Since epubBooks had its first major facelift back in May we’ve received a great deal of positive feedback. However, the one question that’s continually asked was when our ebook search features would be made available to countries other than the U.S.

I’m pleased to announce that epubBooks.com now supports ebook catalogues for two additional countries; United Kingdom and Australia.

Most people will be automatically directed to the appropriate pages but just in case this doesn’t work for you, then you should scroll to the bottom of the homepage, click the “Change region” button and select your country. Visitors from Great Britain will now have all the prices displayed in GBP, and like-wise Australia will have AUD.

At this time the catalogues available for all three countries are the same (US, UK & AU), and all prices are being automatically converted using up-to-date currency conversion rates. The exception to this is with Kobo, who have specific catalogues (and prices) for both their U.S. and UK markets. We’ll also be getting an Australian specific catalogue from Kobo soon.

No new major features (or catalogues) will be added to the website now until the new year, when we’ll start working hard to get as many different stores into the epubBooks system as possible, along with adding a couple of new countries; New Zealand and Canada, plus a few more interesting features for good measure no doubt.

Happy searching and we hope you have plenty of great end-of-year celebrations!

epubBooks UK: www.epubbooks.com/uk
epubBooks AU: www.epubbooks.com/au

A few weeks back Barnes & Noble released their hugely successful Nook eReader in the UK. To help them promote their reader to the Brits they’ve partnered with a large number of existing retailers, which will mean you’ll be able to buy the Nook from over 2,500 locations throughout the UK including; Argos, Asda, Blackwell’s, Dixon’s, Foyles and Sainsbury’s.

One of the big advantages with the Nook, as with Amazon’s Kindle, is that you can buy books directly from the device itself. However, and unfortunately for us, B&N charge for many of their classics (as much as 3.99!), but not to fear. Here on epubBooks.com we have all the most popular classics and all of which are free to download and read.

How to download EPUB books to the Nook

It’s actually very easy to transfer an EPUB on to the Nook reader, so much so that a simple list will suffice;

1. Connect the Nook to your computer via a USB cable and navigate to the Nook USB drive; “My Computer” on Windows or the “Desktop” on Mac OS X.
2. Download an EPUB to your desktop (perhaps Sherlock Holmes or Alice in Wonderland).
3. Drag-and-drop the ebook from your computer to the “my documents” folder of the Nook.
4. Once the file has finished transferring, eject the device from your computer and unplug the Nook USB cable; right-click on the Nook drive and select the Eject option.
5. Start Reading!

Download EPUB books to the Nook HD and HD+

If you happen to have a Nook HD then you can use the built-in web browser to visit the epubBooks.com website and download directly to you Nook – no cables and no computer necessary.

How to find the Free EPUB ebooks on epubBooks

At present I don’t have an easy way to select just the free EPUB downloads on the site. It is something I want to fix but it’s still a little way off. In the meantime you will need to visit the book listing page, select the “Free” price, which will narrow the results to something more manageable.

For UK residents, you could just head on over to epubBooks UK, which has only the free downloads listed.

My recent reading list included several books which shared the same feature: there was a lot of historical geography inside. Not that the historical geography was the subject of any of them, but the series of unfamiliar and half-familiar place-names were long enough to get lost in. Still, though all of them were in this or that electronic format, the situation was no better than with paper books: either there were a few pictures with maps inserted as usual illustrations or, in worse cases, there were no maps at all. So, I want to talk about that a bit.

I will not discuss here the cases where a big and complex and detailed map is needed, such as in J.R.R.Tolkien’s books; It’s a serious matter as well, but it’s a different matter.

Maybe sooner or later a dedicated solution will appear in EPUB for custom maps. Sure, maps can be tolerably implemented using images, especially vector images; but so can formulas, and still we have MathML; history books (which need custom maps more often then not) are no worse then maths books after all.

What I am talking about here are those books which would do without a map, but which still could have a small one. Or two. Or more. That is, imagine a reader unfamiliar with Ancient Greece who reads a book which deals with the subject (myths maybe, or history), and the name Argolis pops up in the text for the first time. It is ok to have a link to a textual comment for this word. But isn’t it better to have a link to a little map of Ancient Greece (in the ideal case created in the same style as the illustrations, surely) with the borders of Argolis highlighted? So, that’s my topic for today.

Please note, this essay is not really technical. In fact, the technical details are more or less trivial (and already used elsewhere, e.g. on Wikipedia). My aim here is just to call more attention to some existing possibilities.

1. Why?

‘Why doing that at all?’ is, naturally, the first question an e-book creator may ask. To this I have two general answers:

• In the realm of visual annotation e-books can do much more than their natural rivals, paper book (we will see some examples of that). The reason for it the possibility to make things to some extent dynamic (even as little as the presence of hyperlinks already changes things a lot); and, well, the e-book is not becoming any heavier to carry (its size on the disk is in any case very small compared to an album of music).
• Such sort of annotations, if prepared well, is something useful the user gets in addition to the story; that is, in case of open domain texts, it is one of the many little things that makes your edition substantially better then just the text downloaded from anywhere online.

This sums up to a somewhat trivial answer: because it helps to make your e-book better. Better than a paper book, firstly; and than some other e-books, secondly. Also, by the way, doing such things may be very exciting.

2. What?

Now, assuming that you decided to look into this possibility for your particular e-book, what are the exact options?

The simplest thing to use is a map with a location mark, an «X is here» map. Surely, «X» in «X is here» is not necessarily a point; and that brings us one step further, to a map with a highlighted object. The object may be a set of points (cities that joined some union feature discussed in the text), or a line (borders of a kingdom in a history book), or a blurred spot of complex shape and varying opacity (a region where a dialect is spoken, in a book on folklore or linguistics), or whatever else that can be placed over a map. With the state borders, which change over time, there is an additional nice possibility: they can be highlighted differently depending on the place in text where the link was clicked. The initial example about Argolis falls into this category.

