Very excited that this project is done and out in the world: The Most Important Thing Illuminated, by renowned investor Howard Marks, and annotated several leading lights in the investment world.

This was a project built on PressBooks with Columbia Business School Publishing, and we learned a hell of a lot in the process. We will eventually post a debrief for all to read about the challenges of making this happen: we started with the idea of making the annotations popups, but were stymied by various different versions of iOS handling javascript differently, so we could get popups to work on some iOS devices, but not others. Nevermind working on various Kindle, Nook, and Kobo devices.

Next we decided to make each annotation a linked footnote, to bring the reader to a notes section, and back again. We had a nice technical solution for that, but e-ink devices handled this terribly, and there was enough user testing confusion, that we had to kill that idea as well.

We settled on putting the annotations inline, with some shaded styling on devices that enabled shading and respect CSS, and then degrading (almost) gracefully to horizontal rules and italics separating out the annotations on eink devices that ignore most CSS (*cough* Kindle *cough*).

Finally, this book contains large sections quoted from elsewhere, and eink Kindle don’t really render blockquotes very well across multiple pages, so we had to rebuild how PressBooks handles blockquotes (sticking them in a div, and giving each paragraph a defined style).

Anyway, check it out — it’s a great book.

We’re happy to hear about Saybooks launching a new subscription based book on PressBooks. Says Saybooks:

Fences, the debut novel by popular fanfiction author Laura Bontrager, will be the first novel on the PressBooks™ platform to be serialized for online reading on a subscription basis.

Check out the blog post here.

And sign up to read here.

All around smart publishing woman Jane Friedman (who seems to run even more blogs than I do), has a round-up of “Groundbreaking E-Publishing Services” in her latest newsletter (if you’re an author, I highly recommend).

PressBooks gets a nice mention:

It’s an amazing and free tool, and if you’re already familiar with how WordPress works, then you’ll find it even more incredible.

She mentions us along with Vook and iBooks Author, which is nice company to be in.

Check out her newsletter here (and why not subscribe while you are at it?)

Joe Wikert of O’Reilly was kind enough to invite me onto the O’Reilly Radar podcast to talk about books, and why I think they should be as easy to make as websites:

I should mention that Joe is publishing: “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto,” edited by Brian O’Leary and me.