Monthly Archives: May 2012

today’s learning: remove ETags, gain speed | optimize ETags, save band width

todays' learnings May 29, 2012 Leave a comment

We’re working with ebooks that are basically books and therefore in itself set,  pretty static – once you cached them correctly they should not to be reloaded in your client much less your browser all the time because that would make your app slow and your mobile flat even slower – let alone the Java script sent with it is 40kB each single attempt. Now with epubs even more so: once you rendered them correctly, the text flows clear and e.g. a page turn shall not course a reload while nothing was modified – if nothing was modified. But since we’re using epubs to finally enable ppl to work with text in many different ways, we had to teach the clients the difference:

If you have not set annotations or bookmarks, links or embedments in the ebook you are working with in our reader, the client asks the server: “Look at that entity tag, anything changed since I last loaded this file?”  and the server  matches that specific code with his own current code of the file. If the ETags match, a 304 Not Modified Response is returned – that’s some hard math for the server, sure, but it reduces your server side sending process and saves you a lot of GB.

Simply put: Entity tags (ETags) are a mechanism to check for a newer version of a cached file. Which would be the ebook in our case, and the trick is to find out, where they make sense to save users band width while leaving the server in peace as often as possible to not slow it down. With ETags you tell the client when to talk to the server and what to do, if nothing changed. Right, nothing.

The other way around works for static content: Once you removed the ETag header, you forbid caches and browsers/clients to validate files, so they are forced to rely on your set of Cache-Control and Expires header. Basically you’ll have to delete If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match requests and their  304 response – if there is no question remaining, no answer is expected. This will lead to multiple scenarios of non-completition but gain speed.

That’s what en ETag request looks like that takes 12195 bytes for that one pic and could be reduced when remove ETag and not send back 304 (you remember: no question, no answer)

Response for /i/yahoo.gif

Later, if the browser has to validate a component, it uses the If-None-Match header to pass the ETag back to the origin server. If the ETags match, a 304 status code is returned reducing the response by 12195 bytes for this example. Great.

Apparently this does not run for IE 7 – but who’d have expected?

Thank you for your help, ppl @askapache.com 

guess it’s too late to lock the stable door after the horse had bolted

publishersPOV May 24, 2012 1 Comment

A few days ago I accidentally stumbled across a  rather inconspicuous news release on CreateSpace, well known daughter of Amazons – who are them self godmother and godfather of online book selling and many more things.

Cut short, the announcement says, that Amazons publishing service CreateSpace now enables authors and publishers in Europe, to do what they do in the US of America for quite a while: host, format, offer and sell their stuff without any costly steps in between. Producing huge amounts of books and maybe only selling 30% of them while  the rest becomes economically friendly toilet paper? No Sir, not with the on demand printing service CreateSpace provides.

There are many benefits, economically (time to market, factoring, labeling, marketing, capacity, stock, reach, costumer service, SEO, go down the list, say stop any time and point your finger..) and ecologically, for publishers, authors and costumers at hand. Let’s stress the cons:

What does Amazon publishing worldwide mean in the semi-distance run? After they lost sovereignty in setting pricetags to their books and their influence on what is said about a book, their great impact on where books are sold and who gets what amount of the money made with books to just one company, they now lose yet another, almost the last key-competence of publishing houses to that very same company, to Amazon, the biggest player in the market: helping authors to market. And, of course they’re doing this for print as well as for digital content. Digital content, that goes kindle first, of course.

Though the news release reads like “we’re offering this to authors and publishers” all the time, it says: “we are offering independency to authors and St. Andrew’s cross to the remains of the publishing industry”- it’s hard to get rid of the thought, that there is at the moment no, say really no, way, of selling books successfully without at least one of the big As. And its getting worse:

In the long run this tendency is frightening, as it is with apple, facebook, fill-in-any-chinese-example, oil multis, or, well, everything that gets too big to fail, to put it short. The more content you’ll find on one platform, the more this platforms gains the power to demand exclusiveness (stupid, if they don’t) which means in this case: buy an Amazon device or DO NOT GET THE CONTENT. That’s rather frightening, isn’t it? For us at PaperC it says: keep on running enabling your costumers to create their own stuff, because publishers will not be able to withstand the deluder, the tempting siren.

