EPUB books can now be borrowed from the library

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.

Easy ebooks with eCub EPUB creator

Recently the TeleRead blog discussed the need for an ePub desktop word processor application that would allow authors and non-techies to easily (and cheaply) write and save their work in the EPUB format. There are a number of OpenOffice proponents but otherwise there is no solution yet.

So what are your options?

One possible sollution could be the free eCub EPUB creator, “a simple .epub creation tool” written by Julian Smart that allows you to import XHTML or text files and export these into an EPUB formatted file. Okay, so you won’t get any nice WYSIWYG editing tools but the basic editing (notepad style) is enough to make basic adjustments from within the programme.

Versions are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris – there is even a portable version for use on USB devices.

I tried a quick test project which had 13 HTML, 2 images and a CSS file. I filled in all the appropriate fields from within eCub, used the built-in Cover Designer, changed a couple of options here and there then hit Compile. Done and Dusted!

Here are the basic features of eCub EPUB Creator;

  • Creates unencrypted EPUB files from text or XHTML files
  • Edit text or XHTML files with its simple internal editor
  • Built-in (simple) cover image designer
  • Optionally creates title, content and cover pages
  • Command line execution options
  • Portable Mode (data and settings are stored locally)

When the eCub created EPUB file is opened in Adobe Digital Editions it views just fine, however, when trying to open the same file on my Sony Reader and iPod Touch it failed with, according to Stanza, an OPF error. I will need to do some digging around to find out why it fails on these two devices, but I’m sure there is a simple explanation.

It’s been just over a year since the official release of the EPUB spec and we are now starting to see some great tools released in aiding the creation, conversion and viewing of EPUB formatted books. This is certainly what the ePub community needs and I have a feeling we will only see more tools like eCub being created during 2009.

Oodles of commercial ePub books…but not from Waterstones!

During 2008 the EPUB eBook format gained huge acceptance and we heard rumours touting that there would be 20,000 available EPUB titles by the end of the year. Waterstones were saying this prior to the release of the Sony Reader in the UK.

As we head into 2009, Waterstones still shows less than 7000 titles in their catalogue, when viewing all available eBook titles. However, I get the feeling that this will change quite soon.

A few days back BooksOnBoard made an announcement on WebWire that they now have 30,000 titles available for the iPhone. After doing a search on their site I found that almost 20,000 of those are in the EPUB format. Great news for ePub fans, but we need more. Still, BooksOnBoard was the first retailer to make commercial ePub formatted books available and their entire online eBook collection consists of almost 300,000 titles. Perhaps they will be the first to reach 100,000 ePub books!

No doubt other online retailers such as Waterstones will be soon following suit – will 2009 be the year of the EPUB format?

Marking Up Page Numbers in the EPUB NCX

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.
Continue reading “Marking Up Page Numbers in the EPUB NCX”

epubcheck and Adobe’s page-map

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); Continue reading “epubcheck and Adobe’s page-map”

Gulliver’s Travels EPUB eBook

Back in September I wrote about my epubBooks development; a project to convert the .TXT ebooks from Project Gutenberg into the IDPF’s EPUB format. After many months of hard work I’e finally finished the conversion tools and I’m now preparing development of the website itself, which will allow anyone to download my EPUB books, and all for free.

Although I’m happy with the current formatting in the EPUB files, I wanted to turn to you, the ebook community and ask for your feedback, in the hope that the improvements you submit will make these EPUB ebooks even better.

EPUB Book Features

  • Linked Footnotes – each footnote number is a link, click on this to see the footnote (I’ve actually made them all endnotes). Clicking on the notes number takes you back to the original page.
  • Images – Some titles will include images.
  • Nicely formatted titles, subtitles, etc.
  • Paragraph indents – Except on first paragraph of a chapter/section – as is usual in paper books
  • Block Indents – Small left/right indents on block quotes, letters of correspondence, songs, etc.

This is just a small selection for some of the formatting features I’ve implemented.

Please Note: As certain systems enforce their own stlying by defaults, various features will display differently. UPDATE (2011): This isn’t as prolific as it used to be.

Test the EPUB

The title I’m making available as a pre-release download is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – this has many features which show off my conversion. As this eBook contains images it is quite large, weighing in at over 5MB.

The test book has now been removed as you can find the final release here;

Gulliver’s Travels (Final)

All comments, on both the frontend formatting (indents, italics, etc) and the underlying code (OPF, NCX, HTML markup) is very much appreciated.

This ebook can be read using Adobe Digital Editions, Stanza (desktop and iPhone version), Sony Reader (PRS-505 and PRS-700), BeBook and the FBReader.

Enjoy!

Can we hope for an Amazon and ePub union?

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.

EPUB Preflight (Style Checking)

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.

Using Q tags in ePub documents

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.

W.H.Smith’s are now selling ePub eBooks!

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;

Continue reading “W.H.Smith’s are now selling ePub eBooks!”