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!’
A question posted over on the ePub Community Group was asking what image formats are suitable for use in ePub.
As Jon Noring replied, the OPS 2.0 Specifiaction says that a OPS (ePub) Reading System must support the GIF, PNG, JPEG and SVG image formats.
These are pretty standard formats to be supported so I don’t see any problems with rendering these. But I do have some concerns regarding SVG - these of course stem form having absolutely no clue at all about the format!
Still, I am wondering if there will be any issues when rendering SVG, akin perhaps, to what we had during the browser wars.
Is there anyone out there who understands SVG and can shed some light on this matter?
I created this site because there are very few blogs, mailing lists and other resources on the ePub standard. I wanted to try and bring together the few that there are in one handy place, in the hope to make this information easily available.
I am no ePub expert myself so I’m continually searching for new information and resources to help me learn. One very useful tutorial I found was the ‘Epub Format Construction Guide‘.
Not only is this guide about creating ePub documents, it also gives some nice insights into the compliance of the ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) reader, still the most conformant reader at this time. A couple of surprising things about ADE v1.0 is that it does not support certain CSS attributes. Two big surprises were; text-transform and text-align: justify.
The tutorial itself is more like an “annotated example”, if you just wish to construct an ePub document in a quick hassle free way then this will help tremendously. Once nice thing I like about the guide is that it highlights the areas which need to be altered on a per project basis.
In the future I’m hoping to find more detailed tutorials so if you need more in-depth information, you’ll just have to reference the IDPF specifications.
You can read the ‘Epub Format Construction Guide’ at www.hxa7241.org.
