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.

Whether you call them categories, subjects or genres, how you label your book is vitally important, perhaps especially so in these times of the digital marketplace. Being placed correctly in ebook stores and libraries can help in both regular searches and with discovery techniques such as “Similar Titles”.

The EPUB format has been developed to allow your work to be properly tagged with as many subjects as is necessary to describe the title correctly, allowing any ebook reading system to categorise your books appropriately.

If you’re creating your EPUB files manually then you’ll need to open the .OPF in your favourite text editor. Then inside the metadata tags you can add your subject tags.

Here are some example entries;

<dc:subject>Fiction</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Comedy</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Satire</dc:subject>

You can add as many subjects as you like, though it’s probably best to keep things focused–adding 50 tags will be just as bad as adding none.

The arbitrary keyword or phrase used inside the subject tag hasn’t been standardised by the IDPF, but I’d recommend using the BISAC, LoC (Library of Congress) or other standardised system.

At this point you probably think there’s nothing more to be said on the topic, however…

eReaders Don’t Use All Provided Genres

When you send your EPUB out into the wild you’ll be somewhat disappointed to find that many eReaders don’t display every subject you placed in the OPF file, if any at all.

There are no IDPF requirements stating that a reading system must use any or all of the subject tags for categorisation and if it does use them, then you’ll find that it’s usually just the first entry. In the example above this would be Fiction. Still, we should take the time to add appropriate genres now as you can fully expect that future eReaders will utilise them more fully.

So, along with choosing the correct genres to describe your work I’d also recommend you list them in an appropriate order, and with the understanding that at this time, only the first entry will likely be used to categorise your book.

There are a number of people in the eBook world who really know their ePub format – luckily for us they enjoy sharing this knowledge among the community. One of these such people is Bookworm developer, Liza Daly.

There’s a lot of a misconception around the ePub format with the belief that it is not a very advance format to work with, this is certainly not the case. Being based on several web standards, ePub can do pretty much whatever those standards can do themselves.

In a recent blog post, Liza conducted an experiment to include a HTML5 <video> in an ePub file, which she accomplished by using out-of-island XML mark-up. Okay, so this is something of a hack, and very few ePub readers will render the content (although Bookworm does), but this just goes to show there’s some power in the ePub standard.

All you ePub developers out there might want to keep an eye on Lizas blog as she will be sharing lots of ePub tips throughout this month.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of being invited up to Stockholm to sit with a bunch of like minded people and talk about eBooks – specifically the ePub format. This was a very eye-opening experience indeed.

I was invited to Sweden by Publit, a company who have set themselves the task of making all the Swedish out-of-print books available as PoD (Print on Demand) titles. Considering that 95% of all Swedish books ever in existence are now out of print, this is a very worthy project, if perhaps somewhat daunting. Although Publit’s main business is PoD, they are making use of this opportunity to also provide these titles as ePub eBooks.

During my time in Sweden we discussed the many different areas of the eBook world, including DRM (of course), the processes involved in going from scanned document (TIFF/PDF/DOC) to an eBook Master format and onto ePub creation itself.

Now, the people at Publit are a group of very talented individuals with plenty of technical knowledge, yet there were aspects of ePub which has left them somewhat perplexed. There were two main points which I found interesting and have heard before around the web so I thought I would share them here.

“What flavours of ePub exist?” There is only one flavour of ePub, although it does currently support two different core formats; XHTML and DTBook (Daisy Talking Book). I won’t go further into what makes an ePub here as Jon Noring has already written an excellent article over at Teleread.org; ePub Demystified.

They were also asking if I thought “the next release of ePub would have more advanced features?” (meaning video and Flash media). The answer to this question is that video and Flash, along with audio, are already possible.

The ePub standard (OPS) can already use these types of media because the standard is built upon XHTML, a standard that already supports advanced media. The problem arises not from ePub but from the reading systems’ ability to render these advanced features.

ePub can do more than most people think; the main restriction is the reading system not the format.

I guess the question should be, when will the reading systems allow us to use more advanced media.

We also had a number of discussions on Master Formats (TEI, DTBook, DocBook, etc.) and which is the best to go for. That’s a difficult question but one thing that ties in with my recent thoughts is the question as to whether we can use the native DTBook format not only as the end user ePub format, but also as the eBook master. I will be looking into this further myself but if anyone has any thoughts on the use of DTBook then please share.

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.

