Information & Resources on the IDPF ePub Standard
Last month O’Reilly announced that they will be starting an experimental pilot and selling selected titles in an eBook bundle. The bundle includes a PDF, Kindle-compatible Mobipocket and of course an ePub formatted version.
Today, O’Reilly announced the availability of 30 eBook titles! The cost of the bundle is a little lower than the paper version and if you wish to pay a little more you can get the print book with the eBook bundle included!
Here is the full list of those thirty titles;
Ready … Set … Read!
This is the headline on the Lexcycle website for their new iPhone eBook reader, Stanza. They are touting this as the ‘premier electronic book reader for the iPhone and the iPod Touch’ which more importantly (at least for me) has the ability to read eBooks in the ePub format.
Stanza is still in beta at the moment so there will be a few bugs hanging around but hopefully lexcycle will go final soon. They have a demo video of Stanza running on the iPhone (Quicktime).
Okay, so now you have your Stanza/iPhone ePub reader, but where do you get your books from? This is the easy part…
Continue reading ‘Do you want to read ePub books on your iPhone?’
New eBook Standard Now Available For Mass Market Audience was the title from yesterdays WebWire press release on the ePub book catalogue at BooksOnBoard.com. With almost 200 eBooks in the ePub format this is the first real source for mass market books to be released in the new eBook standard.
It’s a little unclear if the ePub versions have DRM restrictions, but as the site states;
DRM Adobe ebooks can be read only on Adobe Reader 7, Adobe Acrobat 7, or Adobe Digital Editions [...] We recommend Adobe Digital Editions for Adobe format eBooks, both pdf and ePub versions…
We must presume that they have DRM in place.
The market is still waiting for better ePub readers and until we get those it won’t matter how many ePub books they release. Let’s hope that the Sony Reader (PRS-505) receives its Digital Editions firmware update soon and that other dedicated readers, such as the Amazon Kindle and Cybook follow suit.
Yes, we still have a long way to go but it does look like we’re on the right track.
Today over on the O’Reilly TOC, Andrew Savikas made an annoucment that from July 2008, O’Reilly will release a selection of their catalogue as a DRM-Free eBook bundle. This will include a PDF, Kindle-compatible Mobipocket and yes, an ePub format version! Not only are they giving you three for the price of one, but these will also be DRM-Free eBooks (they are considering a form of social DRM.)
Although they are still working on the ePub versions, any PDF eBook you buy now will make you eligible for free access to the ePub version once it is released. For the moment this is only an experiment, but if It works out, they plan to release their whole catalogue in these formats (barring a few with copyright restrictions and some old ones that present at format-conversion challenge.) Continue reading ‘O’Reilly to start selling ePub Books!’
Last week, Feedbooks co-founder, Hadrien Gardeur announced on the mobileread.com forum that they will be releasing their own dedicated E-Ink eBook reader!
Feedbooks.com is a service that provides public domain eBooks for download in multiple formats, including of course ePub.
The device itself will be available later this year (September/October 2008) through a large French retailer (yet to be announced) and then via online ordering later in the year.
Hadrien mentioned that they are dedicating their resources to what they consider to be the ‘basic features’ that any dedicated reader should have.
Hadrien didn’t give too many details away just yet, but he promised to provide screenshots and even videos closer to the time!
As the Feedbooks website provides books in the ePub format I very much hope that their reader will be able to reader ePub books natively.
At this year’s IDPF Digital Book 2008 conference, we had confirmation from Mobipocket president and CEO, Martin Görner, that Mobipocket Reader Desktop 6.2 is able to import ePub files, with the next version being able to create ePub files. At present the reader does not read ePub files natively, it converts them to the MOBI format before transferring to your device.
One minor issue is that the reader does not create a TOC (Table of Contents) from the toc.nsx file contained in the ePub document. Let’s hope they don’t take too long to fix this.
Also in his talk, Görner announced that by the end of the year, the Mobipocket Reader will be available on the iPhone. I guess with the recent release of the iPhone SDK this should be no surprise, but great news nonetheless.