For more complex purposes, more complex things can be done. If a continuous travel is in question, a map with a route line can be used. Such a map is obviously useful (and often used) in large-scale travel stories, like those of Jules Verne, but it can be of use much more frequently, in virtually every story where a travel with more then two stopping points is involved. Consider the following lines in the Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid:

Then to Chaonia’s port our course we bend,
And, landed, to Buthrotus’ heights ascend.

Imagine now, that «Buthrotus» is a link to a map again, but on this map not only the place is highlighted, but all the journey up to this point is traced with a line. Note by the way, that such a dynamic electronic map is much better than a single fixed map with the whole route, which is what you can have on paper. The electronic variant only shows you the portion of the way which a hero has already made, without disclosing the future moves earlier than the readers get to know about them; so the map does not become a spoiler. Well, frankly I am not sure that spoilers are so much of a concern with The Aeneid, but with many other books they surely are.

So, just look at the story you are formatting and ask yourself: would a map be of some use to a reasonable percentage of readers? And if so, why not make one?

3. How?

Implementing functionality like this can be very different depending on the technologies you expect to be supported by the reader. In general, it’s all about having a fixed image (map) with custom overlays (highlights), in whatever way you can implement it (that is, in whatever way the target readers support it). Below are some indications.

The best thing for such purposes I know of is actually SVG with parameters. You may notice that a map with a highlight is actually used to illustrate the very concept of parametrized SVG; SVG and small maps really go well together.

If you want pure XHTML/CSS with no SVG or scripting of anything (being unsure of the support of these things in the target software, I mean), you may, in the first place, reuse the way Wikipedia does it: place the ‘highlight’ image over the ‘map’ image using CSS positioning (EPUB3 standard disables position: fixed value, but apparently allows both relative and absolute which are required here). However, my expecience with CSS positioning in actual e-readers is rather negative, the problems ranging from slight misrenderings during resizing to total chaos.

Another XHTML/CSS way to do the trick is to have the map as a background of a div, and the highlight image as a contained element inside this div. An important part of the trick is that when the values margin-top and margin-bottom are set in percent, they are set in percent of the containing element width. Therefore, using the margins of the inner element, one can enforce the proportions of the outer element, so that all of the background is visible. Two more remarks regarding this approach:

• In both XHTML/CSS approaches you will need to create multiple fragments of XHTML for this, one for each highlight; or maybe generate them with a script from a list of coordinates.
• Note that in an e-book the map width needs to vary together with the page width, so the ‘highlight’ image must have width and position defined not in pixels but in percent of the parent element’s width, and background-size property has to be used to scaled the map (the support of this property is not to be taken for granted as yet, and legitimately so: it is a part of CSS3, not CSS2.1).

This approach will also work only in some readers (partly because of the mentioned background-size property); for me it works ok in Calibre in particular. For this approach I know no brief online explanation to which I could give a link, so I’ll explain it here. Here’s how it looks in XHTML (the location of the Wicked Witch highlighted with red on the map of Oz; the map for this example is taken from the edition by Project Gutenberg).

Here’s the XHTML code:

<div style="width:70%; max-width: 570px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding:0; border: 0; background-image: url(oz.png); background-size: 100%; background-repeat: no-repeat;">
  <img style="width: 2.5%; height: auto; border: 0; margin-left: 30.7%; margin-top: 6.8%; margin-right:0; margin-bottom: 63.2%; padding: 0;" src="redcircle.png" alt="dot" />
</div>

Click here to open the image in a separate window where you can play with the browser window width to see that the mutual positioning is not affected by shrinking; the width is set to 70% rather then 100% to make it easier to shrink the image in the demo.

One final remark (my heart bleeds, but I have to say that): if the possible highlights are few, you may just have a separate map-with-a-highlight image for each case. That’s ugly, but – sh! – the user will never know. And, on the other hand, such an approach works everywhere, and looks as dynamic as anything (clicking on the links on different pages of the book, you are still shown what looks as the same map with different things highlighted). Hopefully, though, more thorough support of CSS and SVG in the major readers will make such remarks unnecessary soon enough.

If you enjoy doing such things but are worried by the incomplete support of the necessary features by the reading software, you may actually consider the following possibility: create two versions of the book (with and without advanced functionality), make them both available to the user, and explain the difference. This will allow you, firstly, to make exciting things without creating problems (that is, to work with all the beauty of SVG without feeling guilty) and, secondly, to make the users more aware of the relations their preferred e-reader has with the relevant formats, thus maybe creating (if the absence of some particular feature will prove important for many books) a tiny little bit of pressure on the developers.

4. What else?

So far I have talked about maps here, but the title says Maps and More; and there’s actually more to mention briefy. Geography is by no means the only layer of information which can be enhanced in this way. If a novel frequently mentions non-trivial architectural elements of a particular style or type of building (be it a gothic cathedral or a classical temple) a schema with these elements highlighted on demand would often be better then a textual comment; another book would profit from a «highlightable» schema of a certain dress or an armour or whatever. If it it useful – why not?

Happy formatting!

Many long-standing visitors to epubBooks will certainly have noticed that I’d released an update to the site a few months back which added plenty of new functionality, along with a nice update to the styling. Although a new design, it was only a Beta and so was released with little fanfare.

Today’s update has fixed a large number of bugs from that release, added some more design tweaks, and a whole bunch of improvements to the search algorithms.

