Many long-standing visitors to epubBooks will certainly have noticed that I’d released an update to the site a few months back which added plenty of new functionality, along with a nice update to the styling. Although a new design, it was only a Beta and so was released with little fanfare.
Today’s update has fixed a large number of bugs from that release, added some more design tweaks, and a whole bunch of improvements to the search algorithms.
The original epubBooks.com (live since 2008) was merely a simple catalog for browsing the free EPUB Classics that were (and still are) available for download. It served its purpose well, but demand for more modern titles and better search features led me to re-think not only the design, but the core purpose of the site. Limited time and resources have made it difficult to achieve all that I’d like but I think the site now has some interesting features.
We’re in a time when there’s many different eReaders, tablets and reading apps to choose from, so one of the core features I wanted to bring was the ability to focus results to any specific reading device, whether it be an iPad, a Nook, Sony Reader or Windows PC. For those of you with multiple devices (apps if you’re a smartphone/tablet user) then you can also select which store you want to buy from based on the books’ price — you’d be surprised how often these vary from store to store.
Some of the most popular pages on the old site were the genre/category pages. In the new release I’ve put a lot of effort in to standardizing the categories for books I include from the different stores. There’s still a lot of work to be done on that area, but it’s now certainly much easier to discover new and different books in whatever category you love the most.
I’ve also tried to keep the the same clutter free design and simple to use interface from the original site, which I know many of you particularly liked.
At present I’m only able to include U.S. titles and with those there’s still a limited number of online stores I’m able to support. I’ll be integrating British, Australian, and possibly even German and French catalogs in the future for those of you from those countries, though I’m not yet able to give a release date for any of that. It is however a priority for me.
I should note that many links for Kobo, ebooks.com and Diesel will work even if you’re not a U.S. resident, so give it a try.
The new design should still be considered a Beta release; there are plenty of bugs to fix and improvements to be made, but this latest round of updates should allow things to move a little more quickly now.
I hope you find the new site useful and I’m always happy to get feedback, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Cheers,
Michael Cook
epubBooks Founder
Manchester, UK