General eBook Related News

Oodles of commercial ePub books…but not from Waterstones!

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During 2008 the EPUB eBook format gained huge acceptance and we heard rumours touting that there would be 20,000 available EPUB titles by the end of the year. Waterstones were saying this prior to the release of the Sony Reader in the UK. As we head into 2009, Waterstones still shows less than 7000 titles [...]

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Marking Up Page Numbers in the EPUB NCX

Below is an example <pageList> markup (that is valid per the NCX DTD) which can be used to mark up page numbers within ePub documents. Note that <pageList> must be placed right after the required <navMap>, and must occur before the first optional <navList>. There may be one and only one <pageList> (but there can [...]

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Gulliver’s Travels EPUB eBook

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Back in September I wrote about my epubBooks development; a project to convert the .TXT ebooks from Project Gutenberg into the IDPF’s EPUB format. After many months of hard work I’e finally finished the conversion tools and I’m now preparing development of the website itself, which will allow anyone to download my EPUB books, and [...]

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Can we hope for an Amazon and ePub union?

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EPUB formatted books as an industry wide standard is what I, and many others want. But can we achieve this without Amazon’s adoption — at least with ePub support on their Kindle eBook reader. It will certainly be a lot easier to have a standard eBook format if Amazon joined the ePub party. I’m reluctant [...]

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W.H.Smith’s are now selling ePub eBooks!

During the Digital Lunch seminar at this years Frankfurt Book Fair, Michael Vantusko from Overdrive commented that W.H.Smith was one of their eBook customers. As I was updating the epubbooks.com homepage I thought I’d check them out to see if they actually have them online yet. I don’t know the date W.H.Smith went live with [...]

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Bookworm will not reject valid ePub – but are you valid?

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Liza Daly from threepress.org has just released an article outlining problems she is having with users uploading invalid ePub formatted documents to Bookworm; an online ePub book reader. It’s very important for anyone developing ePub eBooks to produce valid markup. Not only will Bookworm give desirable results when rendering, but you’ll also be covering yourself [...]

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epubBooks Project Part 3: ePub conversion and epubBooks.com development

In October 2007 the IDPF elevated OPS 2.0 to an official standard and it was from this point I realised that we might well see the ePub format adopted worldwide as an eBook standard. Planning started on how I would go about converting my TEI eBooks to the ePub format. After plenty of research I [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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