What image formats are suitable for ePub?

A question posted over on the ePub Community Group was asking what image formats are suitable for use in ePub.

As Jon Noring replied, the OPS 2.0 Specifiaction says that an OPS (ePub) Reading System must support the GIF, PNG, JPEG and SVG image formats.

These are pretty standard formats to be supported so I don’t see any problems with rendering these. But I do have some concerns regarding SVG – these of course stem form having absolutely no clue at all about the format!

Still, I am wondering if there will be any issues when rendering SVG, akin perhaps, to what we had during the browser wars.

Is there anyone out there who understands SVG and can shed some light on this matter?

Online EPUB Reader – Testers Needed

Earlier today Liza Daly, creator of the tei2epub converter, posted the following notice to the ePub Community over at Yahoo Groups;

I’m looking for interested parties to help test an experimental platform for reading ePub-formatted books via the web. There’s minimal effort involved: just upload one or more ePub documents and try it out. If you encounter bugs (which is likely at this stage) I may ask for you to forward the ePub file so I can test it internally.

This is great news and exactly the kind of activity we need to encourage the adoption of the ePub format. I wish Liza all the best and very much look forward to the seeing the reader go live.

To all you tech heads out there, please get in touch with Liza and start digging out those bugs!

You can contact Liza using liza@threepress.org.

(Thanks to Liza for giving permission to use her email address in this article)

DocBook XSL now supports EPUB!

The Digital Editions blog is reporting that the latest release of the DocBook XSL (1.74.0) now supports output to the ePub format. It was only recently that the tei2epub converter was announced so it is great to have a converter from DocBook to the ePub format.

DocBook is a very mature XML master format that although is used mainly for technical documents, can also be used for simpler documents and prose like books, which could make it a useful master format for any public domain eBook projects.

This release of the DocBook XSL is an experimental release and is being made available for testing purposes. Any developers out there should certainly check it out and if you find any issues, report them back to the DocBook project.

Feedbooks to release their own e-Ink Reader – Native ePub?

Last week, Feedbooks co-founder, Hadrien Gardeur announced on the mobileread.com forum that they will be releasing their own dedicated E-Ink eBook reader!

Feedbooks.com is a service that provides public domain eBooks for download in multiple formats, including of course ePub.

The device itself will be available later this year (September/October 2008) through a large French retailer (yet to be announced) and then via online ordering later in the year.

Hadrien mentioned that they are dedicating their resources to what they consider to be the ‘basic features’ that any dedicated reader should have.

  • A 6″ E-Ink device (presumably the Vizplex display), based on Linux 2.6.
  • Browsing for books via folders or metadata
  • A real bookmarking system (similar to the Sony Reader)
  • A simple, yet customizable UI

Hadrien didn’t give too many details away just yet, but he promised to provide screenshots and even videos closer to the time!

As the Feedbooks website provides books in the ePub format I very much hope that their reader will be able to reader ePub books natively.

Mobipocket Desktop supports ePub and to be released on the iPhone

At this year’s IDPF Digital Book 2008 conference, we had confirmation from Mobipocket president and CEO, Martin Görner, that Mobipocket Reader Desktop 6.2 is able to import ePub files, with the next version being able to create ePub files. At present the reader does not read ePub files natively, it converts them to the MOBI format before transferring to your device.

One minor issue is that the reader does not create a TOC (Table of Contents) from the toc.nsx file contained in the ePub document. Let’s hope they don’t take too long to fix this.

Also in his talk, Görner announced that by the end of the year, the Mobipocket Reader will be available on the iPhone. I guess with the recent release of the iPhone SDK this should be no surprise, but great news nonetheless.

Acceptance of ePub is growing from strength to strength, with one more reader adding support for the format. Mobipocket Reader now covers many devices including the iPhone (end of 2008), Blackberry, Windows Mobile, PDA and a number of dedicated ePaper devices. Once the reader is updated across these devices, ePub support will be opened up to a whole new batch of users.

Digital Book 2008 Review

Two weeks ago the IDPF held their Digital Book 2008 conference at the McGraw-Hill auditorium in Manhattan, New York City. This was a one day conference held as part of the International Digital Publishing Forum’s (IDPF) spring education series, with the main focus being on the emerging global eBook market and adoption of the ePub digital publication standard.

