Andrew Savikas over on the O’Reilly TOC has written a nice tutorial on how to read your O’Reilly ePub formatted books on the iPhone using Stanza.

One thing to note about this is that he was only successful in doing so when using his MacBook Pro, he was unable to say the same about the process using Windows.

After reading his article, I have to say the whole thing seems really easy!

Andrew did bring up one of Stanza’s failings, “A lot of the formatting isn’t (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.” Perhaps it’s understandable about tables but I am surprised that lists are not yet supported. However, the app is still in beta and we know that Lexcycle are working hard on improving it.

One thing Andrew noted in his post was that O’Reilly are also looking into releasing their titles as individual iPhone Apps. I’m not convinced by this approach myself, but hey, for you iPhone users it will if nothing else give the proper formatting that O’Reilly intended

Okay, there’s a long way to go before ePub is a format that all devices can read properly, however it’s great to see that the industry is still moving forward.

Last month O’Reilly announced that they will be starting an experimental pilot and selling selected titles in an eBook bundle. The bundle includes a PDF, Kindle-compatible Mobipocket and of course an ePub formatted version.

Today, O’Reilly announced the availability of 30 eBook titles! The cost of the bundle is a little lower than the paper version and if you wish to pay a little more you can get the print book with the eBook bundle included!

Here is the full list of those thirty titles;

• Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
• Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
• Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management
• Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
• Facebook: The Missing Manual
• Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
• Designing Web Navigation
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed
• The Art of Agile Development
• Process Improvement Essentials
• Enterprise SOA
• Applied Software Project Management
• Practical Development Environments
• Security and Usability
• We the Media
• Devices of the Soul
• Digital Identity
• Database Nation
• Spam Kings
• Open Sources
• Open Sources 2.0
• Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
• Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
• The Cathedral & the Bazaar
• Mind Performance Hacks
• Statistics Hacks
• Smart Home Hacks
• Wikipedia Reader’s Guide: The Missing Manual
• Flex 3 Cookbook
• Painting the Web

At the moment they will only be providing twelve of these for the Amazon Kindle (highlighted in bold), the rest will be released over the coming weeks. At present the Kindle still has a number of formatting issues so it lacks support for tables and monospaced fonts, which are very important to the O’Reilly books, this means they have to convert all tables to image files.

We all hope that Amazon will fix these issues and more importantly, start supporting the ePub format natively on the Kindle

If you do decide to take the Print+Electronic option you will save yourself well over 50% of the eBook price. For example;

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Electronic: $31.99
Print Book: $39.99
Print+Electronic: $51.99

This means your would get the eBook bundle for just $12…that’s a saving of 63%. On top of that you get three different eBook versions, all of which come with free updates…not bad!

Today over on the O’Reilly TOC, Andrew Savikas made an annoucment that from July 2008, O’Reilly will release a selection of their catalogue as a DRM-Free eBook bundle. This will include a PDF, Kindle-compatible Mobipocket and yes, an ePub format version! Not only are they giving you three for the price of one, but these will also be DRM-Free eBooks (they are considering a form of social DRM.)

Although they are still working on the ePub versions, any PDF eBook you buy now will make you eligible for free access to the ePub version once it is released. For the moment this is only an experiment, but if It works out, they plan to release their whole catalogue in these formats (barring a few with copyright restrictions and some old ones that present at format-conversion challenge.)

This is not a snap decision, as Andrew explains;

While we would have liked to make these ebooks available sooner, we felt it was important to first contribute to building some of the tools needed for other publishers to follow our lead, such as enhancements to the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets, which can now generate EPUB from DocBook XML source files.

The full list has not yet been released, but Andrew does provide us with a sample;

• iPhone: The Missing Manual
• Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
• Facebook: The Missing Manual
• Making Things Happen
• Open Sources 2.0
• The Art of Agile Development
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed

Alas none of these are of interest to myself, but I’m eagerly awaiting to see what else they will have on offer.

One problem O’Reilly has is that the content they produce, “relies heavily on computer code and complex tables — two types of content that are not rendered well on most of today’s ebook readers.” The ‘code blocks’ they need to include rely on monospace fonts. Let’s hope the Kindle and other readers recieve the updates needed to make O’Reilly’s life much easier.

With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader…

Today O’Reilly have thrown down the guantlet to all the other publishers, DRM-Free ePub books…wow!

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.