So, the iPad is an eReader – though it’s one that reads not only books and newspapers but web pages, emails and numerous other electronic documents. It can also do that stuff an iPhone and iPod Touch can do – running those thousands of third party applications from the iTunes App store. However, I want to focus this article on the book aspects, especially in relation to the EPUB eBook format.

There were rumours knocking around weeks before Apple’s announcement that they’d been discussing with publishers and newspapers to get their content for a new Apple device. Most of this content will be accessible from the upcoming Apple iBooks Store and there should be plenty to choose from as Apple have brought onboard big names such as Penguin, HarperCollins and Macmillan.

The new iBooks store will be integrated in true iTunes style and with a 3G iPad option; you won’t even have to worry about logging onto Wi-Fi hotspots.

From the videos knocking around the internet, the iBooks application seems to have typical viewing options (font sizes) and even that life-like page turn feature – though to be honest I still can’t figure out why this kind of thing is considered so cool. That whole drag a page, swipe your finger (Sony Touch) feature is fun for the first 10 minutes but quite frankly, I don’t sit there when reading a paper book being thrilled at the ingenuity of how a paper page turns, so why should it be any different with an eBook. Just let me tap the screen/press a button and give me the next page by the time I get my eyes to the top of the screen thankyouverymuch.

People have talked about the iPad as being a game changer or an E-Ink Killer (Kindle/Sony). Well, I’m not sure any of the current E-Ink developers believed they’d reached the pinnacle of electronic mobile reading – E-Ink eReaders were always going to evolve and become more multi-purpose – but there are still advantages of these over the iPad; power consumption and reading longevity are two.

E-Ink is extremely low power and thus allows usage of up to two weeks before a recharge is needed. Also, sitting for hours on end with no interruptions from IM’s and incoming email plus a very paper like screen are very pleasant experiences I can assure you.

We’ll have to wait until its released before we know the exact power consumption, but the iPad will probably give around ten hours of play, and that’s highly likely with anything and everything turned off and maybe even a low backlit screen.

Okay, so this isn’t an iPad review and much of that is all personal preference anyway. I guess the question you want form me is;

Does the iPad Support EPUB eBooks?

The quick answer is, yes.

The longer answer would also be yes, but there might well be some caveats here.

The Apple iPad native eBook format is EPUB. Steve Jobs said this himself at the announcement in San Francisco. This of course makes sense as many, if not most publishers have been working toward creating their content in this format, therefore Apple haven’t forced the providers to come up with yet another format.

EPUB is lucky in some respects; it came about at a time when eBooks started to become more main stream and this gave publishers the ability to worry [mostly] about just one eBook format. Beneficial for them and the end user.

It seems that there are really two questions regarding the iPad and the EPUB format.

One. What kind of DRM will it have?

The iPad EPUB eBooks will have DRM and it certainly won’t be the Adobe flavour. A recent announcement says that Apple is dusting off their old Fair Play DRM that was used for music in their iTunes stores until just a year or so ago. This means you will not be able to use these books on other eReaders – you buy from Apple, you use on Apple. At least that’s the way it seems at the present time. Once the iPad is out there perhaps we’ll see some solutions to get around that.

I don’t know enough about Apple’s Fair Play DRM to know if other vendors can implement it or whether this will affect their ability to use the Adobe DRM side-by-side with Apple’s.

Perhaps in the long term Apple will turn out to be instrumental in getting DRM off eBooks completely and a couple of years or three down the line this issue won’t matter any more. We can hope.

Two. Can you Download or Buy from Sources other than the iBooks Store?

Will I be able to browse the epubBooks.com website, click the download button and have my books open in the iBooks reading application?

This is a really big question and one which is still open. My gut feeling is that the answer will be no.

I’ve yet to hear if Apple will allow competing eBook apps to be ported to the iPad. Perhaps the eReader developers themselves know that answer, but the Apple TC’s will forbid them to talk, so everything is hush hush for the moment.

