HTML vs ePub

I know ... this one sounds silly but it is not ... and I can prove it to you.

What is publishing about?

It comes from a verb "to publish". In that respect the exact format you do the publishing is just a matter of taste. Good or bad taste is ... how to say it ... it is something that you have it or not but .... but you have the right to have your own :-)


From that point of view it really does not matter what you use as long as it is at hand for the reader.
From an access point of view HTML has an advantage .... it is at the core of the internet and even at the base of EPUB ... so it is better (or shall we say say "it can be"? we know to well that not everything/everybody lives up to its possibilities)

Coming back to the actual question .. if we speak about taste then we shall decide first whether both formats are the same type fruits.

Does HTML and EPUB even compare in any way?

I know that this will always be a debate but publishing is about distributing information. It does not matter the channel, the looks, the way you get your hands on it or whatever else. As long as you manage to put the mighty information in the hands of your readers you are good to go. In that sense HTML and EPUB can be compared.
Nevertheless we can agree that there are differences between those fruits and bellow we have some of the major points in discussion.

So how do they compare?

Hold your horses ... it will not be a straight technical comparison. Too easy to do and if I am allowed to say it not so kindly .... it's a s###ty job with no serious outcome.

So here you have my points:

Self sufficiency

That means it has or not all it takes to do the job.
At first sight it looks like each format has a different scope and is self sufficient for different targets but is it?

HTML comes with no clothes so to speak. You have the text and some semantics inside it (like headings, lists and tables). Everything else (like images and heavy media and fonts for typography) is outside and for good reasons (if you need me to explain this we will need some time to get you thru some good old principles of accessibility and not only).
EPUB on the other hand includes everything that defines a publication in the standard way of thinking. It hives you everything inside HTML and then some. You have there the structure of the publication (like a summary), the fonts for good looks (if you like to include them), even heavy media can be included (like movies and sounds) not to speak about a separate cover.
And what?
Is that a first? Anybody here remembers the Internet Explorer Web Archive format? It was called MHT and did many things that EPUB does. Long time in advance? Was it used in any way? NO? Why? We can discuss here about the fact that it came from Microsoft and they have a great way of loosing this kind of wars but it was a different problem. Nobody cared about MHT and what it offered. Except for some very specific situations where you wanted to store or send a complete representation of a web page and had no other means to do it you've used MHT. That was all.  Most publishers did not knew it existed. Shall I also remember about the LIT format? It also came from Microsoft. Long story short it did not worked. I can recall also MOBI and REB and many others. Will discuss latter what is common for those formats.
So to speak I will say that both are self sufficient. It just depends what you expect from them and how you prepare for the battle between two products based on each of those formats.  
No winner here.

It gives Looks and Presentation

I like well designed products. Who doesn't? The look makes the difference. But who has the looks here?
HTML comes empty handed in the presentation area as said before. It was designed to share information with no fuss. Just put it there with paragraphs and headings and that was all that it was supposed to offer. And this is what it does.
EPUB on the other hand it has the usual edge. It gives you a cover that the library software of whatever other software it interacts with, can show it to you so that you know what book is that and how it looks. You have also all the bells of the modern era in it and you might think that you can also do some typography (I will not comment too much about this point ... I will reserve another post for it :-) ).
And what?:
I am a supporter of greatness in simplicity. You might disagree but if you use an Apple product and you like it you know what I am saying. Nobody stops you to put a CSS and some fonts and pictures along to you HTML files. You can call that package a book and be happy with it. Will that make it look good? It might but not necessary. The format is not the answer to great looking books. Neither is paper and ink and good old printing technology. It is about what you are doing with the format and the technology in your hand. So to speak, EPUB does not bring anything on the table from this perspective. It just inherits some characteristics of the HTML and its associated technologies and gives you the sensation that you have something new. It is not new. It is not better from a presentation perspective. It is just a convention that some companies agreed to present this to you in a specific format. A format that can look as bad as any other
A draw here also.

It is Ready for business 

Being economical and providing the grounds for success is important but it takes some guts to be sincere and define what will be good in the long run.

