The latest Updates, News and EPUB Tutorials
One feature that I’ve been wanting to add to epubBooks for several years now is the ability to rate and review books — I’m pleased to announce that that is now finally possible!
To be able to added these features I’ve also had to implement User Accounts. The added bonus of this is that I can now start thinking about what additional functionality I can add to provide a better user experience.
In commemoration of the First World War centenary (July 28, 1914), I’ve added fourteen new WWI ebooks to epubBooks. There’s a varied selection of Fiction (including some for young readers) and non-Fiction titles set in and about the Great War. These include well-known authors of the time such as Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells. Along with adding these new books, I’ve also re-assigned a number of older entries which should have been in these categories, so there are now over 20 WWI books available.
Here are few highlights from the recent additions; Continue reading “Books from the First World War”
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on improving the book series section of the epubBooks catalog. This includes making sure any current series contain all the books found on the site ,along with bolstering the incomplete entries by converting and adding any missing titles.
I spent some time updating epubBooks so that individual titles can now be added to multiple series, as it’s surprising how many books crossover from one series to the next, or have a sub-series – the Conan and Waverley series are two good examples of that.
New series added in the last week are; Continue reading “Book Series and Sequels enhancements”
Over the last few years the focus of epubBooks has been to provide very high quality EPUB ebooks from many of the great classic authors such as Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Author Conan Doyle and Beatrix Potter, and for all for free, but up until now we’ve not supported the Amazon Kindle.
In truth, I’d always hoped that Amazon would start supporting the EPUB format and allow their Kindle users to upload all our titles directly to their eReaders. Although there have been rumours, nothing ever came of them and I’m not honestly expecting that to change in the next few years. Therefore, we’ve decided to bite the bullet and start providing ebooks in both the EPUB and Kindle MOBI formats. Continue reading “Amazon Kindle Support”
A couple of months back I set to work on finishing the ground up rewrite of my PG eText to EPUB app and this week I reached a stage where I’m happy enough with the results to start releasing new editions of all the titles currently on epubBooks, along with starting to upload new ebooks.
The new pipeline I’m using (TXT > DocBook > EPUB) means that I can utilise the DocBook XSL project, and thus epubBooks now delivers all ebooks as EPUB3. The DocbookXSL stylesheets lack some of the more interesting EPUB3 features to allow them to be compatible with EPUB2 eReaders, which for the moment is good for everyone. Continue reading “New EPUB3 eBook Editions”
When I launched the site rebuild last month I’d removed the search feature on epubBooks so that I could get the new site out the door as soon as possible. I had a few emails asking when this would be back. I’m pleased to say that I’ve now added back the search feature!
This is still a very simple implementation and certainly needs to be more user friendly (i.e. ignore pluralization so that we return more results) but I can roll out those kinds of features over the coming weeks.
Thanks to everyone for not giving up on epubBooks during this big change.
With the recent changes to epubBooks I removed the option to search the popular ebook stores for free EPUB books – titles now found on epubBooks are still free, but are direct downloads only.
Lots of people are now wanting to know how to get free ebooks from those popular sites like Kobo, eBooks.com, Diesel-eBooks, etc. To help with that, I’ve now created a special page with tips on how to navigate those sites to find all their free ebooks.
So, head over to my epubBooks Free eBooks tips page … and happy searching!
I’m pleased to announce the brand new, ground-up rebuild of epubBooks! For this release I wanted to create a design with an emphasis on mobile users, which will give a much improved experience to those with tablets and smartphones.
Over the last coupe of years the type of visitor coming to epubBooks.com has been more and more mobile based, with almost 60% using the site on a smartphone or tablet — the old design didn’t work too well on any device with a screen resolution less than 1024 px, which meant anyone viewing the site on an iPhone, Windows Phone, or any other small screened device had a difficult time reading the text and navigation the site. Even those of you on 7 inch tablets, like the Google Nexus, spent a lot of time zooming in and out.
The new site uses what’s called a responsive layout, which means that the page sections move to best fit whatever screen size you’re on; text and some images will resize, especially for those smartphones with screens of just 480px. Continue reading “New epubBooks: Mobile First Design”
UPDATE: Due to a site rebuild these features are no longer supported.
Since epubBooks had its first major facelift back in May we’ve received a great deal of positive feedback. However, the one question that’s continually asked was when our ebook search features would be made available to countries other than the U.S.
I’m pleased to announce that epubBooks.com now supports ebook catalogues for two additional countries; United Kingdom and Australia.
Most people will be automatically directed to the appropriate pages but just in case this doesn’t work for you, then you should scroll to the bottom of the homepage, click the “Change region” button and select your country. Visitors from Great Britain will now have all the prices displayed in GBP, and like-wise Australia will have AUD.
Continue reading “New Countries Supported: UK & AU”
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. Continue reading “New epubBooks Now Live!”