Over the last few weeks several people have emailed asking if epubBooks.com has been abandoned – the answer is a resounding No! Okay, I know I’ve not been very active recently so please accept my apologies for that.
The reason for such limited activity is that I am working very hard on developing the new site for epubbooks.com – yes, the blog and current resources will still be accessible. The new site will allow you to download all kinds of different EPUB books, including many from the Project Gutenberg archives.
If you don’t know what my ePub Books Project is, here is a short summary.
The project was started to provide free downloads of nicely formatted EPUB files, the majority of which will be taken from the Project Gutenberg archives. These will not just be plain TEXT files enclosed in an EPUB container, but fully converted to XML (of a TEI flavour) which are themselves converted using XSLT into professional quality EPUB files. Here are some of the features;
- Properly formatted and displayed Chapter Titles/Subtitles.
- Footnotes which are Linkable (forward and backward) for instant access
- Books with Illustrations will also be available.
- Text Formatting (italics, etc.)
- Nice indents for block quotes, letters of correspondence, epigraphs, etc.
- …and many more features
The new web application is the biggest project I’ve developed to date and so is naturally a challenge to my programming skills, which is why it’s taking some time to complete, however things are going very well.
The basic skeleton of the site up and running and I am now working on programming for usability. Of course it’s these less obvious items which are some of the hardest things to programme, so at this time can’t give an accurate launch date. Rest assured it will be sooner rather than later.
Thanks for your patience and understanding and do keep checking back regularly for any new updates.
by Michael Kay – only the paper edition though ;-)