Open Media Review

Bookworm, O’Reilly Supported Free and Open ePub Bookshelf

As a techie I have used O’Reilly’s non-free bookshelf for technical titles, Safari, on and off over the years. The appeal is understandable, being able to access a virtual book shelf of technical references from anywhere there is internet access. The only reason I do not use it consistently is cost. My technical reading tends to go in waves as I tackle new challenges. During the plateaus I let my subscription to the service lapse because I don’t find myself accessing it enough to warrant the cost.

Regardless of my own cost-based decision, there is a lot else to like as the service has evolved, such as search and PDF copies of chapters and titles. And now O’Reilly Labs is helping to bring a similar offering for our own e-books. The project, Bookworm, was actually developed by Liz Daly who spoke at the recent O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. O’Reilly was apparently so impressed with the tool, they invited Daly to bring it into their R&D space.

Bookworm specifically supports the open ePub format which has been adopted by a number of publishers and is supported by a variety of other tools. One of my favorite free e-book sources, Feedbooks, has an option get download their titles in ePub format. Bookworm offers similar search capabilities to Safari and you can always re-download your ePub files back out of it, a nice option if you want to use it as your main bookshelf but might want to copy books to devices that are not always connected.

Bookworm supports OpenID which is a nice touch as I registered to give the service a try. You are greeted with a free copy of “Pride and Prejudice” to get your shelf started or reminded that O’Reilly now offers ePub as the format for the electronic edition of 30 of its technical titles. There is a tour and an FAQ which helped make getting started pretty simple. The progress through a book is at the level of a chapter, which is better than nothing but arbitrary bookmarks would be a nice future feature. There is a mobile interface that is surprising usable though it does require net access.

For the iPod touch and iPhone, the mobile interface offers a link to open the ePub file in Stanza, a bit of software I have also discussed before. Unfortunately, while Stanza offers a superb disconnected reading experience, it does not sync your place back to Bookworm. Stanza seems to be under pretty active development, so maybe that will change. Hopefully its developers will consider adding direct support for Bookworm. I will say that downloading a book to Stanza via Bookworm is a bit simpler than using the Stanza desktop client, so even without sync between the two tools, this is worth taking a look.

What I really hope is that popularizing the ePub format and supporting such great tools for it, like Bookworm, will put pressure on Amazon and its competitors to give authors and publishers the choice to use ePub if they desire. This sentiment was apparently also pretty strongly expressed at the same ToC conference during one of the morning keynotes by none other than Cory Doctorow.

If someone takes something that belongs to you, and puts a lock on it that you don’t have a key for, that lock isn’t in your best interests.

Doctorow’s Law, I’m going to have to remember that.

Technorati Tags: ebooks, free

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