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Learning a bit about the EPUB format

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Shopping cart suggestion to buy an EPUB book

Screenshot of the shopping cart letting me know I could buy an EPUB version

I was buying some books on Rosenfeld Media, when the shopping cart suggested I buy Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting and that it was available in the EPUB format for iPhone and Sony Reader.

Although I was intending to buy the physical book, for curiosity I decided to also give the EPUB version a go. A few weeks ago I briefly glanced over an article What Web Designers need to know about EPUB (via Russ Weakley’s Some links for light reading) but hadn’t delved further so I thought it would be a good chance to learn more.

I completed my order, downloaded the EPUB file, and then realised I didn’t know how to view it! (Note: I didn’t mind figuring it out for myself and although Rosenfeld Media don’t currently have instructions for using EPUB files they have let me know that they will be improving the experience of buying EPUB books as they ramp up their EPUB publishing.) A little research and I found a number of applications including Stanza which is available as an iPhone app and a desktop program. Their instructions helped me to transfer the EPUB file from my PC to my iPhone via wifi - in the end a simple process.

Poking around Stanza on my iPhone I found that I could download other books, many offered free by publishers or through lapsed copyright, and some paid books. I realised I had previously used a similar app to download a few books but perhaps I’d stumbled on a poorly built app as I wasn’t too awestruck by the idea of reading on my phone at the time. Stanza’s interface and interactions, while a little clunky, are alright and “Card Sorting” is formatted well for reading on screen while I wait for the physical book to arrive.

I realise that the EPUB format has been around for a number of years but it feels like it’s been one of those ideas floating around waiting for technology to catch up. Sure, the iPhone might not be the ideal reading interface but the Kindle, iPad, and whatever else comes next means that people who might be unable to access good (or any) book shops/are environmentally conscious/want to save some money/want to try before they buy/etc have a much easier method to do so. Australian books are pricey which I presume is due to the distance books have to travel from overseas, or because the shipping orders are small due to our small population, so providing access to quality information in affordable and environmentally friendly ways is a step in a good direction.

I know that I won’t be giving up on my much-loved bookshelves any time soon, but in the same way that digital music downloads of single tracks encourages me to try more artists without spending a lot of money on CDs, I expect I’ll now “try” more books before I buy physical copies.

Now if only the various publishers, hardware developers, software developers, etc could agree on a single format for e-books and sort out the whole DRM mess!

A few links I’ve stumbled on while looking for more EPUB information:

On reflection as I hit “Publish” this begins to feel like an ignorant post, but I actually don’t know anyone who owns a Kindle or an e-reader, and I’ve been very much in love with the physical flipping of book pages since I was a child. From my choice to download an EPUB book and having a good experience with it, I’m now much more willing to give e-books a go.

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Recent reads - using data

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The Birth (And Death) of Market Research: Why Design Research Will Prevail (Sam Ladner)

This article suggests that summary statistics relied on by market research companies are no longer relevant and qualitative research of the long tail is where the money’s at:

  • “Design research uncovers how long-tail niches develop and what differentiates them.”
  • “…design research is about knowing what to build as well as evaluating the prototype.”

When Data Gets Up Close and Personal (Stephen Anderson)

A good contemplative piece about tracking performance and creating feedback cycles. As an example, Stephen has considered how you could make a “game” out of email by considering motivating factors and presentation of progress.

  • “What we’re really talking about is setting up systems whereby individuals can (1) see in a tangible way (2) reflect on, and (3) learn from their past behaviors.”
  • “Get creative with how you represent the data– our brains will thank you for that with extra attention.”

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures (OkTrends - Christian)

Well… the post is about dating site profile pictures, but I think that it’s a good showcase for data analysis. They’ve done extensive research and they’re using it to give advice to their users = users get more successful results from the site = spreading the word to friends = more money for the business.

The 2 in 100 who might matter most - your core web audience (Seb Chan)

Seb Chan from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum provides an example of how he looks deeper in to the museum’s site traffic data to realise that 2% of people are visiting the site 10 or more times in a quarter.

  • “Whilst we all like the big figures of casual visitors we get to our websites many institutions, having flirted with social media, we are beginning to realise that casual visitors, much like casual visitors through the door of a museum, aren’t so useful for building sustained co-creative relationships with.”
  • “This 2.10% is one that needs a lot more analysis as does the ‘5 or more’ category. How do they arrive at our site? What are they looking for? What do they spend most time looking at?”

Analysis Ninjas: Move Beyond The Top Ten. Find Love (/Insights) (Avinash Kaushik)

  • “You know what is the one thing stopping you from finding truly actionable insights from your web data? Web analytics gems lie deep in the data and we spend our lives looking at the top ten rows of data.”

This article encourages investigation of the long tails in site traffic data to pin-point opportunities and shows how to make sense of what at first might seem like data overload. Avinash provides examples of how to apply advanced table filtering in Google Analytics, generate tag clouds (I’ve given this a try with a client’s search keyword data and it sprouted some very useful visuals), and how to set up keyword trees with Juice Analytics.

