What to Expect in EPUB3: Comments from Bob Kasher, Member of the International Digital Publishing Forum EPUB Working Group

The new release is scheduled for May. The following comes from Kasher's interview with Jenn Webb, O'Reilly Radar:

There are three key areas EPUB3 is focused around: language support, greater accessibility, and increased multimedia support. Language support will allow EPUB3 to save and search non-Roman scripts — such as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic — as font characters rather than JPEGs, as in current EPUB support. This will make a much broader range of literature available to current and future reading devices from base EPUB files. It will truly internationalize EPUB.

EPUB3 will also be better at integrating the current DAISY accessibility standards, to help make reading devices of greater usefulness to visually impaired readers.

EPUB3 will be much more adept at supporting multimedia capabilities for both HTML5-based devices and the coming generation of tablets supporting both Flash and HTML5. It is hoped that in doing so, EPUB3 will help develop an enhanced ebook standard that can be used across a variety of media and content.

Other developments include enhanced metadata support for discoverability, better facilitation support for touchscreen devices, and support for MathML, which we hope will open up greater opportunities for textbook publishers. EPUB3 will be a quantum leap forward in capabilities for future device support, but still backward compatible with current devices on the market. ...

Don't Believe the Rhetoric Behind Google's New "Open" eBook Store

Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine: "Google's e-books are 'open' in the same way that politicians are 'bipartisan' and oil companies are 'green'—the claim makes for good marketing, even if it lacks substance. Buying from Google rather than Amazon will give you no greater control over your books. You're not likely to get any practical benefit from going with Google, either. In fact, Amazon's 'closed' books will soon work on more devices than Google's 'open' books."

Sigil eBook Editor = Well Worth a Try

After several weeks of experimenting and kicking the tires, I really must recommend the Sigil eBook editor. Check it out.

• Free and open source software under GPLv3
• Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
• Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16
• Full EPUB spec support
• WYSIWYG editing
• Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View
• Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200) with full descriptions for each
• Table Of Contents editor
• Multi-level TOC support
• Book View fully supports the display of any XHTML document possible under the OPS spec
• SVG support
• Basic XPGT support
• Advanced automatic conversion of all imported documents to Unicode
• Currently imports TXT, HTML and EPUB files; more will be added with time
• Embedded HTML Tidy; all imported documents are thoroughly cleaned; changing views cleans the document so no matter how much you screw up your code, it will fix it (usually)
• An actually usable user interface
• Native C++ application

ePagine Adobe DRM eBook Reader Released for iPad

eBook Magazine (UK): "French ebook reader ePagine has become the third iPad app to support Adobe DRM protected ebooks, joining txtr and Bluefire Reader. The iTunes description for the free app, which first appeared in the app store on 15th October, boasts 'access to a catalog of more than 100,000 titles' ..."

Review: ibis EPUB eBook Reader

Project Gutenberg News Blog: "Ibis Reader is probably the best online eReader around at the moment, allowing you to read all your DRM-free EPUB’s in any modern web browser on many different mobile devices, including Google Android and the Apple iPad/iPhone. Developed by Threepress Consulting, their EPUB reader is the next generation of the Bookworm project (now hosted at O’Reilly), boasting a vastly improved user interface and new features."

New iWork 9.0.4 Exports to ePub

Softpedia: "You can now put your documents into iBooks on your iOS device, according to the changelog accompanying iWork 9.0.4, the latest version of Apple's productivity suite for Mac OS X. ... 9.0.4 includes compatibility with the standard ePub file format when exporting. Apple highlights that this is 'for use with iBooks.' Users can now create an ePub document that can be read in iBooks on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The feature comes with a note on behalf of Apple saying 'not all Pages formatting options are available in ePub.'"

A Call for Kindle EPUB Support

Jason Perlow/ZDNet: " ... there is one thing that’s keeping me from whipping out the AMEX and clicking the 'Buy Now' button at Amazon, and that’s the lack of EPUB support. Frankly, I really don’t understand why Amazon would leave this out of their current generation of devices. I can understand why they would want to continue with AZW and their own DRM for content sold on their own store, but frankly, Amazon doesn’t sell every electronic book that you can possibly buy."

Kindle vs. ePub - Which Will Go the Distance?

