The last few weeks have seen a tremendous increase in interest about ePub. Many new blog posts have been written trying to explain the format. We’ve also seen a big jump in the number of publishers coming to Threepress for help with tricky ePub problems or just asking for guidance about the format. While I’d [...]
We’re starting to share early betas of the Ibis Reader mobile UI for iPhones, Nexus Ones, and other Android devices with a limited group of testers. If you’re interested in joining the beta program and testing on other phones, tablets, and laptops, please email info@ibisreader.com. You may be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
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BookServer’s open architecture could help enable a new digital ecosystem that helps people find, buy, acquire, and read books from any source, on any device, using many different ebook readers. Based on common, open standards the project has the goal of giving readers the ability to find the books they want, in the formats that [...]
For all your retrospective needs, my ebook year in review and 2010 thoughts.
This is really funny if you get the joke, and still a nice style if you don’t. Thanks Kirk Biglione!
I’ve examined all the listings in the DRM-free publishers index and:
Categorized the publishers, broadly, by genre
Indicated whether their ebooks are available as ePub
Both tasks were surprisingly hard: many of these publishers accept works from a variety of genres, and of course there are multiple distribution channels selling a variety of formats with or without DRM. [...]
Obviously I’m a fan of the ePub format. It’s flexible enough to support advanced publications, but a simple text ebook can be put together with minimal effort.
But I don’t think it’s minimal enough. If I could go back in time and be involved with ePub and its predecessors, here are the choices I’d make:
Make [...]
The ePub format allows for a fairly comprehensive set of book-friendly metadata, mostly drawn from the Dublin Core set of terms. Knowing what metadata to use and how it will appear in today’s and tomorrow’s readers is key; here are some recommendations:
Authorship
Two elements describe authorship of a work: dc:creator and dc:contributor. As you might [...]
The vast majority of ebooks today have print cousins, despite some recent digital-only publishing news. As a consequence, many people creating ePubs want to know how to tie references to the printed pages back into the ebook. My personal opinion is that this sort of print-centrism is unnecessary for the vast majority of titles1, but [...]
This post from August 2008 contains some my thinking at the time about how to make ebook reading and shopping experiences more social. I’m surprised that none of it has happened yet; even the limited lending feature of the B&N Nook doesn’t really capture it:
As soon as I’ve finished the book, the device prompts me [...]