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. ...

EPUB TO KINDLE - Example: Free Google BooksI'm updating an older post on converting free ePub booksfrom Google to work on the Kindle.  (The earlier blog article was updated often for Google-book changes and lost its basic focus.)The conversion is actually easy to do, and although we can now easily get free Kindle-versions of these Google books, it's good to know how to do this for any ePub book that doesn't have a form of digital-rights-protection or management (DRM) placed on it.Google now combines its free Google books with the ones they sell in the the newish Google Book Store....

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...

From the press release: ACCESS CO., LTD., a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile, beyond-PC and digital TV markets, today announced the availability of NetFront™ BookReader v1.0 EPUB Edition, a new, platform-independent eBook reader that features support for EPUB® 3, the latest version of the distribution and interchange format for digital publications and documents developed and maintained by the ...

From the IPDF Web Site: The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced the completion of a major revision to EPUB, the global standard interchange and delivery format for eBooks and other digital publications. The IDPF membership unanimously voted to elevate EPUB 3.0 to a final IDPF Recommended Specification, publicly available at: http://idpf.org/epub/30. EPUB 3 was chartered in May 2010 and developed by a global working group of over 100 contributors, reaching Proposed Recommendation status in May, 2011. Based on HTML5, EPUB 3 adds support for rich media (audio, video), interactivity (JavaScript), global language support (including vertical writing), styling and layout enhancements, SVG,...

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!...

I’m delighted to present a first part of a tutorial on how to create epub ebooks, written by Paul Salvette. Formatting files for digital distribution might look difficult, but it’s good to give it a try – and Sigil seems to be the best tool available. What’s most important – Paul did a great job to explain it as simple as possible. Today you’ll learn how to get started with Sigil. In the two next parts Paul will share tips on styling a document, adding images, metadata, table of contents, and finalizing the work. Don’t hesitate to check Paul’s exceptionally...

From the MPS blog: While most people were enjoying a well-deserved break, our EPUB 3 team has been busy working on a sample for the iPad.  The first cut is below.  We’ve tried to show almost all of the EPUB 3 features currently supported by the iPad which can be seen (remember a lot of EPUB 3′s magic happens at the backend) including: Multimedia: audio and video; animations; slide shows Complex and fixed layouts: print-replica layouts, structured and hyperlinked indexes, embedded fonts, support for high-design content like textbooks Non-Roman scripts: font support, vertical layouts, right-to-left text and page progression Accessibility and early learning: support for accessibility standards,...

An interesting article in Wesley Fryers's blog about his creation of a multimedia version of his ebook Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.  Here is one of his several points: 4. Name EPUB Image and Video Files Carefully Generally I follow strict file naming conventions when sharing online. I use all lowercase characters in file names, avoid special characters and spaces, and use hyphens when needed in longer file names. Thankfully I automatically followed those conventions for most of the 133 images included in my eBook and the 17 referenced videos. I did NOT follow...

Received the following question: Paul -- I have a series of HTML newsletters that have been published weekly over the last year which are available online. I'd like to covert these to an EPUB format, but I am confused on what would be the best way to accomplish this. I "hand roll" my HTML for all my newsletters, and am debating if there is not a "better way" to approach this, and get the proper Table of Contents, etc. Thanks for your thoughts! Ron Blaisdell ...

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...