New Sony Readers for Pre-order at Waterstones UK

If you didn’t already know, I come from the UK, so you can imagine my delight when I saw that the two new Sony Readers (Pocket Edition & Touch Edition) are on pre-order over at Waterstones UK and W.H.Smith.co.uk. I fully expected that us Brits would have to wait another year before being able to buy them, but it seems that Sony have done the right thing!

For those of you who have not already heard, Sony are releasing three new eBook Readers. They are all e-paper devices that can read ePub books. The Pocket Edition has a 5″ screen. The Touch Edition is 6″ like the PRS-505, but with a touch screen. The Daily Edition, which was announced just today, has a 7″ tall touch screen and wireless connectivity via AT&T. At the moment the Daily Edition looks like it will only be released in the U.S.

The costs of the readers over at Waterstones is £179.99 for the Pocket Edition and £249.99 for the Touch Edition. Keeping in form with the PRS-505 prices, these are yet again much more expensive than our U.S. counterparts can get them for; $199 (~£120) and $299 (~£180) respectively.

Waterstones does not have the Daily Edition reader for pre-order and I wouldn’t hold much hope either that it will be released in the UK this year; Sony would still need to find a mobile provider who would allow them to piggy-back on their cell service. The general assumption is that Amazon have been trying to arrange this on their Kindle for quite sometime, without success.

New EPUB eBook Reader to be sold in Argos…Cool!

Although news on the release of the COOL-ER eBook reader isn’t new, what is interesting is that the makers have struck a deal to sell this in the Argos stores.

For those of you who are not from the UK, Argos are a household name — if a Brit hasn’t bought from Argos, you know their neighbour has!

The BookSeller.com article also states that the COOL-ER book store has 3/4 million titles (although not all in the ePub format).

I don’t have a one of these readers myself – I can’t justify spending £189 when I already have a Sony 505 – but as it uses the Adobe Digital Editions, any ePub books you download from epubBooks.com or buy from one of the many book stores around, should render the same as they do on the Sony Reader.

For me, the importance of this Argos/COOL-ER deal shows that eBooks (including the ePub variety) and the digital readers for viewing them are finally entering the mainstream.

Sony announce new PSP Digital Reader – EPUB Support?

This evening a friend of mine pointed me to the Sony annoucment of the PSP and the new PSP Go over on cnet news. Why did I find this interesting enough to write about? The article also mentioned that the PSP’s will be getting their own “Digital Reader”…!!! The article says,

The PSP will also be getting a Digital Reader in December with various comic book publishers onboard to offer content. Marvel will be providing Spider-Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four comics to start, with Wolverine, Captain America, Iron Man, and the Hulk all to follow. Compatibility with other Sony readers and more digital comics publishers will be announced soon.

The initial focus will be on comics, but that paragraph also mentions “compatibility with other Sony readers”. Is that a reference to the Sony Reader? The Guardian also makes mention to the Sony Digital Reader annoucement but again nothing beyond the comics angle.

This annoucement comes just days after Sony announced that they will be dropping their propriety BBeB format and their eBook store will start selling ePub books exclusively (Adobe DRM flavour) by the end of 2009. I can’t imagine that Sony will not open their PSP reader for use with the Sony store.

With over 50 million PSP’s already sold and many, many more once the new PSP Go is released, this could be a huge boost for both the Sony eBook store and the ePub eBook format!

Sony could be making those few hundred thousand Kindle’s seem positively niche.

There are currently 17 Adobe EPUB eBook Readers

I was just over at Bill McCoy’s blog (Adobe) reading his latest post about the current number of dedicated eBook readers which support the Adobe DRM’d EPUB format. Of course there are a number of other reading devices, such as the iPhone that can read non-DRM EPUB eBooks, but it is still surprising how many there actually are.

The Adobe Digital Edition Devices page has a little more details on each but here’s a very quick run down;

  • EZ Reader
  • EZ Reader Pocket Pro
  • Mentor
  • BeBook One
  • BeBook Mini
  • Cybook Gen3
  • Cybook Opus
  • Cool-er
  • Elonex eBook
  • Hanlin V5
  • Hanlin V3
  • iRex Digital Reader 1000S
  • NUUT2
  • Sony Reader PRS-300
  • Sony Reader PRS-505
  • Sony Reader PRS-600
  • Sony Reader PRS-700

Have you heard of all these?

Bill himself seems suprised, saying, “this is faster take-up than even this optimist had hoped for, given our launch less than six months ago of the enabling Adobe Reader Mobile 9 SDK that’s been integrated into all of these products.”

Whether you believe DRM is right or wrong, the positive side of this is that we are seeing more vendors supporting the one eBook format.

We are however still waiting to see if the Amazon Kindle’s will start supporting EPUB; will they use their own DRM – will they use any DRM at all. Let us also not forget Apple, what formats will they support on their upcoming tablet.

Bookeen releases the Cybook Opus

I just noticed on the Bookeen website that their new mini eBook reader, the Cybook Opus, is now available. I have to say this does look a very cute reader.

There’s nothing spectacular regarding the specifications but with a 5″ screen (4″ x 3″- 101mm x 76mm), this is a very pocketable eReader. The best part about this for me is their support for the ePub format, which includes the Adobe DRM (EPUB and PDF).

It looks like they’ve teamed up with BooksOnBoard, who will be providing the official Opus eBooks.

At £215 it’s not exactly the cheapest reader out there, but many will be happy to pay the extra penny’s just for its portability.

Blackewell opens new eBook store with ePub download option

While all the U.S. publishers/eBook stores remain reluctant to embrace the ePub format, the UK, and Europe in general, is really forging forward with its adoption. The latest to release an eBook store selling ePub books (plus PDF and other popular formats), is the UK academic publisher, Blackwell.

