For the purist, those who want their XML validation without the added benefits of what some programmer thinks would improve their ONIX file, there is a lovely generic XML software product called XML Notepad 2007. It’s free and written by a Microsoft programmer, Chris Lovett, so the freeware is from a safe source, it’s easy to set-up for a schema validation and robust with files as large as 20,000 records.
BNC SalesData Tip #3: Creating a Report and the Perils of Design
Changing the design of the bestseller report creator in SalesData was no easy task. The problem: how do you provide users with the ability to do advance searches in an interface that allows lots of criteria? You have to consider the best practices of designing when trying to solve this problem but as so many things in software development there are always exceptions.
BNC SalesData Tip #2: Putting Early Preview Data within Your Purview
FastPencil & Book Oven: Learning from Self-Publishing Models
Whether you consider all self-publishing a dismissable legacy of offline vanity publishing, the future of the book business or something in between, it’s worth paying attention to tools like FastPencil.
No More Nooks for Holiday Books
Barnes and Noble has announced that holiday pre-orders for their new eReader, the Nook, has outstripped devices available. So for those of you looking for a shiny eReader under the tree, seems like it will have to be a Nook Kindle.
BNC SalesData Tip #1: Not Drowning, Waving with Simpler Saved Reports
It’s a brand new day in BNC SalesData land! We hope you are finding the new features and tools useful. If your experience so far has been great, that is fantastic.
If you are scratching your head wondering what we were thinking, well, this blog series may be for you. Over the next several weeks, we will be blogging tips and tricks for using the new and improved BNC SalesData.
New Publishing Business Model #11: Carina Press
Passion. Lust. New (market) positions. Unsurprisingly, Harlequin continues to charge ahead in the eBook frontier. Their latest venture, Carina Press, is a digital book only imprint headed by online press veteran Angela James, most recently of Samhain Publishing.
Kindle Arriveth & Shortcovers Expandeth
As I’m sure all devotees of the eReader/digital book markets already know, Canadians are now able to purchase their very own Kindle (sans wireless—sort of) without having to resort to covert cross-border shopping excursions.
I’m going to leave other bloggers with the critique of the Kindle device itself (Mark Bertils does a great job at index//mb) and focus instead on another key component of eBook adoption: pricing.
Data Exchange Tip #5: Some Basics—Tools Before Validation
An XML file is simply text—nothing very special—except that in order for XML software to read and interpret it, everything needs to be just so. XML is, loosely, a computer formatting language, and as such is a low type of computer code—if not quite as finicky as a proper programming language it has much stricter rules than HTML.