The original epubBooks.com (live since 2008) was merely a simple catalog for browsing the free EPUB Classics that were (and still are) available for download. It served its purpose well, but demand for more modern titles and better search features led me to re-think not only the design, but the core purpose of the site. Limited time and resources have made it difficult to achieve all that I’d like but I think the site now has some interesting features.

We’re in a time when there’s many different eReaders, tablets and reading apps to choose from, so one of the core features I wanted to bring was the ability to focus results to any specific reading device, whether it be an iPad, a Nook, Sony Reader or Windows PC. For those of you with multiple devices (apps if you’re a smartphone/tablet user) then you can also select which store you want to buy from based on the books’ price — you’d be surprised how often these vary from store to store.

Some of the most popular pages on the old site were the genre/category pages. In the new release I’ve put a lot of effort in to standardizing the categories for books I include from the different stores. There’s still a lot of work to be done on that area, but it’s now certainly much easier to discover new and different books in whatever category you love the most.

I’ve also tried to keep the the same clutter free design and simple to use interface from the original site, which I know many of you particularly liked.

At present I’m only able to include U.S. titles and with those there’s still a limited number of online stores I’m able to support. I’ll be integrating British, Australian, and possibly even German and French catalogs in the future for those of you from those countries, though I’m not yet able to give a release date for any of that. It is however a priority for me.

I should note that many links for Kobo, ebooks.com and Diesel will work even if you’re not a U.S. resident, so give it a try.

The new design should still be considered a Beta release; there are plenty of bugs to fix and improvements to be made, but this latest round of updates should allow things to move a little more quickly now.

I hope you find the new site useful and I’m always happy to get feedback, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Cheers,

Michael Cook
epubBooks Founder
Manchester, UK

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 small screens, I mentioned this as an example of a poem too specific to be discussed in a general-purpose tutorial. Let me now repent and discuss it. Maybe the solution presented here will inspire some good ideas for other cases; or maybe it will just entertain someone, which isn’t so bad either.

It’s obviously very easy to use fixed formatting for this poem; all you need is the   character, which, added in appropriate quantities in the beginning of each line, will shape the text accordingly. However, if we want to consider the tremendous range of screen sizes on which an e-book may be read, this solution is not perfect: a tail with wide bends will not fit onto a small screen, and a tail with narrow bends will look unworthy of a fine mouse on a wide screen.

What would be nice to have then is a tail which can vary the spread of its bends depending on the screen width, getting more strongly curved on the bigger screens, though not beyond some reasonable maximum. That isn’t at all hard when we have all the features of XHTML and CSS at our service (and whether we do always have them at our service we will discuss a bit later). Here are two known things which, put together, can do this trick for us:

• It is possible to define both width in percents and max-width in units for a div element, expressing the idea “100% of the screen width, but not wider than e.g. 20em”.
• It is possible to define a fixed width for only one cell in a one-row table, leaving the others (with ‘auto’ width) to fight for the remaining space. Do not forget to make the cells non-empty, with an   inside at least. Otherwise they will not get their share of screen space.

Let us consider, for example, the following piece of code:

<table width="100%">
  <tr>
    <td style="width: auto">&nbsp;</td>
    <td style="width: 9em; text-align: center;">mouse</td>
    <td style="width: auto">&nbsp;</td>
    <td style="width: auto">&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
</table>

After the second cell gets its fixed portion of width, the rest is divided into three equal parts, one for each of the tree cells with “auto” width and (importantly!) identical content. As a result, the cell with text will be closer to the left edge of the table then to the right.

So, here goes the demo! Open it and play with the browser window width, very narrow window being of particular interest.

Some browsers do not allow you to make the window very narrow; that’s why we need these wide gray margins in the demo: they occupy part of the screen space, making the “page” narrower (if you still can’t make the window narrow enough, then just zoom in a little to make the text bigger).

To get a more detailed idea of how that actually works, have a look on this version of the demo where the borders of tables and cells are left visible. For even more details you may want to look into the demo’s source HTML.

Some technical problems may be encountered along this way currently. This piece of HTMLis rendered uniformly in all the browsers I tried so far (four on Windows and three on Mac), Calibre is doing fine as well, and I was told the same about Azardi and Bookle. However, some other ebook-readers do not join this unanimity of browsers and get puzzled, producing a dull straight tail with no cheerful bends (not a totally unbearable rendering, but apparently inconsistent with the code, and much much worse than the one seen in the browsers). In particular, there is a known problem with ‘auto’ margins, and some inconsistent behaviours related to table formatting.

So, if there’s any eReader-developers reading this artice, I encourage them to take this little sample EPUB file, generated from the same demo code (without the gray margins, but with the colored borders, to see more precisely what actually happens), and check whether their tools agree with the popular browsers. This one-poem ebook may act, apparently, as a nice and rather untrivial table-formatting test.

If (or when) everything works, you will be rewarded with a nice twisting tail on the page.

One EPUB formatting question which I recently got interested in was: how to create a bilingual poetry book? That is, if you want to have a book of poetry in one language with line-by-line translation to another language (to aid a reader who knows the language of the original not too well), how do you do that? In a paper book, a good and well-tried solution is to have the texts in two languages placed on the left and the right page, facing each other. For an e-book, unfortunately, that approach cannot be reused; in particular because with an e-book you usually have only one page visible at a time. Splitting the page into two columns may be acceptable for short citations, but to format a whole poetic collection in this way would be inconvenient, for the columns are somewhat too narrow in this case even on bigger devices.

Here I describe a solution which I find acceptable. Though the problem in question is a rather narrow one, some details of the approach may be useful for other goals as well. In the examples I use the first lines of Catullus 1, with both the original text and the translation taken from the corresponding wikisource page.

