Blog

I couldn’t quite believe it was still only Wednesday when it got to the end of the London Book Fair.
As with any trade fair, it’s a fairly full-on experience, and this year even more so as I was talking at the "Dig…

ValoBox recently featured in the programme for Klopotek Publishers’ Forum in Berlin. It’s an event which has been around for ten years and focuses on the production and process side of publishing. How can you use technology to make your business more efficient and get your content to readers in more effective ways?

Oli and Anna from ValoBox teamed up with Adam Duvander, the Editor in Chief of Programmable Web to run a workshop…

We’re pretty darn excited today to announce that we’ve rolled out a big upgrade to our reader.

We’ve had this in the pipeline for a while so it is great to be able to finally show it to you.

So, what’s different?

Every book has a home page

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to get a feel for a book, once you ‘land’ on it. ValoBox books might be encountered on ValoBox.com, but they could equally be reached by someone clicking on a link shared by…

Last week ValoBox presented at the If Book Then conferences in Milan and Stockholm.
The conference was founded by Bookrepublic, a pioneer in the European publishing scene. 2013 is its third year and it has been getting bigger and bett…

We’re going to be there and we’d love to meet up with any publishers keen to find out more about ValoBox.

Anna is going to be speaking about working collaboratively with start-ups at the Digital Minds Conference…

Fighting their way through the bizarrely named Superstorm Nemo, the finest and brightest in digital publishing converged on New York’s Marriott Hotel for the 7th Tools of Change Conference. …

Following up from last week’s bumper load of programming books from Packt Publishing, this week we are pleased to bring you even more books on web design from

We’re always breaking our backs trying to bring you the freshest and finest in new books about development and programming. And we really have pulled it out the bag this time round. We have just received a shed load of books by

In the ever changing market of eBooks there is a lot to keep up with, so we’ll be checking in with other top industry figures to take stock of the shifting landscape of the world of publishing. We want you to be in the loop so here’s a heads up for all the conferences we’ll be attending in the near f…

Featured in Flagon’s Den’s ‘Next Week in Startup Land’ newsletter is our very own Anna Lewis , making her feelings known about Paul Graham’s book Hackers and Painters. She also shares some of her frankly individual sense of humour.

Flagon’s Den (@flagonsden on Twitter) is a useful service for any startup. The…

Thanks to everyone that has entered and retweeted about our competition. Unfortunately the competition has now closed, but as a final hurrah we are giving you one last bumper pack of great things to look over.

Today we bring you offerings from Ted Talks. They give advice on the top ten places where anyone can learn to code , as well as a talk from Mitch Resnick on how best to get kids in…

With less than 24 hours to enter our Twitter competition it’s time to get involved! You stand to win a whole bundle of books teaching how to design beautiful websites. All it takes is a follow on Twitter (@ValoBox) and a retweet and in a few simple clicks you’ll be in the running to win a whole font of knowledge. Check out this

Our Twitter competition has rolled into its second day and the anticipation and excitement is palpable. Just a reminder, you stand to win over $130 worth of free books on web design and development. All it takes on your part is following our Twitter page @valobox and retweeting any of our tweets labelled with #webdesign.

<img src=“http://i.imgur.com/rgJ4JOM.png?1” …

Roll up, roll up. Come one and all. Today our Twitter competition begins! This week we are bringing together five experts from the web design community to tell you how learning web design can help you in all kinds of awesome ways. And we’re giving you the chance to win a bunch of stuff to help you get started.

The world needs more web developers!

Web development is a much sought after skill with web designers and software developers in higher demand than ever. The great thing is that once you know the basics it quickly becomes fun and rewarding, and you can be as creative as you like.

We want to help spread the knowledge so we’ve pu…

We are super excited to announce that we have reached the finals of the Tools of Change Startup Showcase. It was a combination of the judges’ opinion and public voting so we would like to thank everyone that spared a moment and supported us. We c…

For those that are not painfully aware, big rails apps become slow, especially in development and testing. A slower app is harder to work with and ends up forcing you into bad practices. I’d like to pretend I run my test suite all the time but when it takes a minute to run, it ends up as a more of a pre-deploy check.

Despite our best intentions apps bloat as they do more things in more detail. The default rails app has very little structure and you often end up with a big and bloated app…

Today Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-hour series and visionary is giving a talk at Techhub, London. He plans to explain the nature of startups and shift a few books in the meantime. The latest…

Here at ValoBox we’ve been working hard to rethink the way people purchase and consume books, creating a consumer-friendly pay-as-you-go service. Over the past year we’ve been busy bringing together content from the best publishers from around the world and creating a slick service that lets you get hold of that content as quickly as possible. (More about ValoBox here. )

So, we are very pleased to announce that we have been listed as semi finalists in…

Without prior knowledge of a book it’s very difficult to know which bits you do and don’t want to read. Now, with an improved ‘Explore’ service (accessed at the top of every ValoBox page), ValoBox allows you to hone in with eagle-eyed precision on exactly what it is you need. We have created a ‘Book details’ page which can now be accessed from our catalogue of titles, just by clicking on the ‘More details’ link. It displays a detailed overview of the book’s Table of Contents to give you a gre…

It’s important to know if a book contains the information that you need before you buy it and the great thing about digital books (compared to their physical counterparts) is that you can do this really quickly and accurately.
ValoBox takes full advantage of that. We let you search the full text of any book to find all references to the exact bit of information you’re looking for, even if you haven’t bought the book yet. Then, our pay-as-you-go model lets you preview or buy the specific pa…

We presented at a conference called Books in Browsers earlier this month – there’s a write-up of it here:
In Praise of Books in Browsers

The presentation was filmed by the folk at O’Reilly media and put onto YouTube:

You can see other talks from the conference here on the Books in Browsers playlist.…

You can apply here at Enternships.com

Or, if you prefer you can send an email to team@valobox.com.
Send us a cover letter and your CV to answer the questions:
- Why do you want to work for us?
- How would you use your skills and experience to contribute to our company?
Please give us some examples of why you’re the kind of person we are looking for.
…

Now on ValoBox we give you the opportunity to read ten pages from absolutely anywhere in the book, for free.

This is on top of being able to view a sample chapter at the front. You won’t need to use up any credit to dive in and check out the parts of the book you’re most interested in. This is what you’ll see when you browse the book. When you run out of free pages you can use your ValoBox account credit.

“So, looks like you are in the church of technology” someone tweeted in response to a photo of the venue for Books in Browsers. Essentially, that’s exactly where we were. The Books in Browsers conference is hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco. It’s a converted church housing a digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, and about 150 billion archived web pages.

It was an unusual book conference. In this instance it was technologists discussing pub…