was this set of Hardening WordPress codex pages. There is a lot of information here which I will have to go through and see what extra precautions I need to take. Hopefully I am out of the woods for now and won’t have this issue again.

Now back to some normal work!!

The post Fixed issues with website and learnt a bit more! appeared first on Pubfluence.

Anyway, as I have mentioned in the past, making sure that you have valid backups is one of the most vital points in preserving your data/website/content etc.

I am not a big WordPress ‘under-the-hood’ expert, but after a quick search of the WordPress Codex, I identified what was needed to fix it and restored the relevant files from my backup of Friday. As well as the nightly backups that take place, I always also make an export to XML (there’s that acronym again) of my content via the WordPress tools option.

Need to do a bit more of an investigation and talk with my Web Hosting Company – UK2.Net – about how this may have happened, but the moral of this tale has to be, always make backups.

Update – 14:00 10th Feb. 2013

Looked further into this as I still can’t get any response from the Web Hosting Company I think what happened is that the hacker got into the server at the Web Hosting Company and simply replaced all the content in my index.html (non WP sites) and index.php files with their stuff.

I am not sure how many other companies are sharing the same server, but it will be interesting to see happens over the next few hours. I have seen one tweet referencing the Web Hosting Company, but as yet no details. Worrying.

The post We were hacked, but backups rule. appeared first on Pubfluence.