During much of the first quarter we needed to turn folks away who were looking for help with ebook conversions and other projects, due to the demands of launching Ibis Reader.
We’re on track now to resume consulting and custom publishing software development alongside Ibis Reader, so please feel free to contact info@threepress.org for:
Ebook [...]
We’ve just posted an Ibis Reader Privacy Checklist, a set of informal answers to the questions and issues raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s February paper: Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers. The EFF has a long history of advocating digital and consumer rights and recently they’ve devoted more attention to digital [...]
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.
More [...]
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 [...]