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...

There are plenty of read-it-later style applications that save web documents to a special application on your tablet or smartphone, but what if you want to load them onto your e-reader instead? There’s a Google Chrome extension for that. DotEPUB will allow one-click saving of web content into EPUB files that you can load into your EPUB-compatible reader. (Kindle owners are out of luck.) Of course, it’s been possible to do the same thing with Instapaper plus Calibre for a while now, but that does add an intermediate step. (We did mention this a year ago, but it’s...

On PaidContent, Bill Rosenblatt looks at whether we can ever expect a universal format for e-books, equivalent to “MP3” for audio. He doesn’t think so. For one thing, he points out that MP3s aren’t actually used all that much in digital music sales. Apple uses AAC, which has generally better sound quality. The only major commercial market for MP3s is Amazon, and it only has 10% of the music market. And whereas MP3 had a number of advantages over the competing CD format (in particular, it was much smaller and easier to transfer digitally), EPUB doesn’t offer...

On FutureBook, Richard Stephenson has a brief piece looking at the interactivity now possible in iBooks. Since iBooks 1.5 supports Javascript, this means that e-books can take upon themselves abilities formerly associated with stand-alone appbooks. Stephenson uses the example of the Beatles Yellow Submarine iBook, available for free from the iBookstore, which uses embedded Javascript to add interactivity. He suggests that this interactivity could be a great way for publishers to add additional revenue streams, such as the ability to purchase music from within the Yellow Submarine book. While I will admit that it’s good to see...

Amazon may not allow EPUBs to be read directly on the Kindle, but it still makes use of them in creating Kindle e-books. Given that they’re pretty much the industry standard for e-books outside of Amazon, it would be foolish of the company not to. PaidContent has a report on Cork, Ireland e-book wholesaling company ePub Direct receiving €1.3 ($1.69/£1.09) million in venture capital funding to grow its business. The company supplies titles to 116 stores, including Amazon, Apple, and Waterstone’s, and also serves over 15,000 online libraries. The article isn’t clear on who ePub Direct supplies them...

One of the hottest new computer games is the latest entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise, Skyrim. Although I haven’t played the game myself, it seems that one element of the game is that it includes a bunch of in-game books, some of them quite long, that go into the backstory of the game world and various things in it. As Jeremy Hill notes on our sister blog Gamertell, there are so many of them that there just isn’t time to read them while in the game (where there are, obviously, better things to do, like killing dragons). ...

Diane Duane has revised and relaunched another of her backlist as an e-book. This one, Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, takes CSI-style forensic drama (though it was first published in 2002, the same year as the original CSI launched) and puts it into an SF/fantasy setting. It’s one of the few Duane books I haven’t gotten around to reading yet—but now I have a good excuse! Duane writes that she took the opportunity to fix a few issues she’d noticed in the book over the last ten years, including restoring some material that had previously been cut and rewriting the...

I somehow missed seeing this when it came out a week ago, but Smashwords founder Mark Coker announced that Smashwords is going to begin accepting more e-book formats in 2012. At the moment, the site uses an automated document converter called Meatgrinder that accepts DOC files and processes them into that multiple formats it sells. However, as with any automated conversion tool, the results can be inferior to what is possible for those who prefer to design these formats from scratch. Coker writes: To accommodate the books from these ebook design pros, we'll offer a...

At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...

For “absolutely no reason”, Diane Duane is running a 50%-off sale on every e-book in her on-line store, good today, October 10th, only. Use the coupon code NOREASON to get the discount. Duane’s e-books are available DRM-free in both mobi (Kindle) and EPUB (Nook, Kobo) formats, and are already quite reasonably priced. 50% off that is quite a deal!...

A couple more e-book-related news items from Diane Duane’s blog that hit in recent days: First, Duane is now able to make available multi-format bundles, including both EPUB and Kindle/MOBI, for all the DRM-free e-books in her store. (And .LIT will be added to these bundles as well, over the next month.) To celebrate, she’s running a week-long 20%-off sale using the coupon code BUNDLE. (When you place the order, you will enter the code on the very last screen after you verify your PayPal information.) Second, Duane has added a package deal where all nine volumes of...