Exact Editions Blog

We recently discovered that Google was no longer finding the home page of one of our partner publishers because the description of the magazine Quest Bulgaria on their home page was pretty much identical to the description on our system. Our derivative entry knocked them out, rather than the other way round, because our site is busier than theirs…..so given more weight by Google.

This was a puzzling and unwanted result so the publisher quickly changed the description on our … Keep Reading

Google’s Book Search project is possibly their most ambitious undertaking. From one point of view it is an attempt to reverse engineer a proposal entertained by Alan Turing 60 years ago. He was wondering how to design a computer which would have a very large, efficient and affordable digital memory. As a thought experiment he considered the potential for using books ( a library) as a system of machine memory:

We may say that storage on tape and papyrus scrolls

The Association of American Publishers have produced a letter in support of the IDPF‘s EPUB standard. There are so many things wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to start. This quotation is representative of the substance of the letter:

….For books with text that can be reflowed, many publishers would like to create and deliver to retailers and/or wholesalers EPUB files. If a proprietary e-book format is then needed, it is expected that the

This looks pretty interesting (and it looks like the first installment of a multi-part manifesto). I particularly liked her way of putting things here:

The publishing model has evolved over history in a very slow, organic fashion. The sedate pace of change has suited publishers. Stated simply, the journey of a text from author to reader has been a linear one, with publishers traditionally fulfilling the intermediary roles of arbiter, filter, custodian, marketer and distributor. There has been some blurring

Web software has the massive advantage that you can make incremental improvements to a steadily improving service (and web services do seem to steadily improve — we trust that Exact Editions is). There was a small new release for our service today, and users will not notice anything.

The main change is that it makes it easier for us to set up ‘shortcuts’ for content that we are hosting for our clients. It logs the user into the right account … Keep Reading