If apps such as Stanza are allowed onto the iPad then I think all the above questions will be answered in a positive light.

The iPad will be out there in a couple of months (you can order it now) so then we’ll know for certain the future of reading with the Apple iPad.

Apple iPad: Quick Facts

• Released Date: Late March 2010 and April 2010 for 3G option
• Price: Currently $499 for the 16GB model
• Memory: 16/32/64GB
• Multi-Touch 9.7 inch screen (1024×768)
• iBooks Store for books, magazines and newspapers
  • EPUB book format
  • Apple Fair Play DRM
• Various other electronic content
  • Video, Music, Games
  • Untold apps providing eMail, Calendars, Maps, Photos, etc.
• Wi-Fi & Bluetooth
• Pre-paid, no-contract, unlocked 3G connectivity (optional upgrade)
• External Keyboard Dock
  • Apple or other standard Bluetooth keyboards

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The Apple iPad and ePub Books

EPUBReader is one of the more recent software ePub readers, released just two months ago by Michael Volz, and with the addition of some recent upgrades has grown into a very stable, nice looking ePub reader. The reader is actually an Add-on for the very popular Firefox web browser – for those still using Internet Exploer (IE) this is yet another good reason to change over to Firefox.

Once installed all you need to do is go to a website with some ePub files (why not try Some Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens) then click on the file download button. The book will open right in the reader (browser) for immediate enjoyment.

The software is still in heavy development so expect lots of improvements and often.

Reading from a computer monitor is not for everyone but for those who don’t mind, this could be a nice alternate to those bulky alternatives.

For more information visit the official website (www.epubread.com) or to install now go to the EPUBReader Add-on page at Mozilla.

Please note: this reader is only for non-DRM ePub books.

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Read ePub books in the Firefox Web Browser

I’m not totally convinced that having two screens will improve peoples reading experience, though perhaps the one book type that could benefit woud be the textbook. The ability to have the book on one screen and a web browser on the other, looking up a spelling, or word meaning over the internet would be quite handy too.

There is also speculation on what book format the device would use. Well, if this reader is based on the normal Asus netbooks I would say that every book format would be readable. Adobe DE? Mobipocket Reader? And why not, as Steve Jordan commented in his recent Teleread article, maybe we need eBook readers to support every format. If the Eee Reader is a Windows based system then that could be a reality, we’d even see Adobe Digital Editions on there, meaning ePub formated books will be readable to.

Steve Jobs talks again about dedicated readers, insisting that, “general-purpose devices will win the day”. Well, as usueful as it is to be able to read books on an iPhone/iPod Touch, the small screens just don’t hack it for me, so perhaps the Asus will be the first company that makes a viable general purpose device. The image above is not likely the real thing so it will be interesting to see what they come up with

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New Asus Eee Reader with Dual Screen

For those of you who have not already heard, Sony are releasing three new eBook Readers. They are all e-paper devices that can read ePub books. The Pocket Edition has a 5″ screen. The Touch Edition is 6″ like the PRS-505, but with a touch screen. The Daily Edition, which was announced just today, has a 7″ tall touch screen and wireless connectivity via AT&T. At the moment the Daily Edition looks like it will only be released in the U.S.

The costs of the readers over at Waterstones is £179.99 for the Pocket Edition and £249.99 for the Touch Edition. Keeping in form with the PRS-505 prices, these are yet again much more expensive than our U.S. counterparts can get them for; $199 (~£120) and $299 (~£180) respectively.

Waterstones does not have the Daily Edition reader for pre-order and I wouldn’t hold much hope either that it will be released in the UK this year; Sony would still need to find a mobile provider who would allow them to piggy-back on their cell service. The general assumption is that Amazon have been trying to arrange this on their Kindle for quite sometime, without success.

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New Sony Readers for Pre-order at Waterstones UK

For those of you who are not from the UK, Argos are a household name — if a Brit hasn’t bought from Argos, you know their neighbour has!

