Adam C. Engst has a propensity for being first.
When your author had the pleasure of interviewing “ACE” for Seattle magazine and the cover story, “Who’s Building Our Dot.com Empire,” Adam was selected as a “first string” pick as one of the Emerald City’s original Internet pioneers for his groundbreaking book, The Internet Starter Kit and his weekly publication, a first-of-breed Mac newsweekly known worldwide as TidBITS. For many, The Internet Starter Kit was both the entry vehicle and the on-ramp to the global Internet’s express lane. (That’s Adam as “action-figure” holstering the book below, on right)
Last month, Adam scored yet another first, this time releasing with Aussie partner Peter Lewis, a dedicated EPUB Reader, the first built from the ground-up exclusively for the Apple Macintosh desktop. Putting two firsts together, if one were to read the Internet Starter Kit on “Bookle,” the name of the new EPUB Reader, they would be holding two “aces” in their hand, and these “bullets” beat all other hands when it comes to pairing the look and feel of the Apple Macintosh. Got an EPUB Reader for the iPhone or iPad? Bookle brings your EPUBs home to the Mac desktop for a reading experience across untold millions of literary titles.
Project Gutenberg has now made almost all their titles available in the industry ebook standard EPUB and all are DRM-free (DRM=Digital Rights Management)! Google Books allows users to download over one million public domain books in the EPUB format.
Bookle 1.4 provides the core features needed for reading any DRM-free EPUB, the “free-form” user-controllable brand of electronic reading that “shape-shifts” into the ideal viewing experience be it on a mobile phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer. Unlike the PDF format, EPUBs let readers customize the font, size, and background color on a per-title basis. What’s more, Bookle can even read EPUBs out loud.
As another kind of “first,” we asked Adam to retrace the invention of Bookle from page one.
Seattle24x7: What’s the best way to think about EPUB books? How are they different?
ACE: EPUB is essentially a reflowable format. It’s the Website page reinvented. There is no fixed concept of a page in EPUB. A PDF is page-based. EPUB is not.
Seattle24x7: That seems tailor made for devices like a smartphone. It’s often hard to read something designed for the desktop on a smaller device.
ACE: The reality is that a page-based format is next-to-impossible to read on a small screen. Because it just shrinks! What has happened is that people find EPUB a better format for reading on iPhone, so they say to themselves, I’ll start to accumulate my library in EPUB format. Then they find they cannot read these books on their Macs. With Bookle, they can!
Seattle 24×7: It’s a big screen vs. small screen dichotomy?
ACE: Yes. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the small screens, but sometimes you’ve got a big screen, and you want to read on it. Or you’re work on a larger screen and you need to have an EPUB book on screen as your reference while you’re working. This scenario is going to be present more and more as EPUB takes over. We’ve got an interesting kind of format war cropping up.
Seattle24x7: Who are the contestants in this war?
ACE: You’ve got PDFs, EPUBS and now Apple’s iBooks as another new, wild card. And there’s Amazon’s format, entitled Kindle 8, which is EPUB plus some proprietary stuff. It’s readable only by Kindle devices and Kindle apps.
Seattle24x7: How did you and Peter Lewis of Stairway Software manage to collaborate?
ACE: I first met Peter face-to-face in Seattle in 1994 when we were both doing stuff in the days of the early Internet. While in the U.S. for a conference, he wound up journeying to Seattle and stayed for a week. We visited with him in Australia in 98. Peter is one of the best in the industry, the developer of Keyboard Maestro and Interarchy among other superb titles.
Seattle24x7: You are both using UserVoice.com to gather feedback for future versions of Bookle?
ACE: Yes. We are totally aware of the fact that Bookle is a 1.0 program. That was utterly intentional. People have very specific ideas about how they think things should work, and that’s absolutely great. We want to hear all of those ideas for improving Bookle.
Seattle24x7: One of the new factors in Mac software development is the Mac App Store. How do you find it working?
ACE: With the Mac App Store, we can push out small, incremental upgrades much more frequently. However, one new issue is “sandboxing.” Sandboxed apps have to hold their information in a very specific place. So, let’s say you have a 2.0 version upgrade, something major, and you want to charge an upgrade fee. Well, you can’t, exactly. Ordinarily, if you have a 1.0 product and you want to tell everyone about 2.0, you could invite them to upgrade. With the App Store, all of those users are Apple’s customers not yours. And so you have no way to alert them to the fact that there is something new.
Seattle24x7: You also run TakeControl Books which has published an extraordinary number of titles on using the iPhone, iPad and iMac more effectively, and available in both PDF and EPUB format.
ACE: Every download of Bookle comes with a free copy of a Guide to using the software published by our Take Control imprint. In fact, you can downlaod and view the free Guide to Bookle pre-purchase.
Seattle24x7:TidBITS, your well-known Macintosh newsweekly, just created a “membership” program. What can you tell us about it?
ACE: After many years Tidbits created a membership program which is basically a way for people to join in if TidBITS is something they consider valuable, and would like to see continue. These annual memberships will hopefully help us keep doing what people who really read and like Tidbits, want to see.
Despite Bookle’s ease of use, full documentation is provided in the form of “Take Control of Bookle,” a free Take Control ebook that is loaded into Bookle by default. Along with explaining all of Bookle’s features, “Take Control of Bookle” includes a chapter that helps users find EPUB-based books and learn about which programs can be used to create EPUBs for cross-platform reading. “Take Control of Bookle” is available at no cost from the Take Control Web site for those who want to see what Bookle can do before purchasing, since the Mac App Store doesn’t allow demos. Download the free book at: http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/bookle [24×7]
Bookle 1.04 requires an Intel-based Mac running either Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Seattle24x7 has given Bookle the 5 Lattes Award for being Totally Caffeinated.