There is, in fact, one special reason why I like to use passages from the Roman classics in EPUB examples. An e-book, which is scrolled page-by-page and remains open on the page where you stopped reading it last time, is in these respects amazingly similar to a papyrus scroll, which was what Catullus and Horace and Virgil used. Just think of that: when you are reading The Aeneid on your smartphone, your experience is in a way much closer to that of the original readers than what the generations before us had with codex-format books. Anyway, back to the topic…

The formatting of the poetic lines is done here in the same way as in my earier essay,
with a few small alterations: using dev rather than p as the tag for a poetry line (as proposed by Lee Passey in the comments) and adding page-break-inside attribute to avoid a page break in the middle of a split line (in the readers which support this attribute, certainly). I will not use line chunking here, in order to keep the examples simple and focused on the present topic. The entry in the style sheet goes as follows:

.poemLine {
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 0;
  border: 0;
  padding: 0;
  page-break-inside: avoid;
  margin-left: 2.5em;
  text-indent: -2.5em;
}

The obvious good thing about poetry in our case is that it is split into fixed lines. What if we just place the translation below each line of text, formatting both language versions using the same poetryLine style?

The result is rather unreadable, though the direction is probably not bad. Is there something small to be improved? Sure. Let’s just make a separate poemLine2 style for the translation: almost the same, but with one addition:

color: #808080;

Now the result looks this way:

Suddenly, I almost like it. My only objection is that if the user needs to consult the translation only occasionally, its constant screenspace-consuming presence can be annoying. Stating the problem in a more abstract and general way, it would be nice to have a possibility to create several layers of text in the book (e.g. original and translation in our case) switchable on and off at the user’s will at any time.

Such a concept of an e-book may be useful in more than one case. Imagine reading an abridged verion of a history book, switching to the full version on the passages which you are more interested in, and back when such a passage is over.

Let’s try to get some reasonable approximation of such functionality for our particular case, keeping in mind that the support of scripting in EPUB is optional and so solutions based on scripting are undesirable at the moment.

Luckily, with e-books we are not afraid to make the volume a bit bigger; it weights nothing in any case. So, let’s make two editions, a monolingual and a bilingual one, united in one e-volume and tightly interconnected with hyperlinks all over. That is, the lines in the monolingual part (catullus1.html) are to be formatted as follows:

<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus2.html#l1_1b" id="l1_1">&nbsp;+&nbsp;</a>Cuī dōnō lepidum novum libellum</div>
<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus2.html#l1_2b" id="l1_2">&nbsp;+&nbsp;</a>āridā modo pūmice expolītum?</div>

And the lines in the bilingual part (catullus2.html) are to be formatted as follows (note the invisible elements: they are needed for the black and the grey lines to be aligned correctly together):

<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus1.html#l1_1" id="l1_1b">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</a>Cuī dōnō lepidum novum libellum</div>
<div class="poemLine2"><span style="visibility: hidden">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</span>To whom do I give this delightful new booklet,</div>
<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus1.html#l1_2" id="l1_2b">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</a>āridā modo pūmice expolītum?</div>
<div class="poemLine2"><span style="visibility: hidden">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</span>recently polished with pumice?</div>

If you want to keep every line on the same page with its translation, you may wrap each such pair into an additional div element with page-break-inside style property set to avoid.

Now we have two versions of the page appearance, between which we can switch by clicking on the pluses and minuses (no actual links in the examples below, just the general appearance of the pages is imitated; the a tags are assumed to have text-decoration: none set to switch off underlining, otherwise the little links look worse). The link near every line ensures that you are always directed to the right page of the other version (because, obviously, one monolingual page corresponds to several bilingual pages).

A bit strange, but, hopefully, convenient enough (I have tried it in Aldiko on an Android phone). There is much space for task-specific alterations, certainly. You may create an option to leave only the translation on the screen; or make three layers for each line instead of two (e.g. original + translation + commentary), or design a nicer and more convenient appearance for the links (the simple ones are sometimes easy to miss with the finger), and so on. So, good luck to anyone who is going to experiment with that.

Even though the specification for EPUB v3.0 was finalised last October, we’ve yet to see any production ready EPUB3 books out in the wild. The likely reason for this is that EPUB3 compatible eReaders have only come on the scene recently and without an eReader, there’s no way to test how the ebooks look – a bit of a catch-22.

Version 3.0 ebooks may seem non-existent at the moment but this will no doubt change before the end of the year, so now is a really good time to look at how we’re going to transform our Masters to EPUB3 – you do have your books in a master format right?

This last week I decided to convert one of the titles from epubBooks.com to EPUB3 and set to work on Gulliver’s Travels (download link below). I’ve only found two ways to view my newly generated EPUB3 ebook; Azardi and iBooks.

(Note: this test ebook is a very simple conversion from EPUB2 and doesn’t use any HTML5 or CSS3 specific features – consider this article as just a cursory overview.)

Azardi eReader

A short while back Infogrid Pacific updated their desktop eReader app to support EPUB3. At the time it didn’t mean too much because there weren’t any ebooks around. Now that I’ve got something to try I uploaded it and have to say, everything looks good. The Table of Contents works as required and all the content displays well.
Azardi is available on the main OS platforms; Windows, Linux and Mac. Try it.

iBooks

It seems Apple’s newest version if iBooks has some support for EPUB3. Like with Azardi, the TOC displays as expected along with all the content in the same way as the EPUB2 version. One nice feature in iBooks is how it handles footnotes; these are pulled from their place at the end of the chapter and displayed as a pop-up – perhaps the most useful way to view footnotes in an ebook.
iBooks is available on all iOS platforms. Try it.

Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) – Preview 1.8

Although ADE 1.8 Preview opens my EPUB3 ebook, it doesn’t work so well. The TOC is not available at all and footnote links don’t work. They do at least show at the end of the chapter.
The ADE engine is used in all the popular E-Ink eReaders, so let’s hope Adobe introduce full EPUB3 support before the final 1.8 version is released.

Gulliver’s Travels: EPUB3 eBook Experiment

As I’m expecting compatible eReaders to become more abundant over the next months I wanted to look at what’s needed to create a good solid looking EPUB3 book as I’d like to release all the free ebooks on epubBooks.com in the EPUB3 format. The book I chose for this experiment is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (EPUB2 version here).
This is only a first-try and most of what I’ve worked on is the mark-up to make it a valid EPUB3 document. This means that all the CSS remains unchanged and mostly only the head section of the HTML has been updated. This first test is not EPUB2 Reader compatible, so there is certainly more I can do to make it work better on ADE and other v2 eReaders.

EPUB3 Experiment: Gulliver's Travels

Anyway, I hope you find it useful and please do post your feedback in the comments.

What we are going to discuss here is how to format poetry in XHTML format (which underlies EPUB) so that it looks nice on smartphone screens – that is, when many or even all of the lines do not fit the screen width. In other words, our concern is how to break poetry lines nicely.

We do not discuss the poems which use non-standard formatting (Lewis Carrol’s Fury said to a mouse, shaped like a twisting tail, is a good example of what we are not talking about here); each poem of this sort is a separate formatting problem of artistic rather then technical nature. What we are going to consider are poetry pieces which use some sort of conventional formatting. The examples used further in this tutorial are from Shakespeare, from Horace, and, for a more specific formatting convention, from Beowulf.

It is clearly unacceptable to use plain left-align text with no style modification: the result of line breaking will be rather ugly, as shown below (a few lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V are used):

Centering everything (a solution frequently met in actual e-books) is better, but still far enough from perfection:

Let us now proceed to another variant, which is also used widely enough and which I think to be a reasonable basic approach to the problem, and then see what we can add to it.

1. The Basic Way

The idea in this basic approach is simply to use different indentation for the first and the subsequent portions of every poetic line. It has already been proposed several times by different people online; I suppose, it is usually the first thing better then just-center-it-all that comes to one’s mind (after one figures out that, alas, text-align CSS property cannot be defined separately for the first-line selector).

In terms of CSS properties, it means that the text should have a non-zero left margin, and the first line of each paragraph should be negatively indented with respect to the rest of the text (each paragraph being a poetic line rendered, depending on the screen width, as one or more lines of text on the screen):

If different lines of the poem have different indentation, it is possible either to define several style classes, or just to add some non-breaking spaces ( ) in the beginning of the indented lines.

Now let’s format the same few lines from Henry V using this style.

Below you see how it will be rendered…

…on a wider page:

…on a narrower page:

…on an even narrower page:

The result looks better then the previous ones. However, to my taste it is still not as readable as desired. This solution is nearly perfect for the cases when only a small percentage of lines do not fit the screen width (see the second of the three screen widths in the example above). However, when smartphones are in question, splitting of a line into two is no longer a rare emergency which is to be handled just ‘nicely enough’, but rather something that happens to nearly every line (see the last of the three screen widths in the example above). For such cases this formatting is, to my taste at least, good enough to consult the text but not really good enough to enjoy it with convenience. So what can be done to that?

2. Structuring the Text

The way to overcome the lack of structure is, certainly, to add some. In our case apparently a reasonable thing to do in this direction is to allow line breaks only at pre-selected positions which correspond to pauses, or to boundaries between phrases, or to something else of the same sort. An easy way to do it is to replace the white-spaces which should not become line breaks with non-breaking spaces ( ).

An alternative way could be to use white-space property in CSS, but the support of this property by EPUB reading software is, in my experience, not guaranteed in practice; yet another relevant markup element, nobr tag, is by now deprecated and should be avoided.

So, let us format the same piece of poetry once more, now with non-breaking spaces enforcing some logic in line-breaking:

The difference created by structuring the text with non-breaking spaces is seen on narrow pages:

…and:

The choice of ‘permitted line-breaking places’ is surely rather subjective, and may be made differently. In any case, to my eye, the text is both easier to read and more pleasant to see when formatted this way.

A drawback of the approach is the amount of manual markup needed to format a long piece of poetry this way. However, such or similar «chunking» of poetry lines into non-breakable fragments can be done automatically, or semi-automatically. Here is a sample set of rules for English (and a Perl script – poemnobr.pl – based on these rules) which would produce tolerable result in many cases:

1. If application of any of the following rules results in a non-breakable block longer then 25 characters, this rule is skipped. The choice of the number ’25′ reflects my understanding of what should fit on any screen and is rather subjective; you may use whatever number seems reasonable to you in its place.
2. With the above restriction in place, the following rules are attempted, in the given order:
   1. If there is a space before a dash, it is made non-breaking.
   2. If there are punctuation marks in the line before the end of line, everything after the last such punctuation mark is transformed into a single non-breakable block.
   3. If an article (‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’) or a demonstrative (‘this’, ‘that’, etc.) is not followed by a punctuation mark, the following white space is replaced by a non-breaking space.
   4. Next, the same is applied to the word ‘no’ (the word ‘not’ cannot be processed that easily, for it may be connected, in different cases, both with the previous word and with the next one, e.g. ‘not knowing of something’ vs. ‘Somebody knows not of something’).
   5. Next, the same is applied to interrogative words (‘who’, ‘when’, etc.).
   6. Next, the same is applied to conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, etc.).
   7. Next, the same is applied to prepositions (‘of’, ‘from’, etc.).