I Twittered (@epub) about the Cleveland Public Library press release when it was first announced, and David from TeleRead has also written a post on this. “This” being that the Cleveland library is the first library to offer up eBook downloads in the EPUB format! Naturally this is great news for the EPUB fans, but more importantly it’s great for the general public at large.

OverDrive are providing them and another 8,500 libraries access to EPUB books for borrowing. We must also presume that as OverDrive increase their number of EPUB titles , all these libraries will be offered them too.

As TeleRead mentions, it would be great if they could also offer their books via popular iPhone readers such as Stanza which could then encourage younger readers to get back to books.

I expect 8,500 libraries is a good coverage across the U.S. but as an European I hope our libraries can strike a similiar deal. If both sides of the big pond can offer up these services then there’s potential for more countries to follow suit, which would be particularly useful for those where moving a ton of paper books around can be quite difficult and expensive.

Below is an example <pageList> markup (that is valid per the NCX DTD) which can be used to mark up page numbers within ePub documents.

Note that <pageList> must be placed right after the required <navMap>, and must occur before the first optional <navList>. There may be one and only one <pageList> (but there can be any number of <navList> — of course, there can only be one <navMap>).

<pageList id="page-mapping">

  <navLabel><text>Paper Edition Page Mapping</text></navLabel>

  <pageTarget id="page-iii" value="3" type="front" playOrder="82">
    <navLabel><text>Page iii</text></navLabel>
    <content src="frontmatter.html#pageiii"/>
  </pageTarget>

  <!-- ... -->

  <pageTarget id="page-105" value="105" type="normal" playOrder="192">
    <navLabel><text>Page 105</text></navLabel>
    <content src="chap5.html#page105"/>
  </pageTarget>

</pageList>

Notes:

1. Currently there is an error in epubcheck 1.0.3 which says <pageList> must include both the id and class attributes, while they should be optional. Hopefully that bug will get fixed. The above markup includes the optional id (generally a good idea), but not the class so it will not validate to 1.0.3.

2. On <pageTarget>, the type attribute is required and takes one of three values: front, normal, or special. I interpret front to mean front-matter, normal to mean ordinary body matter, and special to mean back matter or some other special section which is not front or body matter.

3. On <pageTarget>, the value attribute is optional and I interpret it to contain an integer number expressing the page value associated with the given type. a type:value pair must be unique in the NCX, which cannot be checked by XML validation. [Note that playOrder is required.]

4. Based on figuring out how this would work in the authoring and reading system environments, it is highly recommended that the target fragment identifier for the “new page” NOT point to an existing id associated with some document structure, but should point to an id specifically associated with the beginning of a new page.

This means adding id to either an existing element marking the beginning of a new page which does not already have an id, or adding a <span class=”newpage” id=”pagexxx”></span> or <div class=”newpage” id=”pagexxx”></div> as needed to pinpoint the location of the start of a new page and its value.

Note that in my example above, I added special id values of pageiii and page105 to the content, and not used id values associated with some document structure (such as header, paragraph, etc.)

[Editors Note: Thanks to Jon Noring for writing the above article.

I would like to add that although the above method IS valid against the NCX DTD, marking up pages numbers in this way has not yet been officially approved by the IDPF. It must also be noted that there are yet no reading systems that would utilize this information.

This method is now being discussed in the EPUB Working Group. If it does become part of the official specification, then it should not be a burden on reading system developers since the syntax for <navList> and <pageList> is the same as that for <navMap>.]

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.

EPUB formatted books as an industry wide standard is what I, and many others want. But can we achieve this without Amazon’s adoption — at least with ePub support on their Kindle eBook reader.

It will certainly be a lot easier to have a standard eBook format if Amazon joined the ePub party. I’m reluctant to say it but all current indications show that Amazon will not adopt the ePub format in the near future – but perhaps there is hope.

Recently we have seen a flurry of publishers and eBook projects (including yours truly) adopting the ePub format and a number of these are pushing their titles onto the iPhone/iPod Touch platform via the Stanza eBook reader. Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg are the two big projects but we now have Pan Macmillan offering commercial Tasters and in the last few days BookGlutton announced that they have joined forces with Stanza. Interesting times ahead for sure.

