About epubBooks
The primary focus of epubBooks is to provide eBooks in the open web standards eBook format, EPUB. This book format allows users of modern eBooks readers to enjoy the best reading experience possible.
The reason why PDF, and even Plaint Text files, do not display in a way that is pleasing to the eye (often looking quite ugly) is that many modern eBook readers utilise small screens (iPhones, Sony Readers, etc). The nature of the EPUB is that the contents will reflow to suit the size of your screen.
All the eBooks found here on epubBooks are provided without any DRM (Digital Rights Management) and as they are Public Domain, Copyright Free, or the author has given consent for them to be made available, they are FREE to download.
Book Production
Although websites such as Project Gutenberg have a wealth of titles in a number of different eBook formats, the formating of these books is often very simple, if it exists at all - this includes their own EPUB files. As EPUB is fast becoming an industry standard and devices such as the Sony Reader and iPhone work best with this format, naturally it was the most suitable eBook format to provide.
Most of the books found at epubBooks are taken from free sources such as Project Gutenberg. Therefore, a number of conversion tools had to be written to convert these plain Gutenberg .TXT files into beautifully formatted EPUB files. For this task I use Perl and XSLT.
There's still much work to be done on these tools to make them faster and more automated so adding new titles to the epubBooks.com catelogue will be a little slow going at first. However, once I am in full production, the tools will be improved quickly and so the number of files will grow faster.
On a special note, I would like to give a big thanks to Liza Daly and Marcello Perathoner. Without their help this project may have taken months longer.
If you would like to learn more about the EPUB eBook format then please head along to the epubBlog where you will find many articles relating to the format.
Who am I?
My name is Mike Cook and I am the developer of the epubBooks project. This is an independant website and I work soley for myself.
Currently I'm a member of two different social networks; Twitter and LinkedIn, where you can connect or follow me.