<br> bubbles <br/>

I am not saying “don’t buy at Amazons because they are all evil and have a masterplan that reads like Exodus 20:3 and I am not saying “hell yes, publishers all over the world, this is what you get from incapacitate your costumer and authors and yes, you deserve it!” (because this is not the situation though a lot of blogs and media read like that recently. Get off, dudes, do some homework, I’ll write about this later). I am saying ‘have your eyes open ppl and reconsider one or the other decision you make.’ Yes, those of us who know how to, get the content they want, do some jail braking and get rid of the rest. But there is plenty of ppl out there who do not realize the shit before the step right in.

Regards, K

Protected: contributors: katja

publishersPOV May 23, 2012

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epub: pros&cons

publishersPOV May 14, 2012 Comments: 4

ePub, short for electronic publications, is a multifunctional open standard XML format that is by now used to create digital content. While it is by far not the only format commonly accepted in the digital publishing scene, a lot of major publishers have invested a fair amount of money to establish new work flows. ePub has been designed to work for ebooks but as of todays development is speeding up, millions of applications have been built to create huge variaties of new documents. There are dozens of advantages and some little cons – see a brief introduction here:

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Independency: No company is likely to hope for benefits from the formatOne of the biggest benefits of using ePub is that the format is independently governed; this means that there are no corporate houses waiting to benefit from the success of the format. Also, the format is not tuned to specific products from certain companies. So, a file created using ePub can be used on a plethora of devices which makes things simpler for publishers.

Standardization:  The mainstream acceptance of ebooks led to many companies jumping on the digital bandwagon with the introduction of their own eBook readers. However, this has caused a mayhem since the offerings of most of these establishments lack a unified standard. On the other hand, the advent ePub has been an endeavor in the right direction as its aimed at setting a standard for digital publication; the format can be used across a variety of devices.

Convenience: Whatever device you are using, a 10.1 inch iPad or a 2.9 inch smartphone screen, the ePub format offers a perfect fit to every device because of it’s unique text reflow. Small screen users do not have to constantly zoom in and out or scroll constantly while large screen users will be able to read faster because they may use the whole screen.

Anti-proprietary: Since ePub is an open standard tool you may use it whether you are an author and self-publisher or Digital Content Manager of a major publisher – without any risk of being charged hefty fees. The open format is a prime reason for its popularity apart from the superlative functionality that it offers.

Compatibility: Not even PDF, which is another well known and widely established format for the publishing of digital content, may compete with ePub. ePub redefines the concept of compatibility:  it uses two languages, XHTML and XML and therefore may be used with a variety of software. Also, platforms that already use XML can easily be transferred to ePub – new ways of publishing evoke! Another advantage is that ePub is delivered in a single zip folder including archives that store the organizational and content files for an ebook.

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Requirements: and rules for creating a zip archive for ePub are extremely stringent. Also, unlike some other format, using ePub requires some amount of prior publishing knowledge plus you’ll need to sneak into the syntax of XML and XHTML. It does indeed help to know how to create a style sheet to build valid files as well. Since tool kits and tutorials are available online for every level of knowledge and requirements, ePub quickly became the major format due to its impressive functionality, compatibility and further development.

very brief poll on ebook flat rates / subscription model / .com feature plans

publishersPOV May 11, 2012 Leave a comment

We’re fuzzing on getting as much publishers as possible into the flat rate model, which is to be exact a subscription model and means: You only pay for as much as you read, publishers get paid for the content that’s really useful.

Skip the fuzz and go to poll w/out a good reason

Of course this does not support the model of publishing as everyone was used to so far: Market a book, set a price, get paid and then no longer care about what the reader actually does with the book. (Same with music where single track downloading changed the whole game, look where it lead.) 80% of books are not read beyond the first 50 pages – but paid for as much pages they have! This makes perfect sense in a world, where a whole book has to be published, where the entire book has to be stored, delivered, taken back and put to waste disposal if need is. This world does no longer exist since we’re having digital versions of nearly everything (where the number of pages is even smaller). And therefore publishers have to learn a lot of difficult lessons about what readers (let’s call them readers while they’re users for another 6 month) want and what they’re willing to pay for – if at all.

Our job right now is to a) convince publishers to contribute their content or b) let them watch others do it while they go on publishing and selling whole ebooks into a shrinking market.

To support them at least a little we’re building the perfect platform for an instant access to high quality textbooks and make sure that readers are happy and contended with their products – if they let us do so. Publishers are a motley crew of different personalities yet they have two things in common: they’re usually sweet and they love numbers. We need to give them some:

Go to poll now

Thank you. Publishers will appreciate your help. Me too.

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