With all this recent iPhone/eBook activity I am asking myself, where is Amazon? The Kindle is certainly making waves with big sale numbers but this is probably nothing compared to iPhone sales. This makes me wonder if Amazon will start making their titles available on this platform and if so, what format will they use. If they use their own eBook format (AZW), they would need to release a dedicated ‘Amazon eBook Reader’ — how many different iPhone reader applications will people accept?

Everyone around here knows that having one standard eBook format will better serve everyone. If Amazon opens their Kindle to the ePub format and strikes a deal with a company such as Lexcycle (Stanza) they could kill two birds with one stone. Hmm, perhaps an Amazon/Stranza union is a little too much wishful thinking.

Providing direct purchase and download would make Amazon a serious option for any iPhone or iPod Touch user, and vise versa.

So, can Amazon leverage the iPhone to further dominate the eBook market and can they continue to resist the ePub eBook format?

Disclaimer: The Amazon/ePub logo I created is intended just for fun.

Recently I’ve been making great progress on my ePub converter but in the process I’ve come across a few areas that have needed some thought. For this short article I’m going to discuss the XHTML Quote tag.

When looking though the IDPF OPS specs I noticed that <q> tags are allowed within ePub documents. As I mark up all quotes in my master TEI documents with a <q> tag I was really happy to see this. However, when I came to test my files in Adobe Digital Editions none of my quotes showed.

After seaching around the net I also noticed that <q> tags are not supported by all web browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer). Liza Daly has also noted that the HTML 5.0 specs will depreciate Q tags – will a version of XHTML follow suite in the future? Will a future IDPF OPS spec implement that future XHTML spec?

(FYI, Liza mentioned that she is currently working on implementing <q> tags in her Bookworm reader, with a work around for IE.)

This is an area which I believe ePub developers should give some serious thought over. Even if Adobe DE go ahead and implement this feature, other readers may not necessarily follow suite.

For my own project I have decided to convert all my <q> tags into regular “quote” characters. Providing more safety both now and in the long term.

During the Digital Lunch seminar at this years Frankfurt Book Fair, Michael Vantusko from Overdrive commented that W.H.Smith was one of their eBook customers. As I was updating the epubbooks.com homepage I thought I’d check them out to see if they actually have them online yet. I don’t know the date W.H.Smith went live with their ePub books but they currently have almost 6,500 ePub titles.

As Overdrive also distribute to Waterstones I would imagine that the W.H.Smith eBook collection will grow quite quickly. It’s great to see more stores offering ePub formatted books to the consumers – perhaps this extra competition will result in lower eBook prices sooner rather than later.

There is however quite some way to go before the number of ePub titles reaches the overall eBook numbers. Here’s a quick breakdown of the current eBook titles in the W.H.Smith eBook store;

56056 - PDF
15368 - MobiPocket
6441 - ePub

I also found it interesting that they’re offering eBooks in languages other than just English. Here’s a breakdown of those in the ePub format, which I will follow up with total eBooks in any particular language.

5863 - English ePub Books
509 - French
50 - German
9 - Spanish
6 - Italian
2 - Swedish
1 - Finnish
1 - Norwegian

A selection of different languages in all eBook formats found on the website;

60586 - English (All eBook Formats)
946 - Spanish eBooks
885 - Japanese eBooks
801 - French eBook
424 - Italian eBooks
390 - German eBooks
35 - Dutch eBooks
26 - Russian eBooks
19 - Chinese eBooks
14 - Portuguese eBooks

I was very lucky this year to be able to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. As it was only going to be a one day affair for me I choose Thursday, the day of the Digital Lunch: Digital Publishing and the EPUB Standard’ seminar.

Before the session got under way I had a quick look around the ‘Digital Market Place’ Hall and came across the iRex Digital Reader stand where they were showing off their DR1000 model. Along with having a basic reader they also have two models with a Wacom touch screen and one of those with Wi-Fi. All models have a 10.2 inch display (1024×1280 pixels) – so no need to go zooming in on your PDF files now. This looks a great piece of equipment. After checking out the iRex stand I then made my way down to the IDPF session.

There were four speakers at the Digital Lunch, Michael Smith (IDPF Executive Director), Michael Vantusko (Overdrive – unfortunately Steve Potash could not make it), Fionnuala Duggan (Random House Digital Group UK) and Robert Nell (Sony Reader).

Mike Smith got things started with an outline of the IDPF and the ePub format. He discussed the amazing sales figures we’ve been seeing in the eBook world and the uptake of the ePub standard from publishers and conversion houses.

