Moderator's note on Hadrien Gardeur: Years ago I urged Project Gutenberg to come up with a truly slick program to download, manage and display Gutenberg books. "A book tuner," I called the idea with radio in mind. Hadrien at Feedbooks had similar dreams and acted on them. Hadrien's technology now helps various e-reading apps serve in effect as book tuners. These include such programs as Stanza (the iPhone reader shown at left) and FBReader (a possible candidate for official use on the next OLPC laptop). From within those apps, his technology lets you directly search and call up items from Feedbooks'...

Feedbooks has beefed up its self-publishing side and also allowed readers to contribute to its public domain section. Check out a recent blog entry.  If you want to self-publish in DRMless ePub and some other popular formats, this option is well worth examining. Feedbooks has tried to simplifying matters so that even nontechnical people can produce high-quality files. Shown here is Anne Whitehouse's Fall Love, a novel published through Feedbooks. Speaking of ePUB, the format standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, Feedbooks has joined the IDPF. Way to go, Hadrien! I'm looking forward to Feedbooks having a healthy...

Moderator's note: Marc is clearly listening to your feedback. I myself am a big Stanza fan. Question: Should we run a separate post on, say, eReader or BookShelf---and then likewise invite the devs to reply to your comments on the pros and cons? - D.R. We at Lexcycle have been overwhelmed by the support and encouragement from the e-book community (especially TeleRead) regarding Stanza. The praise has given us the confidence to forge ahead, and the constructive criticism has tempered our hubris and made us wiser. And overall, the community's many years of musings over what would make a perfect e-book reader has...

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....

The New York Times reading app (#38), Bloomberg (#51), and AP Mobile News Network (#80) are among the top 100 free iPhone apps that may be of interest to TeleBlog readers. All are news apps, and I suspect that the New York Times is the leader in part because of the popularity of its site. Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but I don't see any e-book-reading programs there. I'm in a hurry because the electricity is about to go off around here for maintenance purposes. Within the entertainment category, the well-publicized eReader is apparently #28 and Stanza is #33,...

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...

French-language video on experiment Anyone in e-books should be rooting for the success of a trial of the iLiad tablet for newspaper reading---with Le Monde and four other major French newspapers involved. Get people reading E for any purpose and they may well move on to e-books. Newspaper/pub domain synergies? In fact, the French experiment includes not just newspapers and city guides but also novels from Feedbooks, Médiatoon and Mango. Feedbooks is a favorite of ours because of its support of the ePub standard (disclosure: Feedbooks co-founder Hadrien Gardeur is a TeleBlog contributor). The French experiment is...

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...