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We just posted an application and wiki entry for a new experimental FTP deployment client for ePublisher. Anyone interested in using FTP(S) for deployment, please give it a go and give us feedback.  Please comment either on the wiki page or this blog post.

I am concerned that for myself, and as a company, a lack of objectivity when it comes to designing systems which lay users can feel comfortable customizing, constitutes a significant blind spot. There are, I’m told, plenty of people who are not developers.  There are those who may feel put off by our recipes for customizing your ePublisher projects; creating folders, copy and pasting code, and so on.  I would like to hear from you. In particular, I’m interested in how you feel about ePublisher customization. Do you customize? Is the process intuitive? Are there things that you would like to customize, but you find yourself protesting, “But I’m not a developer!” when you find out what’s involved.

In brief, here is the excerpt from Apple’s FAQ regarding this use case:

Can I download books from other websites?

Yes, you can download freely available ePub files on your Mac or PC. Using iTunes 9.2 or later, add them to your iTunes library choosing File > Add to Library, or drag the ePub file to the Books library on your computer. To read these books, simply sync them to your device.

Since the launch of ePublisher 2010.2, which included the new ePub format, I have been spending time with the iBooks app to see how I like it. That’s what I want to talk about in this article. What are my impressions, prejudices, likes, dislikes and so on.

First of all, I come to the iBooks app with a little bit of baggage. In the eight years that I have been a Quadralay employee, we have delivered content optimized for mobile devices in the Microsoft Reader and Palm eReader offerings. I personally spent some time using the eReader on my Palm Treo a number of years ago. I liked it fine. However, based on the small number of inquiries about these portable reader formats and the lack of any Support cases associated with them, I assumed that while useful, the portable reader platform was little more than a novelty. Also, I should note that in October of 1999 I went to work for the “since-2001-defunct” ibooks.com. This company was venture-capital-funded company whose corporate vision was to be a library for print books online, not at all unlike the iBooks idea.

My first impression was apathy. The “new” format appeared to do much of the same types of things that the eReader did, and honestly, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be into reading books online. I’ve wondered if the effects of spending so much mental energy in a hyper (meaning a non-linear, storybook, literary world) world would mean that I’d never really read “books” again, in the way I did pre-2000.

Then i got an iPhone 4. So, now I had hardware that would run the iBooks app, the first order of business was to install the app and put some ePublisher output onto my iPhone 4. Hmmm… How to do that? Turns out that this can be accomplished by taking the *.epub file that ePublisher generates and drag it into the “Books” tag of the iPhone in iTunes, then Sync the iPhone.

Once I had done this, I was able to view the ePublisher ePub output on the iPhone and it looked good. It looked fine. It looked how I expected it to look, but I confess that it wasn’t of much interest to me because I used content that I had read and reread many times. I didn’t feel compelled to actually spend time in the app. I noted that the formatting was rendering correctly and briefly familiarized myself with the Table of Contents and other navigation features. There was not too much there which impressed me. Many of these same features were available in the other portable device formats ePublisher has been long shipping.

Then, a few days ago, I decided that it might be worthwhile to actually buy a book from the iTunes store, do the whole user experience. I sort of did this, in the end opting to “purchase” the free short storyShatterboy by Scott William Carter. While it was a very short read, the experience was not terrible enough for me to wonder how I might feel about reading something longer. So I “purchased” the freely available “The Winter’s Tale” and I’m into Act IV.

Now, for the denouement: iBooks is very well done and because it is delivered on a device which is imminently useful, at least to me, I feel very positive about iBooks. Shakespeare is chock-full of arcane allusions and archaic vocabulary. iBooks‘ easy linking to a dictionary and web search offer the next best thing to a fully annotated Shakespeare volume. Also the note and highlight facilities, again, while not necessarily revolutionary, are put together in such a way that I feel I could manage all of my textbooks on my phone, were I still a student. I have long lamented my inability to bookmark or search PDFs on the iPhone. The fact that all of these features are also available for any PDF is a huge boon.

Finally, as an experience, there is the potential that this platform could become a viable collaboration client. This is generically of interest to me and Quadralay.

The real rubber meets the road, however, when it comes to the question of “what is commercially viable?” While it might be an interesting demo, it appears that there is not much interest in an ePublisher Google Docs adapter. Similarly, I have thought about and mostly implemented an Open Document input adapter, but again the primary concern about publishing such an adapter is that no one will want it or use it. Our larger ratio of FrameMaker users to Word and DITA users is pretty lopsided. But the fact remains that ePublisher is a viable tool for scenarios beyond technical publishing with FrameMaker input.

Before I was in development, I did consulting for users who wanted to do something custom with ePublisher that was not supported out of box. It was during this period that a lot of ideas regarding what’s possible with the platform began to fall out. As we are not as much in the consulting business anymore, I feel that I’ve lost contact a little with some of the non-standard use cases. It is precisely these cases that interest me most. If you are someone who is using ePublisher in a way that doesn’t fit the traditional model, I am very interested in your story.

I started a wave with Ben to try to get some feedback on this topic and he made the following comments:

Well, I think the focus problem boils down to there being so many ideas that are fun to work on, but getting any one of those “fun” ideas into a state you can ship takes most (all?) the fun out of the process.

The other issue is trying to bound time spent on defects and creating value with new ideas. The problem is that one of these has known customer value (defects), while the other is unproven. The more we can “prove value” on the new ideas, the easier it becomes to focus on one thing and get success.

So how do we do that? How do we prove value? Generally, I prefer the “throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks” approach, hence, the Google Docs adapter. I admit that this might not be the fastest approach, but it’s effective because it always deals with working code. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of code you have to throw away to get something to stick, but if you don’t mind that, it seems to work OK.

Another approach is to try to eliminate or mitigate the amount of throw-away code you write by trying to guage whether an idea will be commercially viable before you ever write any code. Logically, this approach makes a lot of sense. However, in both cases it seems that effort is being applied to an idea which may or may not be of interest and there’s dross in either result. It appears that in 2010, based on discussions I’ve had with Ben, we may begin trying the latter approach; building models or molds of an idea without actually coding it, to see if there is interest.

I should note that the purpose of the Projects section on the webworks wiki is to solicit ideas for features or uses, with the idea being that one of the developers would put time toward some of the items there. This remains a goal, but for the moment, one that I personally have not spent much time trying to develop.

• This is not currently available and there are no definite plans for making this a part of any ePublisher release. That largely depends on user interest (your interest).
• The implementation is a demo. As such, there are aspects which will needs require further development.
• This is my first-ish screen-recording.

Google Docs Demo