I've written plenty on this site about e-book conversion (most recently here and here), and I almost skipped over the Bowker press release. I'm glad I decided to investigate further. Okay, quick details first. From the release: Once an author has decided to self-publish, the next step of creating an eBook alongside print is obvious – it is too big a market. Not too far in the future I believe we’ll drop the “e” and we’ll just have books,” stated DCL CEO Mark Gross. “We applaud Bowker for recognizing the need for trustworthy conversion services for its customers, and are honored to...

We're not entirely sure if the White House is now releasing a free holiday e-book on an annual basis. But we do know that taking a December tour of a seasonally-bedecked White House—presumably decorated by the First Lady—is something of a longstanding D.C. tradition. According to the official White House website, Michelle Obama's 2012 holiday decor theme is 'Joy to All.' And as reported by Obama Foodorama, a blog that exclusively covers the White House's food initiatives: "The thousands of guests who tour the White House in December will receive the Official White House Holiday Tour Book, which features a message from President Obama and...

TechCrunch reports that 1DollarScan, a US subsidiary of Japanese jisui (third-party book-to-e-book scanning) company Bookscan, has introduced an improved formatting service called Fine Tune. Fine Tune promises to custom-format its scans so that they work better and load faster on all different platforms. For example, Fine Tuning for the iPhone, Android devices, or e-readers offers compression, margin removal (to make the PDF fit the screen shape better and waste less space on already-small screens), and optimization for the different resolutions or display technologies. CEO Hiroshi Nakano says this approach is particularly important for making inroads in...

O’Reilly TOC general manager and occasional TeleRead contributor Joe Wilkert has a piece up on O’Reilly Radar looking at a survey O’Reilly recently conducted of its e-book customers, asking on what devices and in which formats they planned to do most of their e-book reading. Wilkert reports that the most popular non-PC e-reading device, with a 25% share, was the iPad—but 46% of those who responded said that their primary device for viewing O’Reilly e-books was their PC, and about half of the people who responded said PDF was their format of choice. When...

I found an interesting article on the blog of “technology innovation company” DPCI about how PDF format is an e-publishing dead end. In an era when e-readers have so many different potential screen sizes and different text formatting and rewrapping abilities, the article notes, a format that was primarily developed to freeze a page into a form that would look the same no matter where it was printed is a dead end for screen reading. PDF is a dead-end format. What I mean by this is that the nature of the format mimics what it was...

The Digital Shift has a survey article that could prove to be most useful to teachers.  Here's the beginning: Following are tools that you can use with your students to create ebooks. With them, you can exercise a range of capabilities, from adding a few page-turning effects to PDFs to creating full-blown interactive ebooks with multimedia elements. The simplest form of an ebook is a PDF or Word document that’s been enhanced with some basic page-turning effects and displayed online. Any word-processing program can be used to create the document. Then, to add page-turning effects for online display, upload the completed document...

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

Google has just added offline reading to its Google Books app for the Chrome web browser. They tout this as offering the ability to read e-books on a plane, or when the Internet has gone down for some reason. To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks. Of course, it only takes...

Andriod Community points out that Foxit has a mobile PDF reader for Android.  They like it: Unlike the desktop version, only a $2.99 paid app is available, but that’s comparable to the other 3rd-party PDF viewers on the Market. The standard zoom and reflow features are present, as well as bookmarks. Foxit seems to be focusing on its reader experience with a set of noted additions: the app will automatically load the last document and page you used, and it can adjust the brightness for its own use, like the Kindle and Nook apps. There’s also a set of annotation tools,...

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. ...

From Planet PDF: Foxit has released an upgrade to its popular PDF viewer. Foxit Reader 5.1 adds integration with Facebook and Twitter, along with Read Out Loud. Improvements to load time, text rendering, print and reading experience are also included in the upgrade. The social sharing option is a new innovation for Foxit's PDF viewer, and it's bound to be popular with those who share via eReaders and RSS feeds. Files can be shared by right-clicking and choosing Share Current Document, or by using Foxit's screen-grabbing tool to select a portion of the document. A nice touch for sharing only the most...

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...