From Nate the Great, the Digital Reader: "So there’s another ePub activism session going on right now on Twitter, and it inspired this rant. I have a number of points about format, Kindle vs ePub, etc that I want to get off my chest. ... The Kindle format has Amazon behind it. ePub has a committee. When you match a savvy, innovative tech company with a being that has 100 mouths and no brain, who do you think will win?" But Nate cites other reasons as well. And he's on target, as usual.

B&N Nook for Android Now Supports EPUB Side Load and SD App Storage

B&N Nook for Android now supports EPUB side load and SD app storage | ZDNet: "It seems that every week something comes along on the Google Android platform that raises it higher on my personal smartphone rating scale. We saw Froyo come to my awesome HTC EVO 4G this week and now just a couple weeks after Barnes & Noble released the Nook app we see a MAJOR update that just propelled the Nook Android application to the top of my ebook reading application list. The new Nook for Android 2.1 application, available in the Android Market, enhances my reading experience by giving me access to all of my DRM-free EPUB files, the ability to store the application on my microSD card, and much more."

Kurzweil's Blio

Technologist Ray Kurzweil's soon-to-be-released Blio eReader software comes free. The software will drop at the same time the bookstore opens. The bookstore has been developed in partnership with Baker & Taylor. Blio runs on - literally - anything: hand-held devices, PCs, tablets, whatever. It can handle color and supports multimedia. Unlike standard dedicated reader software, it preserves a publisher's original formatting (important with many textbooks, cookbooks, how-to books, childrens books, etc.) Kurzweil says Blio is "the new touchstone for the presentation of electronic books, magazines, and digital content." There is also a read-aloud feature. Supports XPS, PDF, ePub. Beta testers have reportedly been impressed. But ... a very late entry into the marketplace, and formidable (to say the least) competition.

New Virginia Quarterly Review iPad Edition

From Publishers Weekly:

The Virginia Quarterly Review has created a digital edition specifically tailored for the iPad. The literary magazine from the University of Virginia has become one of the first magazines to create such an edition and sell it directly through Apple's iBookstore. A free 29-page sample of the magazine's current issue can be downloaded here. VQR is selling its digital editions for $3.99, as compared to the $14.99 price for the print issue.

Speaking to the magazine's push to get into the iBookstore, managing editor Kevin Morrissey said one attractive feature with Apple's storefront is the fact that it supports ePub. "It is important to us that we distribute VQR in a manner that is open, unencumbered by the limitations of digital rights management and patents," Morrissey explained. The magazine also created the ePub edition in-house which developer Waldo Jaquith said "is a testament to the simplicity of the format." Jaquith added that creating the digital editions proved economical for the magazine. "Rather than building a stand-alone app for the iPad, as so many other magazines have done, we were able to leverage our existing website content and create this version at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary app."

The Need for an Agnostic Universal eBook Format and Universal DRM

Thanks much to Tim O'Reilly for drawing my attention to this very important Reuters item which comes via Wired:

... Both [Amazon and Apple] want their devices — the iPad and the Kindle — to be the one consumers use to read e-books, and each wants to be the biggest virtual store were such content is sold.

For Michael Serbinis, chief executive of Kobo, a company that allows users to buy e-books and read them on most devices, that battle is a distraction to the real changes coming.

“Today you can buy a book at Barnes and Noble and you can buy a book at Walmart and you don’t have to keep them in separate rooms in your house,” he said. “You buy a book from Apple and Amazon and you have got to keep it tied up with your Apple universe or your Kindle universe.”

Ultimately, consumers want freedom, said David Shanks, chief executive of leading publisher Penguin Group USA.

“Our fondest wish is that all the devices become agnostic so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read wherever you want to read,” Shanks told Reuters. “First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces.”

The issue, he said, is the fear of piracy and how to set a common digital rights management system to thwart it. ...

Apple Opens iBookstore to Self-Published Authors

Details from ars technica:

To take advantage of the service, you must first have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for each work you wish to make available for sale. Obtaining an ISBN isn’t as difficult a process you might think; it can take as little as two weeks. Second, you must have a copy of the work in ePUB format. There are a variety of different ways to convert text into ePUB format, many of which are free (a list can be found on the LexCycle website). You must also have a valid iTunes Store account as well as a US tax ID.

The last requirement is that you, as the author, must have access to a modern Mac. In order to participate, you must encode your eBook with Apple’s software, which needs an Intel Mac running at least OS X 10.5. The encoding process most likely adds Apple’s very own brew of DRM to the book, ensuring that your writings won't be distributed outside of the iPhone or iPad.

