ReadBeam

This is basically a maintenance release (“Freezing Cooper”):

• Fresh off the mill: Adopted Bootstrap 2.0 from Twitter to make things more responsive on your Kindle or iPad.
• My favorite Apple quote: “General stability and performance improvements”

Due to new hardware things have stabilized significantly. Your cherished morning read should now be ready on time.

Please let me know, if things don’t work out as expected.

Hapy beaming!

Some users with a brand spanking new Kindle Touch wrote in to let me know that they are unable to delete ReadBeam documents from their Kindle.

This is not a problem of calibre or ReadBeam per se, it seems to happen once you mail personal documents via Amazon to your Kindle Touch.

One user (thanks Rainer!) just sent me a workaround: If you login to your Amazon Account and “Manage your Kindle” then you are able to delete the personal documents from there.

Give it a try, and - as always - happy beaming!

I am currently in the thick of migrating to the new server. When you read this you will be most probably already working on the shiny new hardware.

Signup has been reenabled on the new system, please go ahead an get yourself something to read for the weekend.

Please be considerate though, keep yourself to a maximum of three eDocs, so that everybody can use this machine and the conversion delays are kept to a minimum.

Enjoy!

In the last few weeks ReadBeam.com has been swamped by new users. This led to ever growing conversion times. Just converting all the morning eDocs currently takes between four and seven hours.

To alleviate the problem I have temporarily suspended signups.

I will take measures to have ReadBeam again send morning papers in the morning - one will be switching to a freemium business model. Thats fancy for: some features of the site will be usable for free, others will cost money. This will allow me to add new servers and allocate more time on developing the service.

In the meantime I am sorry for the inconvenience.

After digging around I just found an interesting tidbit about why - sometimes - the index in the Kindle files for news sources is missing:

It sounds like you are getting the book reader, and this would be because the EXTH[501] field of the metadata is not set to NWPR (for newspaper). The latest release of calibre fixes this. HOWEVER, if you email the mobi to your Kindle, Amazon will overwrite the EXTH[501] field with PDOC which will put you back to the book reader. If you transfer the mobi via USB it doesn’t get overwritten and you’ll get the news reader which is what you obviously want.

There doesn’t seem to be any way around the email issue. Unfortunate, but “that’s progress” I guess (sarcasm).

Yes, we are approaching ReadBeam 1.0, but before we do, I have reorganized the backend - again. The changes are getting easier on the users though, for most of you things should simply get faster and more reliable.

For now I scrapped charging money for the service - setting up the payment infrastructure is a major hassle - so, enjoy! Instead I have introduced the concept of computime, which is a fancy word for time the converter spent on crunching your docs. This way I plan to identify recipes and/or sources that create a lot of load.

I moved over all of the users (minus spam) and most of the eDocs you set up. Only a handful of private recipes got lost in the process. So if you miss anything after tomorrow evening, log in and check what eDocs are running in your account.

Enjoy, and as always - let me know what you think.

Tom

The next disruptive release of ReadBeam is about to go live. Currently I am doing final testing to remove the most obvious bugs; I’ll leave the others for you :). It may take a few hours until the new version (you know it when you see it) goes live at your end of the net.

The internal data structure changed, so your subscriptions went south. Please just log-in and recreate your subscriptions to have plenty of reading material for the upcoming weekend.

I hope you do like the new outfit and workings. Please let me know if you have questions or ideas. As always, I’m just an email away: tom@readbeam.com.

Downloading is now handled by a content distribution network (Akamai), and mailing by SendGrid. This should alleviate many problems we experienced while we outgrew the old solution.

Yours truly,

Tom

P.S. Kovid and many others created plenty of new recipes in the recent months. If you e.g. like Hacker News or Smashing Magazine set up your own eDocs and have them sent to your Kindle in no time. Check out the available recipes here: eBook Reader recipes.

The release of 0.9beta worked sufficiently smooth. Since the release the traffic on the site has doubled and caused all different kinds of challenges:

• Gmail, my current email provider, locks the account from time to time. Obviously some automated system gets triggered to avoid suspected abuse. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of mails (approx. 1GB daily!).
• The new possibility to download ebook-files directly has been met with great interest. Currently it is rather slow and expensive on my bandwidth. For the next release I’ll come up with a better solution. Most probably I will put the converted epub/mobi files on a CDN like Akamai or something.

Only one drawback sofar: I am not entirely sure that I can migrate your sources over to the new architecture. Or, at least currently, with rather small user numbers, I am not willing to put a lot of effort in migrating them if you could easily do that in five minutes.

But then again, if you see this is a huge problem, please let me know in the comments or via email: tom@readbeam.com.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

While the changes are percolating through the internet, I’ll go out and have a barbeque now. Fed up with sysadmin for today. Enjoy your private recipes!

Some newly modified recipes are gorgeous - try ‘Ars Technica’ if you are into tech or ‘The Atlantic’ if you are into - whatever. Many thanks to Darko Miletic for all the hard work.