Last week, author Charlie Stross posted his review of the process of writing using Scrivener, a specialized story-based word processor I’ve mentioned a few times. Stross has a good overview of the program’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of a professionally-published writer. The program’s biggest weakness, he finds, is that it essentially becomes useless at the point a novel is finished and submitted to the publisher—because the Word document output isn’t quite ideal for submission, and then the publisher will send revisions in the form of Word documents, and expect them to be processed accordingly. Since...

From the ePub Books Blog.  More details in the full article. Let us format a mouse’s tail. There’s a good reason for it: Wikipedia says, and I see no reason to disbelieve, that exactly 150 years ago (July 4th, 1862) Lewis Carroll told the daughters of his colleague the first version of the story which we now know, in written form, as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And this is, obviously, a good occasion for some formatting. There is an especially attractive piece in the named book: The Mouse’s Tale, shaped like a mouse’s tail. In my earlier article on formatting poetry for...

From the BISG website: Thanks to the work of its Content Structure Committee, the Book Industry Study Group is pleased to offer an important new industry reference tool... the EPUB 3.0 Support Grid, version 1.0. Designed to be a handy reference for EPUB content creators and business types alike, the Grid provides information on what enhanced functionality available in the IDPF's recently released EPUB 3.0 standard is supported by which devices, apps, and reading systems.Click here to download the Grid now.Industry feedback is critical to keeping the Grid accurate and up-to-date. So we hope you'll join the dialogue and send in...

From the BlueGriffon website: I have in front of me right now the beta 1 of BlueGriffon EPUB Edition. That beta is EPUB2-only, no EPUB3 yet. I am going to give that beta1 for tests purposes (blogging allowed, no embargo, redistribution of course forbidden) to a number of selected people in the coming days. Please don't ping me if you don't get an invite, the list of testers is already frozen. cross-platform Windows, OS X and Linux powered of course by Mozilla no proprietary pivot format at all creates *.epub, opens *.epub, edits *.pub, saves *.epub; of course including if the ebook was not created by BlueGriffon Web...

New from the KB/National Library of the Netherlands Departments of Collection and Collection Care. Written by Johan van der Knijff. From the Introduction: Over the last few years, the EPUB format has become increasingly popular in the consumer market. A number of publishers have indicated their wish to use EPUB for supplying their electronic publications to the KB [National Library of the Netherlands]. In response to this, the KB’s Departments of Collection and Collection Care requested an initial study to investigate the suitability of the format for archival preservation. The main questions were: + What are the main characteristics of EPUB? + What functionality does EPUB...

Markus Gylling, CTO, IDPF:  it is the members of IDPF who will ultimately decide what happens in the future.  No plans for EPUB4 at this time.  Will be future maintenance releases which will start in the autumn.  IDPF is working in a modular manner to enhance and update existing features.  No changes to the core kernel.  Ongoing project in how to define glossaries and dictionaries in EPUB.  This has been missing too long. Use the dictionary as a book and as a service.  Publishing drafts in the late Summer.  Indexes: current situation of indexes in ebooks is poor.  The working...

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books. As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM)...

As I was browsing through Zite last night to find more stories to blog, I came across what was effectively an advertisement (though Zite apparently considered it a blog article; clearly the program needs some fine-tuning) for an EPUB DRM removal tool. I’m not going to link to this advertisement, because I don’t want to provide it with even a smidgin of search-engine-optimization respectability. Suffice it to say this program, “ePub DRM Romoval,” sells for $29.95 and offers “easy access to DRM-free ePub ebooks for your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, NOOK, Sony Reader and more ebook reader...

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...