The publishing industry is quickly embracing digital publishing and is basically facing the same issues that the music industry had a few years ago. DRM, specifically, is a very complicated issue. Publishers are afraid that without it file sharing will ruin their business---but they should be equally afraid of how DRM can be anti-consumer and limit the adoption of e-books. Beyond locks While I can understand the situation of the publishers, I do believe that the publisher-reader/customer relationship should be built on trust, rather than digital locks and artificial scarcity. One of the...

We’ve officially released a new companion software for Feedbooks users with Windows: News Stand. Thanks to this software you’ll be able to automatically synchronize your subscriptions (RSS feeds, newspapers) to your favorite reading device. See Help page. Download latest version here. Moderator's note: I'll give it a try, Hadrien. Sounds intriguing. - D.R....

Until recently, Mobipocket had a pretty huge advantage over competitors---its ability to turn RSS feeds into Mobipocket files and auto-sync them to a mobile device. As promised, I've been working on an easy way for everyone to turn RSS feeds into ePub, and the feature is now fully ready on Feedbooks development server. Thanks to the REST API that we'll also release this summer, it will be very easy for developers working on devices or software supporting ePub to add support for this: a simple GET request to a resource like /user/id/subscriptions.xml will respond with an...

I remember very precisely my first day with an e-ink device. Instantly I realized what a difference it makes to read on a screen that looks like paper. But for some reason, the whole experience still felt like reading on a screen, instead of reading a book. It took me a few days to fully understand this impression: typesetting. I'm used to hyphenation, kerning, widows/orphans etc.---in a book. On a screen, the typesetting is usually very limited. While the screen looked like paper, the text looked like something that a screen displayed. I managed to avoid this problem very quickly,...

Moderator: Our newest contributor is a familiar name, Hadrien Gardeur---co-founder and CTO of the Feedbooks site offering e-books for many devices and in many formats. Feedbooks supports standards for both e-books and the Semantic Web. A hearty welcome to you, Hadrien! - D.R. EPUB as a standard---it's actually three standards, OPS, OPF and OCF---is a real step forward for e-books. I really like how flexible the OPF standard is: with proper fallbacks you can very easily support all sorts of devices, and extend the document. But there's still room for improvements, and the best way to support EPUB is to discuss...