Back to Basics: Tip for exporting rows (Google Analytics blog)

This is a brief tutorial to show that while Google Analytics allows you to export up to 500 rows of data normally,   to export more (eg. all your search keyword terms) you can add &limit=xxxx (where xxxx is a number more than the total number of results) to the URL and then download the CSV to retrieve all the data.

Charting the Beatles (Michael Deal)

Beautiful infographics [swoon] !

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Recent reads - accessibility

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Web accessibility myths (Ian Pouncey)

“…open content that is inaccessible to 50% of people is better than content that is never published. Ideally it is published with a license that allows others to take it and convert it to different forms which may be accessible, but this isn’t possible if it only exists in a file on someone’s desktop.”

Testing for Accessibility (The Pennsylvania State University)

Suggested protocols and tools for testing web sites for accessibility.

[Draft] Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites (W3C)

Advice from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative on how to approach companies with inaccessible web sites and the type of information those companies may need in order to help them make their web sites more accessible.

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Tribes and influence

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Last night I watched a video of  Seth Godin talking about tribes, influence and generating change on ted.com.

The idea of starting something is often a “requirement” in digital projects - a steep increase in participation, brand loyalty, brand advocacy - however the execution is often lacking key ingredients and falls short of expectations. Books such as Chip and Dan Heath’s “Made to Stick” look at ways to make things memorable, and I think a hook is invaluable in “creating” (and maintaining) tribes.

Seth Godin is compiling a list of tribe building tactics with the help of, you guessed it, a tribe.

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Admit to mistakes

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Things go wrong from time to time - you misread the ingredients when baking a batch of biscuits and end up with baked gloop, or you send an email to the wrong person because you momentarily rely on your email program’s auto-addressing. In these scenarios you admit to the mistake and do not serve gloop to your guests hoping they won’t notice, or you send an apology to the confused email recipient.

Public errors can be embarrassing but if you cover them up, especially with the immediacy of blogging, twittering, and status updates, a few disgruntled people can cause a snowball of bad feeling against a brand.

I received a newsletter from Air New Zealand and was happy to see them prominently admit to an error with their unsubscribe functionality that might have caused some people who had previously unsubscribed to receive the latest newsletter. Although the issue did not affect me personally, it makes me feel good that they took the effort to acknowledge their mistake.

Even if I was affected by the issue, the simple explanation and instructions on how to unsubscribe would have left me feeling satisfied that they were owning the mistake and caring for me as a person by helping me unsubscribe easily.

Air New Zealand's Amail

Air New Zealand's Amail

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Tweeting from digital agencies

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Chris Lake has tried to track down the twitter accounts of the top 50 UK interactive agencies (as ranked by New Media Age) in his Econsultancy post Digital agencies on Twitter (or are they?). While looking at who is practicing what they preach he found that of the top 50, a couple of agencies are very active on twitter, some slightly active, others have only claimed their names, while many are no where to be seen.

He suggests “roughly a 25% adoption rate” so I decided to spin some numbers for a closer look and found that if you include those who have at least claimed their names then this boosts the figure to 36%, or 18 out of the 50 agencies.

Out of those 18 agencies with twitter accounts, only 33% are independently owned - this surprised me as I had assumed that independent agencies may be more inclined and less restricted by red-tape to leap on to twitter. On the other hand I did have a correct hunch when I found that 67% of the twittering agencies, whether independent or otherwise, have less than 100 staff members - perhaps smaller companies find it easier to react to new technologies and co-ordinate engagement.

Breaking down the types of agencies that are twittering: 67% classify as Marketing, 22% as Design & Build, and 11% as Technical.

The comments to Chris’ post vary from minor debate about whether or not to judge an agency on its twitter presence to pointing out that individuals within the companies are often active tweeters even if there isn’t a company presence. Some responses question the point behind setting up a company account.

Claiming your company brand is useful to avoid brand-squatters and communicating via twitter can help to spread news. A central account can provide a link between staff, helping employees to connect, and potential employees to explore further in to the agency. Depending on the type of agency, a company twitter account can be used to:

  • Share information and findings
  • Seek advice on solving issues
  • Update industry friends or inquisitives about latest campaigns
  • Link to useful articles
  • Develop partnerships with local businesses
  • Promote your business
  • Encourage staff knowledge-sharing
  • Provide an accessible point of contact
  • Announce job vacancies
  • Demonstrate the culture of the company to potential employees
  • Access a community willing to give you a few minutes for testing/feedback
  • Spread the word about industry events
  • Have a laugh

It doesn’t hurt to think about defining some measurements (they might just help you with your next social media pitch) but remember that not all metrics are equal. If you’re interested in measuring twitter success, I’d recommend reading yongfook’s recent post, Social Media ROI, which provides helpful tips and examples of defining metrics.

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