After such automatic processing, some manual post-correction may be applied, which, in turn, may eventually lead the editor to formulating additional automatic rules to her/his own liking. It may be potentially interesting also to consider more advanced text analysis for automatic chunking of poetry lines; e.g. syntactic parsing may be helpful in deciding which portions of text should be ‘kept together’.

3. Some special cases

This section is dedicated to special sorts of poems, and if you are not interested in them, you may just skip it.

3.1. Greek and Roman Classics: Handling Formal Cæsuræ

For the metrical forms with clear cæsuræ it may be good for readability to enforce those as the only allowed line-breaking positions. Like this:

(The example is taken from the Ode 1.11 by Horace, as translated by Arthur Hugh Clough)

Below you see how it will be rendered…

…on a wider page:

…on a narrower page:

…on an even narrower page:

3.2. Old English Poems

One more special case: Old English poems. Here, obviously, the most appropriate line-breaking position is right before the long space which separates the half-lines. Note, that in this case the long space itself will provide the necessary indentation for the second half-line, so no special provisions for indentation are needed, and the CSS style should look as follows:

Then the text is formatted as follows:

(The example is taken from Beowulf)

Below you see how it will be rendered…

…on a wider page:

…on a narrower page:

…on an even narrower page:

That said and shown, it remains only to wish the readers good luck with formatting whatever they want.

A couple of weeks back Ectaco announced their new 9.7 inch E-Ink eReader (WiFi and Touch Screen), nothing special in that, but the big news about this is that it will be the first colour E-Ink device to be available for purchase!

The jetBook Color EDU.12 has been in development since earlier this year in Russia and will be made available in the States during Q4 2011. The new eReader is actually being pushed as a K-12 device, or as Ectaco put it, “Educational eTextbook tablet with Test System, Home Assignments, Remote Tutoring and eBook studies”.

Anyone outside of the education system us unlikely to get their hands on one, or want to for that matter, as the it seems to be tied heavily to the “Teacher’s Console” and purchasing looks to be only possible via the Ectaco website; so you’ll probably need appropriate credentials.

There’s plenty more details on the jetBook K-12 website but I’ll list some of the main features here;

• Color e-Ink 9.68″ PVI EPD touch screen (1600×1200) using Electromagnetic Resonance Technology.
• 32GB of memory.
• Rechargeable 2350mAh Lithium-Polymer battery lasting for 10,000 page turns.
• Plug-in GPS module that allows parents to locate their child or the unit itself with a few clicks.
• Text-to-speech module for pronunciation of books
• Script character recognition in combination with an EMT panel allows students to write on the screen.
• Teachers can restrict the download of any programs or content that is not related to the class.
• Screen serves as an ID card for the student displaying a schedule of classes (updated daily via Wi-Fi or 3G).
• Send students grades, exams, homework, and messages.
• Fully interactive SAT course that will train, test, and raise students’ SAT scores.
• Features the content of a 50-state reading list
• A Speed Reading course
• Talking Oxford Dictionaries narrated by professional linguists
• Foreign language courses that teach any of the 52 available languages and provide great support to ESL students.

Pictures of the EDU.12 are hard to come by at the moment but from what we can see the device will suffer from one known limitation of E-Ink, which is that the colours aren’t generally very vibrant (suffering from low contrast and “pastel” colours) compared to the screens found on the current crop of tablets.

Still, every new advancement in screen technology brings us closer to the perfect screen – great clarity, very low powered, full colour, fast refresh, usable in bright sunlight, etc. – so hopefully this will be a success and provide the R&D teams with more funding to continue development.

I could only find a couple of visuals for this new eReader; an image from Liliputing and a video (in Russian) on YouTube, which shows the device for a total of about 5 seconds (jump to 2:05 and then again just after the 3 minute mark).

Rumours are abound right now that Amazon is on the verge of providing support for EPUB ebooks on their Kindle eReader. What’s getting peoples tongues wagging is a post from an eReader blog* stating that Amazon is telling publishers to start providing them with titles in the EPUB format.

As vague as the details are from that post, there is some substance in the concept that Amazon are preparing to add EPUB support.

Back in April Amazon announced the introduction of their new Library Lending Program in co-operation with OverDrive, who [currently at least] deliver their ebook titles as EPUB files. The OverDrive blog also states, “[y]our existing collection of downloadable eBooks will be available to Kindle customers”. We also know that the Kindle Previewer software (for ebook developers) will import EPUB files, which internally converts them to MOBI.

Liz Castro, well-known ebook developer and author of EPUB: Straight to the Point, has her own thoughts on how the Kindle will support EPUB, believing that Amazon will just convert titles to their proprietary MOBI format for use on the older Kindles.

In my opinion, Amazon can do better than just convert the EPUB’s.

I’ll confess here that I don’t know much about the Kindle software system, but I would be surprised if they couldn’t run two different reading apps side-by-side. As for the hardware on the older Kindles; if they are capable of reading MOBI ebooks, there’s no real reason they can’t also read EPUB 2, perhaps even support the full EPUB3 spec.

Most, if not all, ebook developers will tell you that MOBI is an inferior ebook format to EPUB (not that this format doesn’t have its faults), add to that the features being developed for the upcoming EPUB3 and you have a strong case for why Amazon may decide to phase out their own ebook format.

If publishers and ebook developers are allowed to focus all their efforts on just one standard ebook format, then ebook production will take a great leap forward, which in turn will give the people on the streets better ebooks — at least in regard to features — and ultimately a better user experience.

* It’s unclear if this is a reputable source for such gossip, so I’ve made the decision not to link to this site. The article doesn’t really say alot but if you’re interested, a quick look on your fave search engine should bring them up.