The BookSeller.com article also states that the COOL-ER book store has 3/4 million titles (although not all in the ePub format).

I don’t have a one of these readers myself – I can’t justify spending £189 when I already have a Sony 505 – but as it uses the Adobe Digital Editions, any ePub books you download from epubBooks.com or buy from one of the many book stores around, should render the same as they do on the Sony Reader.

For me, the importance of this Argos/COOL-ER deal shows that eBooks (including the ePub variety) and the digital readers for viewing them are finally entering the mainstream.

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New ePub eBook Reader to be sold in Argos…Cool!

The Adobe Digital Edition Devices page has a little more details on each but here’s a very quick run down;

• EZ Reader
• EZ Reader Pocket Pro
• Mentor
• BeBook One
• BeBook Mini
• Cybook Gen3
• Cybook Opus
• Cool-er
• Elonex eBook
• Hanlin V5
• Hanlin V3
• iRex Digital Reader 1000S
• NUUT2
• Sony Reader PRS-300
• Sony Reader PRS-505
• Sony Reader PRS-600
• Sony Reader PRS-700

Have you heard of all these?

Bill himself seems suprised, saying, “this is faster take-up than even this optimist had hoped for, given our launch less than six months ago of the enabling Adobe Reader Mobile 9 SDK that’s been integrated into all of these products.”

Whether you believe DRM is right or wrong, the positive side of this is that we are seeing more vendors supporting the one eBook format.

We are however still waiting to see if the Amazon Kindle’s will start supporting EPUB; will they use their own DRM – will they use any DRM at all. Let us also not forget Apple, what formats will they support on their upcoming tablet.

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There are currently 17 Adobe EPUB eBook Readers

There’s nothing spectacular regarding the specifications but with a 5″ screen (4″ x 3″- 101mm x 76mm), this is a very pocketable eReader. The best part about this for me is their support for the ePub format, which includes the Adobe DRM (EPUB and PDF).

It looks like they’ve teamed up with BooksOnBoard, who will be providing the official Opus eBooks.

At £215 it’s not exactly the cheapest reader out there, but many will be happy to pay the extra penny’s just for its portability.

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Bookeen releases the Cybook Opus

In addition to the 45,000 titles they have launched with (in partnership with the eBook wholesaler Gardners), Blackwell will also be stocking the BeBook eReader, a reader which is becoming quite popular among UK users.

It’s uncertain as to whether they will use any DRM (I can’t imagine they won’t) but at the moment the BeBook does not suopport the Adobe (ePub/PDF) DRM. However, there was a recent annoucment from Endless Ideas, who sell the BeBook, that their new WiFi BeBook reader will be supporting ePub DRM. Perhaps there will soon be a firmware update for the current model.

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Blackewell opens new eBook store with ePub download option

According to the article this reader has been specially developed for Borders, although it gives no details on exactly what the specifications are. All I know is that it is an E-Ink device that readers EPUB and “Adobe formats” (presumably PDF). As it has been released to work with the 45,000+ titles available at borders.co.uk, it must also be able to read the Adobe DRM protection.

At the moment it seems exclusively for in-store release as there is no mention at all on their website.

It’s great to see some comptetition for the Sony and of course more choice for the consumer. If I find out anything else about it I’ll let you know.

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Borders UK release the Elonex: their very own eBook Reader

Project Gutenberg EPUB Books

Over at Project Gutenberg, Marcello Perathoner has been working hard to convert all the Gutenberg titles into the EPUB format. At this time these versions should be considered experimental, but after trying several different titles, they are all more than readable.

The books are converted where possible from the HTML version in the Gutenberg archives and for those titles without a HTML version, Marcello uses the plain .txt book. The plain .txt files at Gutenberg are notoriously inconsistent in their layout so converting these accurately is extremely difficult — I know this myself only too well. Perhaps it’s time Project Gutenberg embraced a Master Format.

