Category: Publishing & media (Page 35 of 53)

The ever-helpful Jon Noring has formed a new discussion group on Yahoo, EPub Community, with a goal of furthering discussion and collaboration around the IDPF specifications which underlie EPub (OPS/OPF/OCF).

As part of the review I was doing of the eBookWise-1150, I played some with their publishing tools. The device maker, eBook Technologies, Inc. (ETI), has some tools for publishers, and I tried both a batch processing tool and an interactive one. I say “played” with them because I only tried a few things, and there were many features, especially to the interactive tool. The tools looked very solid. I have also played around some with the Kindle Digital Text Platform. I do this to learn the tools, but also to keep myself honest. We advise clients on these devices and also the workflow surrounding eBook creation. Our clients don’t expect us to know every bell and whistle, but they do expect us to understand what is possible and not possible.

The more eBooks become attractive options for publishers, the more issues of publishing to multiple formats and platforms become important for publishers. Our experience so far has been that the most typical requirement for publishers is the need to produce eBooks in many different formats and not just one (this despite sensible solutions like IDPF’s EPUB format). And they need to do this efficiently. This is a practical reality of the marketplace today as no one eBook format has won the format war, no one channel is dominating sales, and indeed no one channel is typically worth doing on its own. The revenues simply are not there yet. (Indeed, even if you decide that you will only do, say, PDF-based eBooks, the similarities from one channel to the next end with the PDF extension, necessitating technologies like codeMantra’s Universal PDF).

Adobe is one of the vendors supporting EPUB, and their Digital Editions developer site has some good resources. They just added an EPUB Best Practices Guide (in, not surprisingly, EPUB format, so you can download Digital Editions if you want to get right to reading it).

So I have been reviewing an eBook device, the eBookWise-1150, for an upcoming issue of eContent Magazine, and I have to say that I am sold with the reading experience. More detail to come in the actual review of course, but I tried reading in a few settings–indoor evening light, on the subway aboveground and below, outdoors a bit–and I could read comfortably in each setting. I also like the size. This picture is my crude attempt to show the screen size of the eBookWise device against the other devices I often read on–my notebook, a desktop computer in the Gilbane office, and my tiny Motorola cell phone.

Michael Smith, the new Executive Director at the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), writes with some news about their upcoming conference in New York, Digital Book 08. Michael notes that the emerging global eBook market and the adoption of the EPUB digital publication standard will be high on the agenda. Included in the program will be a session on “The eBook Industry in Japan.” Mikio Amaya, President and CEO of PAPYLESS Co Ltd, Tokyo, the number one retailer for PC and mobile eBooks in Japan, will be presenting. Michael reports that the number of visitors to PAPYLESS sites is up to 4,800,000 people monthly, with 43,000,000 monthly page views.

Or at least of nothing about publishing in the strict sense, but the new movie and television site Hulu.com is very impressive. Among other things, it tells me that Flash video may carry the day when all is said and done.