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 ...

Betabeat has interviewed magazine design icon Roger Black, who over the last few decades has been responsible for redesigns of a number of well-known magazines (including Rolling Stone, New York, the New York Times Magazine, and Newsweek. To say that Black is “famous” in the magazine design scene would be like calling Michael Jackson “well-known”. Black says that he is “flabbergasted” by how many people have bought iPads, “and even more so how the publishing industry thought it was some kind of magic pony that would save them.” But even so, Black seems to be adapting to the...

While I was out and about last night, I happened to notice a CDROM stand on the counter of a local print and copy shop. It was a free CD version of “Names & Numbers”, one of the local telephone directories. Curious, I picked it up and took it home to give it a run-through. Though I have only taken a cursory glance over it, I am actually fairly impressed. Though the device has a Windows autorun and installer built in, it can also be run off the CD without needing to be installed. At heart it seems to...

From the Neiman Journalism Lab comes a review of this new product: The nonprofit news organization Center for Public Integrity is announcing an alternative today at the annual Online News Association conference. The Center wants to make reading its work more enjoyable for the user, and a smarter investment for an organization rethinking its online and mobile strategies. The Center has a new HTML5 product that gives users an app-like experience in a web browser. The project is part of a new digital initiative at the Center, funded by $1.5 million in grants from the Knight Foundation. “We think we’ve created a...

If you're a fan of military history or just like a good historical title for your eReader of choice, then head on over to the Air Force Historical Research Agency or the HyperWar section of ibiblio.  Jam-packed with research data, personal papers, images and more, you will find lots of neat and historical information! With it's origins in World War II and today having over "70,000,000 pages" of information, the Air Force Historical Research Agency is a great place to visit for both aviation and history buffs.  Using both my iPad and my Android phone, the web site scales really well...

On the A List Apart website, Joe Clark has written an extremely good, extremely long essay on why HTML-based formats are becoming the new standard for e-books, and what needs to be done to clean that standard up. Clark points out that HTML “is great for expressing words”—and not just words in websites, but the form of words used for most fiction and some non-fiction books—what Craig Mod called “Formless Content”. Every e-book reader on the market can display some HTML-based formats—everything but the Kindle can do ePub, and the Kindle’s AZW format is just HTML-based in a different...

Photo Note: My auto-focus digital camera had a little trouble getting good shots of the screen; no matter what I do, the shots tend to turn out slightly off-focus. The shots may look blurry, but suffice it to say that’s a problem with my camera—in person, the reader is quite as crisp and clear as printed text. I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems. In Praise of Astak Before I start...

Last night, Paul Biba startled me with an offer: he had received a review unit of Astak’s 5” Pocket PRO EZ Reader, but did not have the time to review it. Did I want to? Did I ever‽ This will make a great opportunity to compare this competing e-book reader to what I remember of the Sony. With that in mind, I am starting a new series of columns: Two weeks with an Astak 5”. I actually expect to have this reader longer than two weeks—Paul believed it was mine to keep, though I will try not to get too attached...

One of the big tests for the Sony PRS-700, and the thing I’ve been studying the most, is how well it displays the different formats of books it reads. Over the last few days, I have done more reading than I had done in the previous month, and am ready to make some observations. In this post, I will cover ePub and LRF-formatted books. In the next one, I will look at PDFs. Note that the comparison photos above and below may not show any of the platforms at its best, due to strange tricks that backlighting and flash photography play on...

I have just spent a day trying various different types of e-books with the PRS-700 that Sony has loaned me for the next two weeks. By and large, it has been an interesting experience, and I’m starting to see a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of e-ink. It’s been interesting. In this post, I will cover the installation process, and take a brief look at two conduits—the included Library and the open-source Calibre. Future posts will include some photographic comparisons between the 700 and other readers I have been using. Quick Start I guess that someone at Sony had the...

George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time). But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted. Over the last four columns, I have...

This series, “Paleo E-books,” looks at groups who were writing Internet literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s—well before most people had any idea what an “e-book” was. Prior “Paleo E-books” columns cover: The Superguy Mailing List The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest In this entry I will be looking at fan-written fiction, or “fanfic”—and in particular one of the more famous early Internet fanfic series: Undocumented Features. Today, there is nothing unusual about Internet fanfic; it’s just one of those things that people do on the Internet. It’s gotten so you can barely research Harry Potter without coming across a...