After many months of hard work, the EPUB Working Group has released the first Public Draft of the new EPUB® 3 specifications for review. This is a substantial update on the current spec and has core changes that include;

• HTML5 support
• Rich Media and Interactivity
• Layout Improvements
• Global Languages
• Accessibility Improvements

EPUB is a XML and Web Standards based delivery format for digital books and publications allowing content to be used on many Reading Systems, which include Apple iOS, Android, Desktop computers and dedicated eReaders.

The new EPUB3 is a major revision to the current standard and with a move to HTML5 based content, now provides support for key emerging technologies including video, audio, scripting, interactivity, styling and layout enhancements, vertical writing, improved accessibility and MathML support.

The WG has also made big improvements on how the EPUB 3 spec is structured, now providing 5 documents; EPUB 3 Overview, Publications 3.0, Content Documents 3.0, Open Container Format 3.0 and Media Overlays 3.0. You will also find an, EPUB 3 Changes from EPUB 2.0.1 document, which should help everyone better understand the changes made from the old spec.

It must be noted that this is just the first public draft and the EPUB WG are now open for both IDPF members and general public to comment on.

The current draft can be found here on the IDPF website: http://idpf.org/epub/30

All comments on the EPUB3 specification should be submitted to the Issue Tracker.

EPUB3 Final Recommendation is expected to be reached in mid-2011.

Booki.sh have just announced they’ll be launching an ebook store in Australia, where the books are not downloaded but streamed from the cloud.

With the implication that we’re only renting/licensing our purchases, this news has caused quite a bit of a stir with some people denouncing it as, the worst thing to happen to publishing. Of course, some people would say that DRM has already killed off any possibility of actually owning our ebooks, including Booki.sh themselves.

This “ebooks-in-the-cloud” scenario isn’t new. I’ve been mulling it over for a while and my conclusion is that it’s not such a bad idea – but only if the book industry change the way we pay for them.

If all our books are stored in the cloud – meaning that we can’t download them to external storage – then we really are only renting them. I don’t find this such a big deal because if I actually wanted to own a book, I’d probably go out and buy a paper version anyway (wow, did I just say that).

(Ok, so that’s no completely true, but most of the ebooks I do buy are DRM-free professional books, from O’Reilly, A Book Apart, etc., so I do actually own them.)

It’s only recently that I’ve come to realise (or is that admitted to myself) that I mostly only read books (novels) once and if I ever read them again, it’s likely years after the first time, so I don’t mind having one-off/temporary access to them. But, if these cloud books imply that we’re only renting them, then I’d expect the price to be reflected in that.

The business model for ‘ebook Rental’ could be something similar to what we have with DVD rentals, where you can get pay-per-view movies streamed over the internet for anything from 25% – 50% of the purchase price. If I take a monthly subscription package then I could get them even cheaper.

So publishers, are you going to let me rent my ebooks – will you let me read Stieg Larsson for $2.00?

…no, I didn’t think so.

During some research on using Adobe’s InDesign to create EPUB documents I came across this UK training course entitled, “Creating ePubs with InDesign”, which is being run by Highlander, one of the UK’s oldest and most successful training providers for the creative, web and marketing sectors.

They have two 1 Day sessions available in March and April (London, UK) and the course will cover everything from an introduction to EPUB documents, to setting up paragraph and character styles, to setting up metadata, to covering the processes involved in converting the exported EPUB files to other ebook formats – I presume the Amazon Kindle will be covered, but there is no mention of it on their website.

You’ll need to have previous experience with Adobe’s InDesign CS5 software and it’ll also be useful if you have some previous knowledge of HTML and CSS, although it’s not a requirement.

Here’s a (shortened) outline of the course details;

• Overview
  • EPUB vs. PDF
  • Supported devices
  • What is kept and what is lost in EPUB?
• Overview of InDesign long documents
• Adobe Digital Editions reader
  • Evaluating an EPUB in Digital Editions
• Modifying documents for EPUB export
• Video and your eBook
• Managing images for EPUB export
• The Export Process
  • Embed metadata
  • Embed fonts
• What is the EPUB format
  • Converting EPUB to other eBook formats
  • Applications used to create eBooks
  • Applications used to read eBooks
  • Applications used to convert eBooks to other eBook formats
  • Other eBook formats

If you’re a UK resident then this could be a really useful course for anybody who needs to use InDesign CS5 for exporting to EPUB, but please note that this is not an official endorsement as I have no previous knowledge of Highlander. However, according to their website, they’ve been running all kinds of training sessions since 1995 and are an authorised Adobe Training Centre, so I would expect the quality of their courses to be of a good standard.

The 1 Day course price is £350 and there are currently two sessions available; 3^rd March and 28^th April 2011. You can book your place at Highlander.co.uk.

Now firmly placed as a mainstream item, ebooks have grown in popularity enough for many libraries to have started making digital versions from their catalogue available for lending.

The only thing you’ll need, except your eReader and an appropriate library card, is an Adobe ID (see below).

Most libraries that do provide ebooks are using the Adobe DRM protection system, which also means that most dedicated eReaders (Sony, Kobo, etc) and several eReader apps (Bluefire, OverDrive) can be used to read these DRM protected library ebooks.

I’m going to write three very short tutorials on how to get your library ebook onto your eReader/App. One of these three options should give you enough information even if yours is not actually covered here.

Adobe ID / Activation

As libraries are using the Adobe DRM protection you will first need to create an Adobe ID before you’ll be able to read those borrowed books. If you don’t already have one, then please visit the Adobe website and complete this form.

Adobe Digital Editions (ebook reader)

Unless you are using the OverDrive iPhone/Android app (see below) you must install Adobe’s Digital Editions Reader so that your library books can be activated before they are transferred to your ebook reader.

Download Adobe Digital Editions here.

