Liza Daly

I’m thrilled to announce that Safari Books Online has officially acquired Threepress Consulting and Ibis Reader. Keith, Chuck, Jonathan and I are joining Andrew Savikas and his team, with the same goal we’ve always had: to build great digital reading experiences. Acquisition announcements can often strain credulity when explaining why the merger of company X and [...]

This is the second in a series of reviews of interactive digital fiction. Other reviews: Meanwhile. The Play is an interactive short story by Deirdra Kiai developed using the Undum web fiction game engine. It was entered into the 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition where it placed third (most of the entries are old-school text adventures). [...]

I was quite pleased to be asked to write a technical report for JISC. The paper provides background on the state of ebook publishing today, and concludes with a set of recommended projects that aim to improve digital scholarly publishing in the UK. The report is available online as Digital Monograph Technical Landscape: Exemplars [...]

(Part of a new series of reviews of interactive digital fiction) Meanwhile is a branched-storyline comic written and illustrated by Jason Shiga, originally published as a printed book. Interactive game developer Andrew Plotkin designed and coded the iOS version, available on the iOS App Store [iTunes link]. While I’ve seen the print edition, my first experience [...]

Over on his own blog, Ned Batchelder has written up his HTML5 appcache validator tool he whipped together while working on Ibis Reader: The result is Caveman, a Python tool to validate HTML5 cache manifests. It scrapes the HTML page you specify, finding resources, then compares them to the cache manifest and reports problems. Full blog post [...]

I was thrilled to be able to contribute a chapter to Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, a compilation of essays edited by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary. (Incidently, it was great to see how much the text was improved by their editorial work.) In the essay, I highlight some advantages and affordances unique to digital books. The [...]

We’re very excited by the public launch of the second ereading product based on Ibis Reader technology: Bookstream by Don Johnston Incorporated. “From all perspectives of our development team (project managers, programmers, testers, etc.) the Threepress team has been fantastic to work with on the Bookstream project. It’s not everyday that a project meets timelines [...]

HTML5 is a wild grab-bag of technologies. One of the lesser-known bits at the bottom of the bag is the drag and drop API. This allows you to physically drag files from your computer into a browser page, and have the browser do something with the file (typically upload it). If you’re logged in to [...]

We’ve fixed a long-standing limitation in the online EPUB validator that prevented files with non-ASCII characters from being validated. (The bug was actually not in our code but at a lower level; I’ve posted a fix that simply works around it.) If you had problems before receiving “Site error” when uploading an EPUB with accented [...]

(Update August 1, 2011: This position has been filled but we are always interested in hearing from applicants who meet the requirements below and are interested!) Threepress Consulting has an immediate opening for a full-time Python and JavaScript software engineer. You will be joining our team to develop our HTML5 ereading platform, Ibis Reader. You will [...]