Michael Cook | epub Blog

ePub Books Project Part 2: A Little History

My first suspicions that eBooks were going to be the future was way back in the day when all those CD’s were coming out and taking over our beloved Vinyl LP, but the real light-bulb moment was when I first discovered Project Gutenberg sometime at the end of the 1990’s.

If memory serves me correctly, I even considered trying to set up an eBook site back then. I believe what stopped me was that there were just not yet any decent reading devices available – reading from a computer monitor was, and still is, the most uncomfortable experience ever.

And so the years rolled by…

Then in 2004/05 I heard about the Sony Librie and immediately knew that the eBooks’ time was coming…and soon!

Continue reading “ePub Books Project Part 2: A Little History”

ePub Books Project Part 1: An Introduction

In this three part series I am going to introduce the ePub Books Project; a project to convert the Project Gutenberg Plain Vanilla .txt eBooks to the .epub format and make them available to download for free. In these articles I’ll be talking about how the project came into being, the current status, and how I hope to develop it in the future.

When I first setup the ePub Books blog the sole intention was for it to be a platform where I could discuss my experiences as I learn to produce .epub formatted documents from a ‘Master Format’, and with the hope that others may also find the information useful.

The world of ePub has taken off considerably quicker than I, and many other people would have thought and as a result the objectives of both my eBook project and that of the of the ePub Books website have changed.

As I work through and learn about the epub conversion process I will also start work on setting up ePubBooks.com as a repository. This will be a place where anyone can come along and download ePub formatted eBooks (no DRM) for use on whatever epub compatible reading platform they may have.

Feedbooks: One Million ePub downloads and counting!

Feedbooks have announced on their Blog that they have now surpassed 1,000,000 downloads of ePub files – this is a serious achievement!

The release of the Stanza eBook reader on the iPhone and the ePub update to the Sony Reader have of course helped greatly, but this is still impressive as they have managed this milestone in just short of 2 months.

It must be noted though that this is not necessarily the number of ePub books, I would imagine the Feed count will far exceed the eBook count.

UPDATE:Hadrien from Feedbooks has confirmed that at least 90% of the downloads are of actual eBooks.

This shows real indications that eBook users are wanting DRM-Free ePub formatted eBooks. Another reminder for publishers to reconsider their use of DRM on eBooks.

Penguin eBooks are live and in the ePub format!

That’s right, Penguin.co.uk have setup a webpage on their site saying that, “by the end of this year we’ll have thousands of titles available in the shiny new ePub format” – Shiny new ePub format!

Okay, so this isn’t the full launch, just an ‘eBook Taster’ but still, they have six taster titles to download and try out.

God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
The Stories of English by David Crystal
King Dork by Frank Portman
King of Swords by Nick Stone
Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble

Just pop along to the Penguin.co.uk eBook Taster page and give those ePub books a test drive.

I did this myself and I have to say they look great. The only exception is the paragraph indents in one of the books are a little too large, indenting almost half way along the line.

One thing I do like about what Penguin have done, is that they have kept the original page numbers in the right hand margin. For me this is a great idea as it will help in more academic circles and will be good for referencing any particular page.

Penguin give no exact date but do say the doors will open in a few weeks.

Sony Readers are coming to every town!

If you’re lucky enough to live in the U.S. then you have plenty of options when it comes to a dedicated eBook reader. For those of us from Europe however, the pickings are much slimmer. That is until now!

In case you’ve been living under a log – come this Thursday we in the UK will have our very own Sony Reader Digital Book (PRS-505)!!

According to the SonyStyle.co.uk website; they will start shipping the new Readers on the 4th September 2008. The regular shipping takes 5 working days but pay an extra £13 and you’ll receive it within 24 hours. Just think, you could be reading on your very own Sony Reader this weekend!

What do you get for your £199 (+ shipping)

I’m sure you all know the details by now so I’ll be very brief;

6″ E-Ink paper like reading screen
Space enough for 160 books (10,000+ if you use the memory slots)
6,800 continuous pages turns (avg. users may charge just once every 2 weeks!)

And What About Books?

Tens of thousands of bestsellers from the Sony Book Store and Waterstones (plus many others websites.)
100,000+ Free public domain books via sites like Project Gutenberg (H.G. Wells, Jane Austin, Alexandre Dumas, etc.)

Now, if you’re thinking about ordering a Reader from the Sony website why not use my link below. By clicking on this link I will get a chance to win my very own PRS-505! Yep, those great people at SonyStyle.co.uk are running a competition and for me to be in with a chance of winning, I just need to place their link on my website and hope some of you lovely people will click it before ordering.

If I do win, I will however be putting the Reader to good use – I am currently developing tools to convert the Project Gutenberg txt eBooks to the ePub format and expect to start releasing them for free on ePubBooks.com before the end of the year. Having a Reader to test them on will be a big benefit! So…[link removed]

What About Other European Countries?