What makes this special from the other news (see below) is that all the Gutenberg books go through a proofreading process and so the accuracy is very high. This is why so many other eBook project are based on the Gutenberg archives.

Google and Sony partner to release 500,000 Public Domain EPUB Books

Over the last few years Google has been scanning bo0ks by the million, making them available on their book search, but this is the first time they have any of them available to an eBook reader. All the titles are in the public domain (pre-1923 titles only) and once added to the current Sony Reader catalogue, brings the total available titles to around 600,000, far surpassing Amazon Kindle’s 240,000 catalogue. Amazon still use their own propriety eBook format and do no currently allow EPUB files to be read natively – conversion is needed first – but as the Google EPUB books all come DRM free, there are many tools out there that will allow you access to these on a Kindle or other reading platform.

As the press release states, “the publishing industry has more or less united on EPUB for e-book distribution”, so c’mon Amazon, let’s see some native EPUB support!

Don’t have a Sony Reader?

Although this announcement is aimed at Sony Reader owners, you don’t need to own a PRS-505 or PRS-700 to read these Google EPUB books. Just download the Sony “eBook Library” software to search and download. Paul Biba’s article over at TeleRead shows how to access the books without owning a Reader.

No access for non-U.S. based PRS-505 owners

Yet again, this is a U.S. only release, at least if you already own a PRS-505. You can only access the Google books via Sony’s “eBook Library” software, but in my UK version we don’t have access to the Sony Book Store as we are only pointed to the Waterstone website. When I tried to install the new version (2.5) it tells me it cannot install in my region! I believe it is because I already have my UK reader registered and if I were to install on a second computer I would then have access to these titles.

If there are any non U.S. PRS-505 users out there who have succeeded in accessing the archive, please let me know.

Google EPUB Quality?

As Google does not proof read their scanned books, relying completely on the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to produced the digital characters, the quality of the text themselves is not as good as archives like Project Gutenberg or websites that take their books from PG, such as Feedbooks.com. Then again, were are getting 500K free books with the potential to access another million Google books in the future.

All in all, this has been a good week for the EPUB format.

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Google + Sony + Project Gutenberg = EPUB bliss!

Although I am happy with the current formatting of the epub files I wanted to turn to you, the ePub community, and ask for your feedback in the hope that the improvements you submit will make these ePub eBooks even better.

ePubBooks.com eBook Features

• Linked Footnotes – each footnote number is a link, click on this to see the footnote. Click on the same number to go back to your original page.
• Images – Some titles will include images. Italicised image titles when available.
• Nicely formatted titles, subtitles, etc.
• Paragraph indents – Except on first paragraph of a chapter/section (more paper book like)
• Block Indents – Small left/right indents on block quotes, letters of correspondence, songs, etc.

This is just a small selection for some of the formatting features I’ve implemented.

Please Note: Not all features will show on every reader/device (Stanza on the iPhone does not use the files built-in CSS styles.)

Download the ePub eBook

The title I’m making available as a pre-release download is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – this has many features which show off my conversion. As this eBook contains images it is quite large, weighing in at over 5MB.

The test book has now been removed. You can find the final release here;

Gulliver’s Travels (Final)

All comments, on both the frontend formatting (indents, italics, etc) and the underlying code (OPF, NCX, XML markup) is very much appreciated.

This eBook can be read using Adobe Digital Editions, Stanza (desktop and iPhone version), Sony Reader (PRS-505 and PRS-700), BeBook and the FBReader.

Enjoy!

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Gulliver’s Travels ePub eBook – Test Release

One thing to note about this is that he was only successful in doing so when using his MacBook Pro, he was unable to say the same about the process using Windows.

After reading his article, I have to say the whole thing seems really easy!

Andrew did bring up one of Stanza’s failings, “A lot of the formatting isn’t (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.” Perhaps it’s understandable about tables but I am surprised that lists are not yet supported. However, the app is still in beta and we know that Lexcycle are working hard on improving it.