Then Mike Vantusko from Overdrive talked a little about the challenges of being the first distributor to offer ePub formatted books. He was also was very positive on the uptake from stores such as Waterstones, Borders and W.H.Smith from the UK.

Fionnuala Duggan from Random House UK was very positive toward ePub although she did have some reservations regarding piracy. This seems a common issue among publishers and although I agree that the one-click piracy that digital content offers makes it easier, with or without official digital versions, piracy happens. We all saw what happened with the Harry Potter books.

Random House are now working on having core user formats of both ePub and PDF. Fionnuala also mentioned that as from 2009 they will simultaneously release both Paper and eBook editions of all their new titles.

If you’ve been keeping your eyes open then you would of heard recently that Sony made an unprecedented move by relocating their entire eBook division from Japan to the U.S. to better promote the Sony Reader. Robert Nell talked very emphatically about the future of the Reader and told of their expectations for tens of millions of Readers being sold – Sony is serious about eBooks!

“Two years ago there was no [eBook] standard…now there is a standard, the IDPF ePub standard” – Robert Nell

I managed to grab a few moments with Robert after the seminar in the hope of getting some juicy details about the Readers future, but as one would expect, he was very careful not to give anything away. I asked about a release date for the upcoming Wi-Fi features and even when I offered up an October 2009 date, to tie in with their current one model per year schedule, he calmly said nothing. :)

Neither would he give a release date for the PRS-700 in the UK, although he did confirm that it would be released. I got the impression that we won’t see the PRS-700 in the UK until the latter half of 2009 – very likely September or October. If you’re from the UK and were holding off buying a Reader in case a PRS-700 release was imminent…I wouldn’t wait. So get along to SonyStyle.co.uk (or Waterstones UK) and buy yourself a PRS-505 – I’m sure you won’t regret it.

For their big push into Europe, Sony is continuing their partnerships, such as they have done with Waterstones in the UK. In France from the 23rd October, the PRS-505 will be sold at fnac and Germany will get theirs early 2009 in partnership with Libri GmbH.

Later in the afternoon I met up with Michael Smith for a couple of beers and had a great chat on all things ePub. Mike showed a real interest in ePubBooks.com so it was nice to get some positive feedback on my project. I very much got the feeling that as well as supporting the large publishers and conversion houses, the IDPF are also very encouraged and supportive of what is happening in the community with projects such as ePubBooks and Feedbooks.

In the evening we headed down to the Jazil Bar for more drinks, as did a number of other people.
Hadrien Gardeur from Feedbooks was hoping to make it to the fair, but unfortunately he didn’t show. I did meet Andrew Savikas from TOC O’Reilly, though only briefly, which was a real shame as it would have been great to have a good chat with him – alas I had my train to catch.

The big message I took from the fair was that publishers, conversion houses and distributors are serious about the ePub format. Everyone is getting excited about the growth of eBook sales in general and publishers seem to be almost relieved that we are now seeing an eBook standard developed, which in the long term will save them money and be better for the end consumer.

In my last post I talked about the epubBooks Project and how I plan to convert Project Gutenberg .txt eBooks to the ePub format and how I will make these eBooks available for download from ePubBooks.com.

I already have in place a converter to transform the PG .txt files to a TEI Master Format and also an XSLT script to convert these into XHTML. The final task now is to create a converter for TEI to the ePub format.

Before I attempt to write this converter I will need to have a much better understanding on how a book is laid out inside the ePub OEBPS Container Format (OCF) .zip archive. So I set about taking my XHTML output file and breaking it up into the appropriate parts ready to be packaged in to an .epub file.

On the whole this went fairly smoothly, although I did encounter a couple of issues, which I’ll explain at the end of this article.

A great way to understand how to make your own ePub Book is to download and examine a pre-existing book. My reference book was Jon Noring’s submission of “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather, found on the IDPF website.

After unzipping and examining the contents everything looked straight forward, so went ahead and started editing Jon’s file into my own.

OPS

My first task was to split up the all-in-one XHTML file into separate chapters, title page, footnotes, etc., thus creating the OPS files. During this I added the appropriate header and footer (using My Ántonia as the guide), making sure I also included the correct link to the CSS file and giving each its own title.

As XHTML 1.1 can be used directly within an ePub document there was nothing to change within the text itself.

OPF

Once I had all my separate OPS parts I went ahead and started editing the ePub OPF file.

