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...

Since the beginning of the “modern” ebook era, when Amazon entered the marketplace with its Kindle, I’ve wondered why Amazon chose to follow its own path as regards format and DRM rather than adopting the ePub standard and a more benign or universal form of DRM. I’ve wondered because by choosing its own path, Amazon has decided that readers who are not Kindlers (by which I mean consumers who read on dedicated e-ink devices that are incompatible with Amazon and thus cannot buy ebooks at Amazon unless they are willing to strip the DRM and convert the file, which the majority are either unwilling or...

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...

Here is part of a long article that should be of interest to anyone setting up books in XHTML.  It's from the ePub Books Blog: What we are going to discuss here is how to format poetry in XHTML format (which underlies EPUB) so that it looks nice on smartphone screens – that is, when many or even all of the lines do not fit the screen width. In other words, our concern is how to break poetry lines nicely. We do not discuss the poems which use non-standard formatting (Lewis Carrol’s Fury said to a mouse, shaped like a twisting tail, is...

I’m very pleased to share a new post by Paul Salvette. This time Paul will be talking about ePub 3 and how the new version of this popular file format can be used by authors and publishers. For more helpful tips on ebook formatting, check Paul’s book How to Format Your Ebook for Kindle, Nook, Smashwords and Everything Else.   What the Heck is EPUB? The EPUB format is an open source standard that defines how the content and metadata of an eBook should be packaged and how eReading devices and software should render the format to the reader. EPUB is the most...

From the Azardi blog: AZARDI 7 was released today (21 Nov 2011). This version has a number of bug-fixes and feature updates. the ePub3 support has been improved and most significantly the AZARDI Interactive Engine has been updated and included. For more information and to download AZARDI 7 go to azardi.infogridpacific.com. AZARDI is strictly a desktop digital content reader. It works on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, Macs and Linux (Debian). As such it goes a lot further in digital content capabilities than mobile devices. AZARDI has been designed for education, training and instructional content which requires large scale interactivity. 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...

From Publishing Perspectives: On September 15, when Sharp announced that it was suspending production and sales of its much hyped flagship e-reading tablets, called Galapagos, it was seen as proof that Japan would not able to develop an e-book market “in an isolated environment.” That Galapagos failed to survive the first year, many also took it that Sharp was abandoning the proprietary XMDF file format. Why is this important to international readers? Let me explain. RIP Galapagos The XMDF e-book data format, developed by Sharp several years ago, was considered by many in the publishing industry to be the...

Here's another one from Planet PDF today: iStonsoft Studio, a developer of multimedia software, has announced its new PDF to ePub Converter, a professional PDF to ePub conversion software for creating ebooks. iStonsoft PDF to ePub Converter features a user-friendly interface and delivers fast conversion. iStonsoft PDF to ePub Converter allows users to convert their PDF files into eBooks with few simple steps. The tool is equally suited for beginners and more advanced users. Additionally, the software also supports batch conversion. iStonsoft PDF to ePub Converter works on all Windows platform and requires a minimum of 512MB RAM. ...