Narrower banners for webmasters

Someone asked us if we could make the Universalis banner narrower so that she could fit it at the side of her blog. Something like this:

So now, as you see, we have. You can choose your own banner width, within reason (because the banners don’t get any deeper as they get narrower). Instructions are here.

Copy and Paste

In the last mailing to the Universalis mailing list I forgot to mention that the new version of the Windows download now has easier ways of copying to the Clipboard. In addition, the Windows Mobile download , which couldn’t copy at all, now has that ability. In both cases you can copy the current reading or the whole page.

Follow the links to get the downloads and see the instructions.

The Apple Curtain

Since the launch of the iPhone, the world of Universalis downloads has been divided in two by an “Apple curtain”. For everything except the iPhone and the iPod Touch, you could buy one registration code that would work on any computer you had: Mac, Windows, Palm, and many handhelds. But the iPhone version was sold directly by Apple through the iPhone App Store. It wasn’t sold by us and we weren’t allowed to extend our registration code system to cover the iPhone.

This was unfair because  it meant that if you had a PC and an iPhone, you ended up having to pay twice. Now we’ve worked out a way of cutting a hole in the Apple Curtain.

From now on, if you own the iPhone version, you will not need to buy a registration code for other systems – PC / Mac / Palm etc.

e-books: what is the missing ingredient?

There is a debate in the e-book world – well, not so much a debate as an extended rumination – about how to make e-books worth more to the people who buy them. We know the conveniences by now – easy portability – and the inconvenience – slowness for flicking through, and expense when you leave them on the train. New e-book readers are coming on the market every week or so, and people do buy them. But still the question remains: how do we make people want e-books, and how do we make them want them more than they want books? As Joe Wikert says, “Figure out how to add more value to the ebook“. But how?

This post will give a possible answer to that question, and also give an explanation to the people who email me every day to ask whether there’s going to be a version of Universalis for the Amazon Kindle (and if not, why not).