Again using Jon’s example as a guide, I entered all the book information (Title, Author, etc..) into the meta tags – an important tag to note is the dc:identifier. For this you will need to create a unique identifier for the book/document. You can use anything you like here (including an ISBN number) as long as it is completely unique. As this is just a test file I used the epubbooks.com domain name, the date and the time. (This ID will also be used in the NCX file.)

Once I was happy with the data I went on to the manifest section and listed all the files used in the publication; cover, title page, introduction, chapters, footnotes, CSS Style Sheets, images and finally the NCX file.

The spine section lists the reading order for the book and was pretty straight forward.

NCX

Next I edited the NCX (Navigation Center eXtended) file. This provides the Reading System with the TOC listing and navigation links. Each entry is given an ID, PlayOrder, Label and filename. ID’s should always be unique and the ‘PlayOrder’ starts at “1″ with no gaps in the sequence.

There are couple of important points to take note on here. The ‘Unique ID’ created in the OPF file (dc:identifier) needs to be included in this meta section. You will also need to adjust the <meta name="dtb:depth" content="1"/> value.

If you have an eBook with just chapters then the depth will be “1″. If you have an eBook that has Books, Chapters and Sections, then Book is Level 1, Chapters are Level 2 and Sections are Level 3. The more sections you have within your TOC the more ‘depths’ you will need to state.

Footnotes

All the final editing needed was to set up links for the footnotes. As I’m storing the footnotes in a separate file I marked up the entry in the spine with linear="no" as this should be considered an “auxiliary” file.

Now all that was needed was to add the filename to the a tag in the footnotes.xml file, which in this case became chapter001.xml#fn-place-1 and In the chapter001.xml file I added a link to the footnote file, footnotes.xml#fn-1.

Creating the .epub file

There’s a couple of rules to follow when creating your .zip (ePub) file.

• mimetype must be the first file in the .zip
• No compression is to be used on this file.

Once you have this file in place then you can then go ahead and add the rest of the content, just make sure you retain the directory structure.

Problems and further research

One thing to remember is that filenames are case sensitive. Make sure you use the same case as stated in your OPF and NCX files, otherwise they will not be displayed.

When I created my XHTML version I had each TOC entry linking to the appropriate chapter, if you clicked on the chapter heading you would be transported back to the TOC entry. When using DE on my desktop computer there did not seem to be a need to use linking back to the TOC, but until I get myself a Sony Reader or BeBook I won’t be able to test exactly how this works on a dedicated reader.

epubcheck

Although my .epub eBook displays perfectly well in Adobe DE, it does however fail on many points when tested against the epubcheck tool. Most of these seem related to undeclared entities (ndash) and some undefined fragment identifiers. I guess I’ll just need to get stuck into the specifications and see where I’m going wrong – I don’t think these are going to be major issues though.

I hope article has provided a nice overview on creating an ePub eBook. I still need to clean up these epubcheck errors but once that’s done I can get on with writing the XSLT conversion script. I will likely do a follow up article covering what was need to validate against epubcheck and I will try and write some more detailed articles on creating both the OPF and NCX files.

Ready … Set … Read!

This is the headline on the Lexcycle website for their new iPhone eBook reader called Stanza. They’re touting this as the ‘premier electronic book reader for the iPhone and the iPod Touch‘ which more importantly (at least for me) has the ability to read ebooks in the EPUB format.

Stanza is still in beta at the moment so there will be a few bugs hanging around but hopefully lexcycle will go final soon. [UPDATE: Stanza is now considered one of the best free eReaders out there with most bugs fixed, and available for iPhone and iPad].

Okay, so now you have your Stanza/iPhone EPUB reader, but where do you get your books from? This is the easy part…

You can download lots of free EPUB ebooks right here on epubBooks.com.

Alternatively, you can use Feedbooks, whose catalogue is available from directly within the Stanza app.

Browsing and downloading books once you’ve installed Stanza is very intuitive, just select Online Catalog and Feedbooks to get books from our service — feedbooks.com

Commercial ebooks are not currently available so all the titles you’ll find are in the public domain, but what’s available from both epubBooks and Feedbooks should keep everyone reading happy for a lifetime.

Right, all I need now is an iPhone…

UPDATE: I now have a full review of the iPod Touch and the Apple iPad – these two reviews have lots of information on adding ebooks to your Apple device as well as what other EPUB eReader apps are available, and all of which can be used on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

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?