The first time you run DE, you will be asked to activate it with the Adobe ID and password you created previously.

With DE installed, you don’t even need a digital reader as you can read EPUB books on your computer directly from within Digital Editions. If you do have a digital reader, then read on.

Bluefire eReader App for the iPad and iPhone

Bluefire has become a very popular app as it was the first eReader to allow Adobe DRM EPUB files to be added no matter where you bought your books from, which also makes it perfect for users wanting to read library books on the iPad.

First, download the Bluefire Reader app from iTunes (available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch).

Before continuing please activate Bluefire with your Adobe ID; start the app and on the “Library” page click the “Info” icon, located at the bottom. Here you will see the button for activating your Bluefire reader.

Next, visit your library’s website, checkout an eBook, and click the download link – when asked to save or open, select “Open with Digital Editions”.

Using iTunes we will now transfer the book to the Bluefire app;

• Connect your iPad to a computer and start iTunes.
• Select your device (iPad/iPhone) and click on the “Apps” tab.
• Scroll down to the “File Sharing” section and click the “Bluefire Reader” icon in the Apps section.
• Click the “Add…” button.

At this point you’ll need to browse to where Adobe Digital Editions has stored your eBook. By default they will be saved to one of these locations;

On Windows: your-home-directory/Documents/My Digital Editions
On OSX: your-home-directory/Documents/Digital Editions

The EPUB book will then transfer to Bluefire where you can then start reading.

Library Books on a Dedicated eReader (Sony, Kobo, etc.)

Dedicated ebook readers often have their own software for adding books, but we will stick with using Adobe Digital Editions to get your library ebooks on to your eReader.

I’ll be using the Sony Touch Edition for this example, but it should be the same for all devices that support EPUB with Adobe DRM protection. This procedure will be very similar to the way you do it when you purchase ebooks from a store, so please refer to your documentation for more detailed help. Otherwise here is the brief outline.

• Connect the eReader to your computer and start Digital Editions.
• Unless you have already done so, you will be shown the “Device Setup Assistant” – you will need to authorise your reader.
• Visit your library’s website, checkout an ebook and download to DE.
• From within DE drag the book(s) to your reader – In my case I dragged them to PRS-600.

And that’s it.

Overdrive eReader App for iPhone and Android

OverDrive are a digital distribution company who provide ebooks to all libraries. They also have their own app which is available for both Apple and Android devices.

As I don’t have an Android device I’ll be doing this tutorial with my iPod Touch, but the procedures should be the same on Android systems.

Download the “OverDrive Media Console” app from iTunes (or Android Market Place).

Once downloaded;

• Launch the app and click on the “Get Books +” button (top right).
• On the next screen click the “Add a Website +” button.

You’ll then be taken to the OverDrive website where you can search for your library. In my case, I searched for “Manchester Public Library” – searching for “Manchester UK” or “Manchester Great Britain” generated no results, so if you don’t find your library on the first go, try a different search.

• Select your library from the list.
• Clicking the link under the “Library Systems” heading – you’ll be taken to that library’s website.
• Sign in to your library account, find a book to checkout.
• When you click the download button you will be taken back to the OverDrive app.

As this will be the first time you’ve used OverDrive, you will be asked to sign in with your Adobe ID. Once done, you can proceed with the download and start reading your new book.

The OverDrive app is perhaps not the best eReader out there, but the fact that it makes getting books from a library to your device very easy, it can be a better option for many people.

I hope this tutorial helps and if you come across any issues that need sharing, please leave a comment and I’ll update the article.

In a recent ZDNET article, Jason Perlow described his hesitations for buying one of the new Amazon Kindle’s, which was due to its lack of EPUB support. Many responses to the article noted that the “average user” doesn’t care about the format of an eBook, only for the buying experience. I’m not going to argue on that point because in essence, they are right; the average user doesn’t care. Yet there are two real reasons why having one eBook standard is important, and these reasons will certainly impact the end user.

Publishing Infrastructure and Costs

Although most publishers will use a XML Master Format for storing the original book content, they still have to spend a lot of time, effort and costs in producing and maintaining all the different output formats they need to get their books in to the buyer’s hands. There are also no guarantees that all these different output formats will support the same kinds of features, which will mean even more resources (costs) will be needed to support these alternate formats.

Now, if the publishers only had work one eBook standard then they could spend more resources on improving their own tools to produce better output, which will ultimately give the user an even more enjoyable reading experience. Publisher will also have more resources available to give input back to the IDPF on improving the EPUB standard; bringing more and better features to the eBook world. Certainly a win-win situation for consumers and publishers. Without universal support for EPUB though, everyone will be forced to maintain multiple tool sets, which do nothing but increase costs.

I won’t bring DRM in to this conversation as it is actually independent to the eBook format itself and should not be used as an argument against embracing EPUB.

Independent Authors

One important issue Jason brought up in his ZDNet article was that of self publishing authors. By giving independent authors just one eBook format to think about they are able to spend less time producing eBooks files and more time writing content. They’ll have fewer headaches in getting their books out to the public because all vendors will accept EPUB. With just one eBook standard, more and more EPUB-ready word processors and tools will be developed. The more authors that get content on to Amazon’s self publishing system, the more money Amazon will make. Isn’t this what Amazon wants?

Until just a couple of years ago the publishing world was in turmoil with a multitude of eBook formats it had to support, yet the arrival of EPUB had a hugely positive impact which continues to be seen today.

Sure, EPUB itself is not perfect, but it is being continually improved and with the formation of the EPUB Working Group, there are huge improvements being made right now.

I still can’t make up my mind if Amazon will ever support EPUB but I do believe that it will be more and more difficult for them to refuse to do so. Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.