Among the discussions were eBook standards, international digital publishing, the education market and new innovations. Publishers Weekly reported the main theme to come from the day was that the “Customer is King”. The internet has given eBook developers and publishers “unprecedented access to consumer feedback” which they need to listen to in order to grow the eBook market.
Continue reading “Digital Book 2008 Review”

Adobe release Digital Editions 1.5 – with enhanced DRM flexibility

Adobe Digital Editions has been updated with enhanced DRM support and flexibility, now at version 1.5. Adobe DE is a Flash based, lightweight, internet application used for reading PDF’s and the IDPF’s ePub document formats.

The enhancements to their DRM means that users activate their DRM protection on a named basis, this allows you to move your protected eBooks/eDocuments across platforms and mobile devices, of course we’d rather not have any DRM (or at least just social DRM). There is also a limit of 6 desktop and 6 handheld devices that you can activate, which should be okay for most people in the short term but over a period of several years we are likely to need to activate more devices than this, particlarly if we have to re-format our OS. We shall have to see what the future holds for those needing to activate more devices.
Continue reading “Adobe release Digital Editions 1.5 – with enhanced DRM flexibility”

TEI Converter for EPUB Developers

We are seeing more and more tools for creating ePub files being developed and the latest to join the throng is the tei2epub converter from threepress.org. This one however is aimed more for developers than the end user, unlike the BookGlutton ePub API.

tei2epub is being developed by Liza Daly and is written in XSLT, although it does utilise a little Python. I know nothing about Python but from what I can make out this is mainly for creating the actual files and final .epub container (which is actually just a renamed .zip file).

This converter really interests me as I already have my own converter (pg2tei) for creating TEI documents from plain text files, as found on Project Gutenberg. I recently started teaching myself XSLT so will follow the development of this for sure!

I don’t have a Python processor installed so haven’t ran any files through this, though I have taken a quick look at the source code and it looks quite straight forward. I believe this uses the official stylesheets written by TEI, so the tei2epub converter should be quite simple to follow, even for those of us whose XSLT skills are not yet well developed.

If you’re interested in both TEI and ePub then this is certainly going to be useful to add to your toolkit.

BookGlutton’s EPUB Converter unveiled

Earlier this month BookGlutton announced their ePub API. This neat little tool gives everyone an easy way to convert HTML files to the IDPF’s ePub format.

At present the API is in public beta and currently only converts ‘simple’ HTML files, it also lacks both image and CSS support. Still, don’t let this put you off, the potential here is great and is certainly another step in the right direction. As time goes by the API will certainly get better.

To show the kind of acceptence ePub is gaining this tool also caught the attention Keith Fahrlgren over at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Blog who certainly seems encouraged by this and feels that it is “the first step in lowering the barrier to entry to creating EPUB documents.”

Many other people around the net have shown a strong interest in the API, with most believing this is a first step in encouraging developers to create more ePub tools.

If you wish to try it out yourself go visit the BookGlutton ePup API page, there’s also some instructions there to help get you started.

epubBooks.com is active again!

It may only have been three weeks since last had my own internet connection but boy, is it good to be back! Of course the world of ePub caught fire right when I was not been able to report on it.

These past weeks has seen the introduction of a new ePub converter from BookGlutton, the IDPF Digital Book 2008 conference and release of Adobe Digital Editions 1.5, which from the reports has marked improvements, Mac OSX support and has been localised into French and German.

There’s more news of publishers wanting to release their content in the ePub format (let’s see if it really happens) and we are now seeing dedicated eBook readers released on a regular basis. There’s also another eBook reader available for the iPhone.

At Digital Book 2008, Sony demonstrated working ePub books on their PRS-505 and it seems that Mobipocket Desktop 6.2 handles ePub files – rumour has it that the next version will also create ePub files!

ePubBooks.com is here to bring together all and any news related to ePub and eBooks, although some of you may have read this news elsewhere, I will still be writing several articles to cover all the latest happenings. Make sure you check back regular.

Hopefully by the end of the week I will have the site fully up-to-date.