E-book formatting is a challenge, as I've written about in previous posts. Later this month, Flipick is launching a tool that might make it easier. From their press release: Flipick is a new online service that allows book publishers and design shops to produce their own ePub3 compatible eBooks directly from within Adobe InDesign. This new service is quick, and capable of producing rich, informative and interactive text in an utmost cost-effective manner. Flipick is expected to be popular with publishers creating fixed-layout eBooks such as K-12 and scientific textbooks, storybooks and graphic novels in a format that dynamically adapts to disparate reading...

Last year we covered Ars Technica publishing John Siracusa’s 27,000-word comprehensive review of OS X 10.7 Lion as an e-book, and the very successful sales numbers for a review that could still be read free on-line. This year, with the release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Siracusa has done it again—but as the Nieman Journalism Lab reports, the process has not been without snafus. Since Mountain Lion was under NDA until the day it launched, that means that the e-book had to be submitted to Amazon at the same time the article was allowed to be published online...

Last week, author Charlie Stross posted his review of the process of writing using Scrivener, a specialized story-based word processor I’ve mentioned a few times. Stross has a good overview of the program’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of a professionally-published writer. The program’s biggest weakness, he finds, is that it essentially becomes useless at the point a novel is finished and submitted to the publisher—because the Word document output isn’t quite ideal for submission, and then the publisher will send revisions in the form of Word documents, and expect them to be processed accordingly. Since...

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books. As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM)...

As I was browsing through Zite last night to find more stories to blog, I came across what was effectively an advertisement (though Zite apparently considered it a blog article; clearly the program needs some fine-tuning) for an EPUB DRM removal tool. I’m not going to link to this advertisement, because I don’t want to provide it with even a smidgin of search-engine-optimization respectability. Suffice it to say this program, “ePub DRM Romoval,” sells for $29.95 and offers “easy access to DRM-free ePub ebooks for your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, NOOK, Sony Reader and more ebook reader...

CNet’s Sharon Vaknin has a 3-minute video (embedded below) in which she covers some ways of giving e-books as gifts. While the process is pretty simple overall, it is interesting to see Vaknin present video of how it works. Giving e-books as gifts with the Kindle or Nook is as easy as clicking on “Give As Gift” on the Kindle or B&N listing for the book. Both sites offer a time-delay feature in which you can choose a calendar date to have the e-book delivered. iBooks doesn’t permit e-book gifting, however, so all you can really do is send...

I know I mention Diane Duane’s e-book store sales a lot, but I figure that she’s one of very few excellent examples I know of authors who run their own DRM-free multi-format e-book stores and offer frequent discounts to boot. She’s a shining example of how to do things right, and I think that kind of example needs all the exposure it can get. And speaking of frequent discounts, Duane is currently offering a 60% discount on everything in her e-book store through 23:59 Hawaiian time, Tuesday March 27th. Use the coupon code FLASHSALE during the checkout process. Among...

Until recently, the main formatting tools that self-publishing writers could use to create e-books were expensive desktop-publishing applications that cost a lot of money to buy and a lot of time to learn. (I’m not counting Calibre here because Calibre is a conversion app—you still have to do the actual writing and formatting in something else.) However, the $50 writing and note-keeping app Scrivener has changed that. Scrivener can export e-books in PDF, Kindle, EPUB, and Word (required for Smashwords) formats, among others. On his blog “Writing is Hard Work,” independent author and English teacher Roger Colby...

While libraries everywhere are scrambling to come up with an ebook plan that can satisfy both their patrons as well as their long-term organizational goals, sometimes the greatest resources they can offer are already in their libraries.  What’s this?  Simply put, it’s the utilization of their local resources, of history, genealogy, and local authors.  This is the sort of information that is highly desired, yet sometimes falls off the radar, lost to the deluge of publishers, best-sellers and other more “trendy” technological items. It’s easy to dismiss local materials from any project planning, arguing there’s no budget, no staff and no...

A MobileRead thread reports that the Requiem FairPlay DRM-cracking app now removes the DRM from Apple’s iBooks EPUB e-books, in addition to the music and video DRM-removal that it already did. Follow-up comments express skepticism that Apple will let it stand for long without changing their DRM to block it, or that it will make much difference where people buy their e-books since most people don’t care about DRM. For myself, it would make me a touch more tempted to buy e-books from Apple if I knew I could then render them platform-agnostic—except given that most nonexclusive e-books...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...