Acceptance of ePub is growing from strength to strength, with one more reader adding support for the format. Mobipocket Reader now covers many devices including the iPhone (end of 2008), Blackberry, Windows Mobile, PDA and a number of dedicated ePaper devices. Once the reader is updated across these devices, ePub support will be opened up to a whole new batch of users.
It may only have been three weeks since last had my own internet connection but boy, is it good to be back! Of course the world of ePub caught fire right when I was not been able to report on it.
These past weeks has seen the introduction of a new ePub converter from BookGlutton, the IDPF Digital Book 2008 conference and release of Adobe Digital Editions 1.5, which from the reports has marked improvements, Mac OSX support and has been localised into French and German.
There’s more news of publishers wanting to release their content in the ePub format (let’s see if it really happens) and we are now seeing dedicated eBook readers released on a regular basis. There’s also another eBook reader available for the iPhone.
At Digital Book 2008, Sony demonstrated working ePub books on their PRS-505 and it seems that Mobipocket Desktop 6.2 handles ePub files - rumour has it that the next version will also create ePub files!
ePubBooks.com is here to bring together all and any news related to ePub and eBooks, although some of you may have read this news elsewhere, I will still be writing several articles to cover all the latest happenings. Make sure you check back regular.
Hopefully by the end of the week I will have the site fully up-to-date.
This announcement is to let you know that over the coming weeks there will be very few updates to the site.
I recently moved apartments and it will be a few more weeks before I can get an internet connection fixed up. For now I have to limit myself to doing basic email and maintenance during my lunch break, which is usually no more than half an hour a day.
On the weekends I will be online for an hour or two while having a coffee at the local San Francisco Coffee shop down in Ostbahnhof (Munich). Perhaps I might be able to add an article or two then.
Once I am back online I’m going to start updating the site much more regular.
Thanks for your Patience.
Mike Cook
Good news for all British Sony Reader (PRS-505) fans! According to theBookseller.com, it’s believed Watwerstones have signed a deal with Sony to stock the Reader when it is released the in the UK later this year.
As a Brit myself this is great news. I bought my Reader from the U.S. in December 2006 but have to live with reading public domain titles or buying PDF versions from sites such as eBooks.com and so fighting with Sony’s inferior PDF viewing quality. Let’s hope once it’s released I’ll be able to use their services, even though my Sony is a U.S. model.
It looks like eBook readers are going to have a good time this year in the UK, I’m sure the rest of Europe won’t be too far behind for Sony or the Amazon Kindle.
Although we’re still waiting for Adobe’s Digital Editions to be released for the Sony Reader, once this happens, all those ePub titles being released by Penguin and HarperCollins will give Sony’s PRS-505 a huge boost over the Amazon Kindle. No doubt Amazon are aware of this so let’s hope they react and make the Kindle read the ePub format natively.
Hot on the heels of Penguin’s announcement, HarperCollins UK now have plans to release their titles in both print and eBook format this coming September. Thanks to Graeme Neil’s article over at theBookseller.com for uncovering this excellent piece of news.
According to his article, Victoria Barnsley, HC UK C.E.O., says that HC is also looking in to clearing the rights to release their 2,500 title back catalogue, ready for this autumn.
If you’ve had any doubts that ePub will not become an eBook standard then you should take notes of these movements within the industry - the ePub format is certainly getting some influential backing. It looks to me that the (book as well as music) industry is finally listening to its consumers? Let’s hope the trend continues!
It’s great that publishers are moving over to the ePub format but perhaps we can also help it along. Why not start converting public domain titles to the ePub format, this will certainly encourage reader applications to written and the more readers there are, the more people will want ePub books!
I myself am working toward creating conversion scripts to create ePub files - I’ll talk more about this project in the future.
Keep your eyes on epubbooks.com as I’ll be trying to bring together more resources and tutorials to help you in creating ePub documents.