One thing Andrew noted in his post was that O’Reilly are also looking into releasing their titles as individual iPhone Apps. I’m not convinced by this approach myself, but hey, for you iPhone users it will if nothing else give the proper formatting that O’Reilly intended

Okay, there’s a long way to go before ePub is a format that all devices can read properly, however it’s great to see that the industry is still moving forward.

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TOC tutorial on how to read O’Reilly ePub books on your iPhone

Another alternative is now being developed by Opera Software for their popular web browser in the form of a widget. Jon Noring has been advising Haakon Lie over at Opera to develop the browser plug-in, which is currently at a beta stage of development.

Please note: to use the widget you will need to download a version of Opera with File I/O support from Opera Labs.

There are some basic instructions posted over on the Opera Widgets blog. In short these are;

• Add books by going to the library and clicking “Add book…”
• Read books by clicking “Read”
• Navigate a book using the keyboard
  • Scroll up: Shift-Space, Page up, Arrow up, Z
  • Scroll down: Space, Page down, Arrow down, X
  • Previous chapter: Arrow left
  • Next chapter: Arrow right
  • Chapter top: Home
  • Chapter bottom: End
  • Toggle TOC panel: F4, T
  • Toggle bookmark panel: B

For some reason you will need to rename your .epub file to the .zip extension. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

There was no mention of any DRM capabilities so don’t expect any DRM protected books to work yet. There are however, a number of places where you can download FREE ePub books. Please visit the ePub Books page on this site for a list of suitable websites.

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An Opera ePub book reading widget is being developed

The ePub standard has seen great interest of late from both professionals and amateurs alike but this is the first time were are going to be able to read ePub formatted books on a dedicated eBook device such as the Sony Reader.

The new firmware allows the Reader to view both DRMed and non-DRMed ePub/PDF files, which also means Sony users can now purchase books from vendors other than Sony itself (Fictionwise, O’Reilly, Penguin UK, etc). A short time ago we had confirmation from several publisher that they will start to provide ePub formatted books – Penguin UK announced they’ll have plenty of ePub books available from September 2008.

Waterstones/SonyStyle to sell Sony Reader in the UK!

For those of us who are UK eBook fans, Sony have partnered with the Waterstones book store in the UK to start selling the Sony Reader, available from 3rd September 2008, they will have over 25,000 titles available when they go live! You can also Pre-Order your Sony Reader UK (PRS-505) from SonyStyle.co.uk. The eBook titles to be made available at Waterstones will be released in the ePub format.

It was anticipated that both these pieces of news would be big, but the response around the net has been just huge. There’s been a lot of activity and hype surrounding the Amazon Kindle recently but this news shows that Sony are by no means going to play the underdog.

All-in-all,  this has been a great day for the Sony Reader, Waterstones and of course all of us who wish to see the ePub format succeed.

I only have the PRS-500 myself so I’d love to hear from any readers out there on how easy it is to update, transfer and read ePub books on the Sony Reader.

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Sony Reader now reads ePub books!

The reader is currently in an open-beta status, so as always, expect some bugs and of course many improvements over the coming weeks and months.

To use the reader you will need to create an account on the Bookworm site, all your books will need to be uploaded there. At the moment there is no way to organise your books so if you upload more than a couple dozen, navigation may be a little cumbersome. Liza is working to improve this.

Unlike most other ePub readers, Bookworm allows for full use of stylesheets and images, which is especially critical for technical books which include HTML tables and code samples.

The layout for the books within your web browser is pleasant enough, although without an iPhone and am unable to try out the mobile version. I did try out the mobile version from within FireFox, the layout is minimal enough for it to render well on the small screen.

Liza mentions that the mobile optimisations are currently for the iPhone only, but she is working on other devices, next up will be for the Opera Mobile.

In Liza’s original blog post she gave a list of up-coming improvements, these were as follows;

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Use the web-based Bookworm reader to read your ePub books