From the Adobe Digital Editions blog: Today, we’re posting a how-to guide that explains how to convert eBooks authored using Adobe InDesign for compatibility with the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Store. Because Amazon uses their proprietary AZW format, the Kindle doesn’t natively support the open EPUB standard. However, with a bit of open source software, it’s fairly easy to convert the EPUB files exported with InDesign into the Amazon-compatible MOBI format. Converting InDesign documents for Kindle compatibility requires the following steps: 1. Export InDesign document to EPUB2. Convert EPUB to Amazon-compatible MOBI format3. Preview on Kindle device (optional)4. Upload to Amazon store For...

From Planet PDF comes word of Kdan Mobile releasing an updated PDF reader for iOS: Kdan Mobile, a developer of mobile applications, has released version 3.8 of PDF Reader, a major update to its powerful mobile PDF application for iPhone and iPod Touch. The new version includes a new user interface, optimized annotation tools, PDF form-filling capability, support for new file types and it integrates with online storage applications Kdan's PDF Reader has the following key features: Powerful file viewing engine Supports various file formats including RAR, ePub, CBR and CBZ File transfer capabilities through WiFi, USB and Cloud storage Document...

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...

That's the title of an article in Infoworld by Galen Gruman.  Here's an excerpt: The age of the mobile reader is upon us, thanks to iPads, Kindles, and smartphones. So why is it so hard to create mobile content? There's a shocking lack of tools to craft books, monographs, magazine articles, white papers, and other content for use on mobile devices for the ePub format deployed in e-book reader apps such as Apple's iBooks and Amazon.com's Kindle, much less for the kind of scalable presentation seen in the few good magazine and newspaper apps like...

Received the following email from Gary Young: Most of the eBooks that I buy these days are “protected” with DRM using the Adobe Adept system. Does anyone know how much this adds to the cost of a single copy of an eBook? Obviously, Adobe wants to make money, and they will charge publishers a fee for the right to use their DRM software. How much is that fee? ...

You can find the rest of the post at E is for Book: So last week I announced that I converted my picture book app, LULA’S BREW, into a .pdf for download to The Illustrated Section and various electronic devices... and a Nook color picture book. I got you started on preparing your files for the process. Here's the rest...  The latest buzz is that Adobe InDesign 5 (CS5) can convert files to .epub. VonLogan's tutorial will walk you through this step-by-step, so you'll need to download it from Will Terry's blog. My first glitch was that I only have...

Today Wolfram launched CDF, a new document format that incorporates interactive charts, infographics, tables, and anything else that you can produce in the company's own Mathematica (or that you can import as MathML expressions from Excel and Word). Conrad Wolfram writes, "The idea is to provide a knowledge container that’s as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts." Although Wolfram is positioning this as an open document format, the readers over at Slashdot are skeptical about the EULA and potential issues down...

German ebook software company txtr has updated its Android app with several new features. Some, such as bookmark and note syncing, are familiar to users of the Kindle app, but the update surpasses Amazon's offering by including cloud storage for personal docs as well as purchased books. The company also offers a white label version that can be customised or branded by third parties, and claims to have the largest selection of German language titles in the German market. From the press release: Besides searching for books and browsing by genre, users can now discover books through channels, such as Featured Books...

The latest issue of ACCESS, a newspaper for librarians in Asia, looks at Singapore-based iG Publishing, which now offers "some 50,000 titles from more than 100 reputable North American, European and Asian academic publishers." The article doesn't go into much detail on the underlying technology, but it looks like iG relies on PDF and the Adobe Acrobat Reader DRM plugin called FileOpen. Read the full article at www.aardvarknet.info....

Marie Lebert's review of the past forty years of ebooks continues over at Project Gutenberg News with eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present. Lebert's post focuses mainly on the timeline of the format's evolution, so I heartily recommend you supplement it with Nate Hoffelder's OMG PDF WTF at The Digital Reader, which highlights some of the format's huge security issues....

You may want to hold off installing that new eReader app on your iPhone or iPad. You may not realize this, but Adobe will only let you play with so many eReading apps on your device before you run out of allotted authorizations. Or worse, if you’ve installed too many apps, you may be in trouble when you restore or replace your device.   I have been a longtime supporter of eBooks. Although I didn’t leap enthusiastically into them in my Palm Pilot days, I did have a few that I read. I especially loved to have the scriptures on my PDA. So convenient, and...

From IndesignSecrets.  For full details see the article: InDesign CS5.5 brings many improvements to the creation of EPUB files. A posting hererevealed some of the improvements. However, recently I ran into a bug which occurs when exporting EPUB out of InDesign CS5.5, which does not occur in InDesign CS5. It has been described as a WebKit encoding bug. I was working on creating two eBooks, and I had started them in InDesign CS5. When InDesign CS5.5 was completed, I happily opened them in the new version because using CS5.5 required a lot less postprocessing of the files. The chapters passed EPUB validation,...