The secret among those who have poked around EPUB, the open specification for ebooks, is that an .epub file is really just a website, written in XHTML, with a few special characteristics, and wrapped up. It’s wrapped up so that it is self-contained (like a book! between covers!), so that it doesn’t appear to be a website, and so that it’s harder to do the things with an ebook that one expects to be able to do with a website. EPUB is really a way to build a website without letting readers or publishers know it.

But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious — but frightening — step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications.

Hugh McGuire on the future of books and publishers as API providers.

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Books in the Age of the iPad

From today (or actually from six months ago if you were sniffing around some of our new novels on the Penguin website) you can download the opening chapter (or chapters) of all Penguin’s new fiction for free. Yes, that’s right. FREE. For nothing. In pdf form — which you can print, email, view on your PC screen or a Blackberry, Palm or iPhone — these Tasters offer you the very beginnings of Penguin’s latest novels. You can get your mitts on some great stories without having to give a jumped-up calculator the keys to your bank account. It’s an entirely risk-free way to discover new authors, to read new stories (and to pass them on to your literate friends).

I’ve been quite effusive in my praise of Penguin before, but I think deservedly so. They seem to relish in experimenting with what it means to be a publisher in this day and age, and it’s a joy to watch them innovate.

(Disclaimer: My employer was recently purchased by Pearson, who also own Penguin. Make of that what you will)

The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There’s some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you’ve never seen before. You’re still really inside some annotated version of your own head.

- William Gibson, interviewed on the Amazon Bookstore Blog

Hat tip: Boing Boing

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