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.

Fancy an eBook reader with two screens? Then you might want to take a look when Asus release their Eee Reader, which could be out before the end of the year.

I’m not totally convinced that having two screens will improve peoples reading experience, though perhaps the one book type that could benefit woud be the textbook. The ability to have the book on one screen and a web browser on the other, looking up a spelling, or word meaning over the internet would be quite handy too.

There is also speculation on what book format the device would use. Well, if this reader is based on the normal Asus netbooks I would say that every book format would be readable. Adobe DE? Mobipocket Reader? And why not, as Steve Jordan commented in his recent Teleread article, maybe we need eBook readers to support every format. If the Eee Reader is a Windows based system then that could be a reality, we’d even see Adobe Digital Editions on there, meaning ePub formated books will be readable to.

Steve Jobs talks again about dedicated readers, insisting that, “general-purpose devices will win the day”. Well, as usueful as it is to be able to read books on an iPhone/iPod Touch, the small screens just don’t hack it for me, so perhaps the Asus will be the first company that makes a viable general purpose device. The image above is not likely the real thing so it will be interesting to see what they come up with

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.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks back we had a new release of the epub validation tool as the old one was not validating documents properly. epubcheck-1.0.3 was released to fix the XMLParser as it was not allowing multiple validators to be added.

The error was first realised by Jon Noring who noticed that Adobe’s “page-map” attribute extension, which is used in the NCX , was being validated incorrectly. This extended markup can be used for mapping page numbers (to align with those in the paper book edition).

Jon Noring has posted to several communities about the page-map issue. Here’s a short extract (slightly edited);

I recently became aware that a few publishers are using Adobe’s “page-map attribute extension” in their EPUB publications for mapping page numbers (such as in a parallel paper book edition) to the EPUB content.

In principle it is a great feature [the "page-map attribute extension"], and EPUB now provides a standard way (via NCX) to do this. However, Adobe’s proprietary implementation violates two very clear requirements in the OPF “Package” specification (OPF is one of the specs which underlie EPUB):

• See item iii — the ‘page-map’ attribute is not supported in the OPF Package Schema
• See item A-iii. A reading system must ignore all Package markup not supported by the OPF Package schema.

Therefore, any publisher wishing their EPUB to be fully conformant to the IDPF specifications MUST NOT use Adobe’s ‘page-map’ extension.

[...] Adobe implemented ‘page-map’ a long while back, and they may no longer officially support it after NCX became a requirement.

Here is Jon’s full post; Important Advisory to Publishers on EPUB Format: Do not use ‘page-map’ extension.

Jon is pushing on this point as there is actually an alternative to the ‘page-map’ functionality already built into NCX specifications.

The right way to add page markers is with NCX, using the element which is already supported in EPUB, and furthermore is fully accessible! It is trivial for reading system developers, including Adobe, to support it since they already have to support the primary navigation list in NCX — pretty much the same code can be used to support the other link lists NCX can also support, such as page mapping, list of illustrations, and pretty much any other list one wants. NCX support for multiple navigation link lists is very powerful!

I’ll make a post with more details on how to do this in the next few days.

Perhaps it’s difficult to ask publishers to give up a feature that currently works, but as more and more ePub reader systems implement EPUB in accordance with the specifications, then you might suddenly find that your eBooks start to break. I’m sure it’s worth a little effort now to save on what will be lots of effort in the future.

Paul Norton from Adobe Digital Editions has now released the epubpreflight validation tool. This small utility is meant as a compliment to epubcheck and is used to check that your ePub files are suitable for Mobile devices. There are many guidelines that need to be followed when developing ePub for mobile devices that are not mentioned in the EPUB specs, so this is going to be a very welcome tool.

Here’s a list of things that epubpreflight currently checks for;

• Content files that are empty.
• Content files that are over 300KB.
• Image files that are empty.
• Image files that are over 10MB.

As you can see the list is rather small at the moment but this will grow in time. On the DE blog, Paul also mentions that he would like to see a set of configuration files that could test for specific platforms (ADE, PRS505, conversion to other formats, etc.)

It’s going to be a good number of years yet before mobile devices have the power to parse very large files (images, chapters, etc) so it’s going to be in everyone’s interest to see this tool developed.

New eBook Standard Now Available For Mass Market Audience was the title from yesterdays WebWire press release on the ePub book catalogue at BooksOnBoard.com. With almost 200 eBooks in the ePub format this is the first real source for mass market books to be released in the new eBook standard.

It’s a little unclear if the ePub versions have DRM restrictions, but as the site states;

DRM Adobe ebooks can be read only on Adobe Reader 7, Adobe Acrobat 7, or Adobe Digital Editions [...] We recommend Adobe Digital Editions for Adobe format eBooks, both pdf and ePub versions…

We must presume that they have DRM in place.

The market is still waiting for better ePub readers and until we get those it won’t matter how many ePub books they release. Let’s hope that the Sony Reader (PRS-505) receives its Digital Editions firmware update soon and that other dedicated readers, such as the Amazon Kindle and Cybook follow suit.

Yes, we still have a long way to go but it does look like we’re on the right track.

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 (if TeleRead’s DRM Poll is anything to go by) 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.

DE 1.5 will also run on a Mac OSX Leopard (10.5) and has been localised to English, French and German.

It was reported that there were one of two glitches for some people when updating their current version of Adobe DE, with a fix here. According to the Adobe Forum though, this has now been resolved.

There is however one rather large flaw with DE 1.5 in that there is still no support for text justification. Peter Sorotokin, one of the DE developers, commented about this on MobileRead. He stated the reason is that “we need to pull new low-level line layout code which would support bidi, glyph composition, etc. and we are hesitant to add features to the current branch” – perhaps we will see this feature in version 2.0.

If you wish to try out the new Adobe DE 1.5 then you can grab it here.