In addition to the 45,000 titles they have launched with (in partnership with the eBook wholesaler Gardners), Blackwell will also be stocking the BeBook eReader, a reader which is becoming quite popular among UK users.

It’s uncertain as to whether they will use any DRM (I can’t imagine they won’t) but at the moment the BeBook does not suopport the Adobe (ePub/PDF) DRM. However, there was a recent annoucment from Endless Ideas, who sell the BeBook, that their new WiFi BeBook reader will be supporting ePub DRM. Perhaps there will soon be a firmware update for the current model.

Borders UK release the Elonex: their very own eBook Reader

In a press release on thebookseller.com, Borders UK have announced the release of their own ePub eBook reader, in an effort to compete with the Waterstones/Sony partnership.

According to the article this reader has been specially developed for Borders, although it gives no details on exactly what the specifications are. All I know is that it is an E-Ink device that readers EPUB and “Adobe formats” (presumably PDF). As it has been released to work with the 45,000+ titles available at borders.co.uk, it must also be able to read the Adobe DRM protection.

At the moment it seems exclusively for in-store release as there is no mention at all on their website.

It’s great to see some comptetition for the Sony and of course more choice for the consumer. If I find out anything else about it I’ll let you know.

Free EPUB books at epubBooks.com

After several months of development my new epubBooks.com website is live. The new site has been developed to give access to free EPUB book downloads and I’ve designed it with simplicity of use in mind – hopefully it’s visually pleasing too.

All the current downloads have been produced from public domain titles using my own automation tools (with a little help from Liza Daly). These tools have been developed to give features which are often only found in commercial eBooks, and even then, many of the classics available don’t have such features.

All footnotes are fully linkable (as endnotes at the back of the book) both to the note itself and then back to the page it was linked from. Illustrations are included for books where they were available. Many other advanced layout and formatting features have been included, which are often only available with handmade books.

At present the library of books is quite small, but from now I will be concentrating on converting new books and improving the speed at which I can convert them.

Over the last year or so I’ve seen forums and blogs asking why there are not that many books which have illustrations, and so this was one area I wanted to concentrate on. It should be noted that illustrated ebooks are quite tricky to convert automatically, so the numbers of new titles being added is going to be limited, however, I’ll work to try and improve in this area.

If you have comments on the new website or the EPUB ebooks that I provide, then please do contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

While developing the new site I’ve neglected the Blog terribly so I am going to make much more of an effort to update this with any EPUB relevant news on a more regular basis.

I hope you enjoy the new website — Mike.

Google + Sony + Project Gutenberg = EPUB bliss!

This last week has proved to be quite a week for the EPUB eBook format with announcements from Google, Sony and Project Gutenberg on their support for the EPUB format.

Project Gutenberg EPUB Books

Over at Project Gutenberg, Marcello Perathoner has been working hard to convert all the Gutenberg titles into the EPUB format. At this time these versions should be considered experimental, but after trying several different titles, they are all more than readable.

The books are converted where possible from the HTML version in the Gutenberg archives and for those titles without a HTML version, Marcello uses the plain .txt book. The plain .txt files at Gutenberg are notoriously inconsistent in their layout so converting these accurately is extremely difficult — I know this myself only too well. Perhaps it’s time Project Gutenberg embraced a Master Format.

What makes this special from the other news (see below) is that all the Gutenberg books go through a proofreading process and so the accuracy is very high. This is why so many other eBook project are based on the Gutenberg archives.

Google and Sony partner to release 500,000 Public Domain EPUB Books

Over the last few years Google has been scanning bo0ks by the million, making them available on their book search, but this is the first time they have any of them available to an eBook reader. All the titles are in the public domain (pre-1923 titles only) and once added to the current Sony Reader catalogue, brings the total available titles to around 600,000, far surpassing Amazon Kindle’s 240,000 catalogue. Amazon still use their own propriety eBook format and do no currently allow EPUB files to be read natively – conversion is needed first – but as the Google EPUB books all come DRM free, there are many tools out there that will allow you access to these on a Kindle or other reading platform.

Continue reading “Google + Sony + Project Gutenberg = EPUB bliss!”

ePub Books Project Update – Still Alive and Kicking!

Over the last few weeks several people have emailed asking if epubBooks.com has been abandoned – the answer is a resounding No! Okay, I know I’ve not been very active recently so please accept my apologies for that.

The reason for such limited activity is that I am working very hard on developing the new site for epubbooks.com – yes, the blog and current resources will still be accessible. The new site will allow you to download all kinds of different EPUB books, including many from the Project Gutenberg archives.

If you don’t know what my ePub Books Project is, here is a short summary.

The project was started to provide free downloads of nicely formatted EPUB files, the majority of which will be taken from the Project Gutenberg archives. These will not just be plain TEXT files enclosed in an EPUB container, but fully converted to XML (of a TEI flavour) which are themselves converted using XSLT into professional quality EPUB files. Here are some of the features;

  • Properly formatted and displayed Chapter Titles/Subtitles.
  • Footnotes which are Linkable (forward and backward) for instant access
  • Books with Illustrations will also be available.
  • Text Formatting (italics, etc.)
  • Nice indents for block quotes, letters of correspondence, epigraphs, etc.
  • …and many more features

The new web application is the biggest project I’ve developed to date and so is naturally a challenge to my programming skills, which is why it’s taking some time to complete, however things are going very well.

The basic skeleton of the site up and running and I am now working on programming for usability. Of course it’s these less obvious items which are some of the hardest things to programme, so at this time can’t give an accurate launch date. Rest assured it will be sooner rather than later.

Thanks for your patience and understanding and do keep checking back regularly for any new updates.