MacLife also has something.

eBook Portability Across Platforms and the Proprietary Software/DRM Conundrum

From The Wall Street Journal:

... commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It's as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

Much of this problem stems from the publishing industry, which has demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online. The music labels once asked the same from digital-music retailers, but eventually agreed to open up.

The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc. and Sony Corp. all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple's new iBooks store can be read only on Apple's own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple's virtual bookshelf. (So I hope iBooks customers like Apple's light-brown wood paneling.)

Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.

Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, lets customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google's Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company's website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.

Amazon's apps are slick and work on many of the most popular devices today, but Amazon buyers should know that they're likely stuck using the retailer's software forever. While Amazon says it plans to keep making apps for more devices, the list of potential devices for reading grows longer every day. Moreover, Amazon sells its e-books in a proprietary format, so there's no way to open those files on another device without an Amazon app or without resorting to cumbersome (and potentially illegal) third-party conversion software.

Barnes & Noble, too, adopted an Internet-connected app approach, providing a seamless way to shift its e-books between the Nook, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, WindowsMobile for the HTC HD2 and soon iPad. Barnes & Noble has been integrating its e-bookstore into niche e-reading devices, like those by Plastic Logic, Irex and Pandigital. It also, uniquely, offers you the chance to "loan" some e-book purchases to a friend for 14 days. But its bookstore requires a somewhat annoying step: Each time you download a book to a new device, you must enter your name and the credit-card number that was used to buy the book in order to unfasten the digital lock on the book.

Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they'd put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music's Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can't be transferred or doing so is cumbersome. ...

New B/N Reader for iPad

From CNET's David Camoy, a first-reaction:

... We'll have more thoughts on the new app once we play around with it for a few days, but our intitial impression is that it matches up well against Amazon's Kindle for iPad app and Apple's own iBooks app and even has a few potentially nice extras to help differentiate it. We liked the List view (it's more robust looking than the Kindle apps List view) and the customization options for the page layout give you something to tinker with, though it took us a moment to figure out that the "themes" setting, which includes some preset page designs (you can save your own themes as well), was accessible through a small link at the top of the font settings menu.

The one question we had was what periodicals would actually be available. The one periodical we had in our demo account was the Wall Street Journal, and it wouldn't load on the iPad. All our books loaded fine. (We'll give you more details as we get them). ...

Elsewhere, at Gizmodo, Matt Buchanan provides a very good, balanced analysis of the app's benefits and shortcomings. Matt's likes: a multidevice platform providing access to one's B/N library across the range of computers as well as the Nook, iPad and the new iPhone and forthcoming Android apps ... of course, lots more books to choose from than what you'll find among Apple's iBooks ... B/N's lending feature remains intact, though a bit hard to negotiate ergonomically ... more customizable than the Kindle iPad app ... and a stronger search tool than Kindle's app. Matt's dislikes: Ugly screen, a book-buying process that shoots you out of the browser, less great syncing and library management tools than the Kindle app, no free reading of eBooks within B/N stores as with the Nook, no interoperable DRM solution (so good luck sideloading previously purchased books to other devices). No can do. At least not in the current iteration, although B/N says it is working on this. Matt's final analysis (italics mine):

Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble's endgoal isn't actually to sell you a slab of plastic and silicon. It's to sell you an ecosystem, to glue you to their platform. That's why you can read their books on iPads, nooks, computers, BlackBerrys, whatever. They don't care about the thing you're reading on, so long as they're selling what you're reading.

Here's the thing, if you're actually trying to decide which ebook ecosystem to buy into, if you haven't already: You should go with the ebook ecosystem that you think will last, since all of your books that aren't free are going to be tied up by DRM, and you don't want to wind up like the suckers who bought music files from Walmart when they shut down their store. Obviously, if you've already bought a nook or Kindle, you've made your decision. )

Barnes & Noble's app is, for many reasons, the best right now. They're using the more universal ePub standard. But do you have any doubt Amazon's going to improve their iPad app? Amazon also owns 80 percent of the ebook market. Their ecosystem works better on a broader level, though you are very much locked to it, in part because of their proprietary file format.

The Reason Joe Wikert Trashed His Kindle for an iPad

Worth quoting: "Sure, you can load content [for the Kindle] from sources other than Amazon, but there's really only one digital bookstore for the Kindle. The iPad offers two advantages. First, you can buy from Apple and Amazon, not just one. And second, the iPad natively supports ePub files, which are closer to an industry standard than the Kindle's mobi format."