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Feedbooks: A million ePub downloads—plus serial novels added, including horror story
September 10, 2008 | 9:40 am
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By David Rothman
Feedbooks, which offers public domain books, Creative Commons works and RSS-to-e-reader arrangements, reports a million ePub downloads.
And Feed expects to hit two million in just a month.
On top of that, iPhone users can now download serial novels from Feed, a new category within the Stanza catalogue—including a horror novel, Stillwater, by Joe Schreiber. Other Schreiber-related links are here.
iPhone-fueled increase
Stanza, of course, is e-reader software that runs on the iPhone/Touch among other platforms.
It’s the main reason for the boost in Feedbooks’ ePub count, although the Sony PRS-505 is helping, too, now that it has ePub capability. Just as with the Kindle, you can call up a list of books to download within the reader, even though Stanza is software rather than a device per se.
Crucial next few months
“With the launch of the Sony Reader in the UK and Waterstone’s online store,” says Hadrien Gardeur, “major publishers are finally distributing books in ePub. To improve both the format and the compatible reading systems, the upcoming months will be crucial.”
Exactly, and I don’t just mean technical improvements per se, but also the introduction of a logo for nonDRMed ePub. Downloaders of books and software need to know they’re absolutely safe from eBabel—still an issue if you’re stuck with DRMed ePub. Yes, DRMed ePub is still better than a DRMed proprietary format, but the best approach is no DRM or social DRM. Stay tuned for some comments on this issue from a Pan Macmillan executive.
Meanwhile here’s another chance to speak out on ways ePub can be better. Comment away! And if you have trouble posting because of the TeleBlog’s current tech problems, e-mail me at drNOSPAMteleread.com.
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Comments:
Well, OK, let me be the one to ask the Stupid Question: Those non-DRMed ePubs from Pan Mac (ooh, does that come out as “Pac Man” when I read it!), if a way to transfer them to the iPhone was possible, Stanza would read them just A-OK?
Sure. And there’s 2 ways to transfer them: enter the URL in Stanza, or use Stanza desktop.
*slapping my dim head*
Thanks for that. I keep forgetting that Stanza also has a desktop component!
Now the next Stupid Question: Could it do DRMed ePubs? If not, is that planned to be added?
Mike, there’s no ePub DRM standard at the moment. I dislike DRM, to put it mildly. But I suppose it’s one possibility for the “protection”-crazed. The smartest publishers will just say good-bye to DRM and either use social DRM or nothing at all. That’s why I’m so excited about Pan Mac’s use of non-DRMed ePub. Thanks. David
I guess you should realize that when I say DRMed ePub, I mean the ePubs that have to go through Adobe Digital Editions.