As the title of this post indicated, it seems the UK is not the only country that will be receiving a Reader release this year. MobileRead.com user doctorow posted on the site that perhaps Germany will also be getting their own Reader before the year is out. According to Spiegal.de (written in German) they have spoken with Sony Germany and there are plans for a release there. Perhaps an announcement will be made during this year Frankfurt Book Fair.

There is also speculation that France will follow suite before the year is out.

UPDATE: We’re now hearing that Waterstones book shops in Amsterdam and Brussels will be stocking the Sony Reader.

This could be an interesting year for us Europeans.

TOC tutorial on how to read O’Reilly ePub books on your iPhone

Andrew Savikas over on the O’Reilly TOC has written a nice tutorial on how to read your O’Reilly ePub formatted books on the iPhone using Stanza.

One thing to note about this is that he was only successful in doing so when using his MacBook Pro, he was unable to say the same about the process using Windows.

After reading his article, I have to say the whole thing seems really easy!

Andrew did bring up one of Stanza’s failings, “A lot of the formatting isn’t (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.” Perhaps it’s understandable about tables but I am surprised that lists are not yet supported. However, the app is still in beta and we know that Lexcycle are working hard on improving it.

One thing Andrew noted in his post was that O’Reilly are also looking into releasing their titles as individual iPhone Apps. I’m not convinced by this approach myself, but hey, for you iPhone users it will if nothing else give the proper formatting that O’Reilly intended

Okay, there’s a long way to go before ePub is a format that all devices can read properly, however it’s great to see that the industry is still moving forward.

Fictionwise to start selling ePub formatted books…soon

A few days back one of the MobileRead forum members contacted Fictionwise and asked when they will start selling ePub formatted books. As they noted in the post, BooksonBoard are currently the only online bookstore that are selling commercial ePub books.

UPDATE: We should not forget that O’Reilly have a small selection of titles that come as an eBook bundle, included in that bundle are books in the ePub format.

Fictionwise replied by stating that “We are currently making our plans for epub compliance over the coming months.”

However, it seems that one of the biggest hurdles for them is how to encrypt their titles, “each vendor is currently using their own proprietary encryption scheme for epub.” DRM isn’t going to go away anytime soon so it’s understandable that they need to work out these issues before they can move forward.

An interesting point they made was that there are still very few publisher supporting ePub at this time, yes more will follow suit, but until they do the number of available titles will be limited.

Continue reading “Fictionwise to start selling ePub formatted books…soon”

An Opera ePub book reading widget is being developed

Not so long ago Liza Daly released Bookworm to the public, an ePub web application for reading .epub formatted eBooks.

Another alternative is now being developed by Opera Software for their popular web browser in the form of a widget. Jon Noring has been advising Haakon Lie over at Opera to develop the browser plug-in, which is currently at a beta stage of development.

Please note: to use the widget you will need to download a version of Opera with File I/O support from Opera Labs.

Continue reading “An Opera ePub book reading widget is being developed”

Sony Reader now reads ePub books!

Very early this morning, 12:01 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time to be precise, TeleRead.org broke the news that Sony are officially releasing a firmware update allowing the Sony Reader Digital Book PRS-505 to read the IDPF ePub formatted books – available from their website today.

The ePub standard has seen great interest of late from both professionals and amateurs alike but this is the first time were are going to be able to read ePub formatted books on a dedicated eBook device such as the Sony Reader.

The new firmware allows the Reader to view both DRMed and non-DRMed ePub/PDF files, which also means Sony users can now purchase books from vendors other than Sony itself (Fictionwise, O’Reilly, Penguin UK, etc). A short time ago we had confirmation from several publisher that they will start to provide ePub formatted books – Penguin UK announced they’ll have plenty of ePub books available from September 2008.

Waterstones/SonyStyle to sell Sony Reader in the UK!

For those of us who are UK eBook fans, Sony have partnered with the Waterstones book store in the UK to start selling the Sony Reader, available from 3rd September 2008, they will have over 25,000 titles available when they go live! You can also Pre-Order your Sony Reader UK (PRS-505) from SonyStyle.co.uk. The eBook titles to be made available at Waterstones will be released in the ePub format.

Continue reading “Sony Reader now reads ePub books!”

Use the web-based Bookworm reader to read your ePub books

If you are looking for a web-based ePub book reader then look no further than Bookworm. Developed by Liza Daly (see also tei2epub Converter), the Bookworm ePub reader will allow you to read ePub books directly from your web browser, there is also a “mobile web-optimized” version for those of you with an iPhone.

The reader is currently in an open-beta status, so as always, expect some bugs and of course many improvements over the coming weeks and months.

To use the reader you will need to create an account on the Bookworm site, all your books will need to be uploaded there. At the moment there is no way to organise your books so if you upload more than a couple dozen, navigation may be a little cumbersome. Liza is working to improve this.

Unlike most other ePub readers, Bookworm allows for full use of stylesheets and images, which is especially critical for technical books which include HTML tables and code samples.

Continue reading “Use the web-based Bookworm reader to read your ePub books”