May be we shall first agree what "ready for business" means. If you ask the normal guy they will tell you that everything that brings money in the company is. My take is that the normal guy has bellow average entrepreneurial spirit and here are my reasons.
HTML was invented in the scientific sector and it missed the class on business reasoning. No digital rights management you will say, no "big guns" supporting the business case, no sales channels no nothing. Just a format to distribute content. But it does that very well and it is at the base of many great content related businesses right now and in the visible future (let's just mention the web itself and the social network phenomenon). What will all those be without HTML? 
EPUB on the other hand has all of the above. It offers DRM (actually the Reader/App that interacts with it offers it but that is a different story) ... It comes with the backing of all major publishers ... It has multiple sales channels (very real web shops selling books in this format) and we might find some other advantages.
And what?:
Let's start with some basic business reasoning:
Big business comes either thru implementation of basic economics principles (like productivity, repetability, reputation, ...) or thru straight innovation. Both EPUB and HTML are digital formats so implementing the basic economic principles comes by default.
If we talk about production you might even see some advantages for HTML. I know that for sure and anybody who was involved in the production of EPUB files knows also that it is not a straight job and you do not have ready made tools and you don't know for sure how will it be displayed on the end user screen and some other aspects that make your life miserable. It is much cheaper to produce straight HTML files than a simple EPUB. No need to explain to much but we can give it a try in the comments if you like. In this perspective you can say that HTML helps you keep some of your hard earned money in your pocket and this is very good business any day.
So we still have innovation. This is again related with what you do with the format not what the format offers you. You can build great things with both formats but let's be serious ... when you have a very open, clear and well understood "jack of all trades" format like HTML and an open and shiny but also very much enforced and a "Goliath like" format ... what will you consider to be the best choice for the base of your next big publishing product? May be you will not chose HTML for that because it looks so much "light" but you will most probably have a hard time comming with a really innovative product enclosed by the limits imposed by EPUB.
You can call it a draw also but realistically speaking EPUB was made as a business tool and it does not live up to it's expectations. If a business is not a straight winner that are more chances that it will be a flop in the end. It might not be the case always but in most cases it is.

Some conclusions before you get bored?

If we keep the same line and of logic HTML looks like a more rough approach. Something like a draft manuscript in comparison with the hardcover published book. I can agree on this, but is that in any way a disadvantage? In this frugal society does anyone think that the hardcover will make the difference on the long run? People today are starting to question the necessity to own "harder" things like the cars. In 20 years if not less who will own a car in the developed world when the option of using a shared vehicle (or just asking for one to come to you) will be so much more appealing. How many members of that society will buy paper books and keep them like a treasure when they do not own a car and may be not even the house?
Don't get me wrong. I have lead and ink in my blood for the generations of printers in my family and I am looking to buy a letterpress in the near future but that will not change the future of the printed books.
No Starship Enterprise will carry any printed books ... except may be ... for curiosity.

So ... going back to the business side of the problem ... shall you go with EPUB or HTML?

Neither of them is a guarantee for success but if I am going to put my money on this I will go with HTML any day.
It gives you freedom to innovate. It lets you encapsulate the content in any kind of business concept and distribution channel you might like to go ... It makes me feel light and nimble and able to build something that will go beyound what it was already created before. This is what business is about.
Enjoy.

Postgres first steps on Ubuntu

Long story short: I was deploying one of my platforms on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 16.04.
As usual I start by installing Apache, Mod Python, my preferred editor (Geany), copy the Python files in the right place and here we reach a more complex step ... getting the database up.

Actually it is not complex but there are some things that you have to remember. If you don't do it in the correct order you might loose some time getting it right and this just happened to me yesterday so this morning I decided to write this post. Why? Because everywhere I look on the web the script is bloated with stuff that is not needed.

Here we are:

# Open terminal and install PostgreSQL as following:

sudo apt-get install postgresql libpq-dev postgresql-client postgresql-client-common

# Open pg_hba.conf  to see if everything is OK.
# Your current PostgreSQL version might be different (mine is 9.5 as you can see)
# please see yours and change the path bellow accordingly
sudo nano /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/pg_hba.conf

# You should see the following line immediately after the long comments at the beginning:
local   all             postgres                          peer

# if different please make it look with the example given, save the file (CTRL+O) and exit nano (CTRL+X)
# restart the service (not needed if you did not changed the file)
sudo service postgresql restart

# Enter PostgreSQL cursor
sudo -u postgres psql

# Now you are at the helm and can start doing the actual interesting stuff
# Get control over postgres user ... you will need it :)
ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'password1';


# Create your custom user
CREATE USER my_user;
ALTER USER my_user PASSWORD 'password2';
# This one depends on what you need to do with your user
ALTER USER my_user WITH SUPERUSER;

# Create the database
CREATE DATABASE my_database;
GRANT ALL privileges ON DATABASE my_database TO my_user; 

# Now you can exit postgres command line and add pgadmin3 to do the rest of the stuff using a GUI
sudo apt-get install pgadmin3

Enjoy :)

Free PDF/A validation

And finally there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
Remember the days where all you can do in terms of validating PDF files was to use PitStop?
Then some of us who had to do with PDF/A realized that this was not enough. And here Callas entered the scene. Then Acrobat followed and may be you considered that it was finally done.
There were interesting times but let's be fair ... it is not done until the fat lady sings and those days the fat lady is something else than a big name company. PDF/A is an open format and there shall be at least one way to validate it using free software. It is not about socialism (I am also producing commercial tools) but about the free services that (archives, libraries and NGO's) that have to comply with this format but had no tools to do it.
So ... for anybody that has to validate PDF/A documents using free tools check veraPDF (http://verapdf.org/home/). Some well spent EU money :-)

Enjoy it.

Hyphens & Dashes

Great resource on hyphens and dashes. I can't think of anything more but who knows. Suggestions are welcome :-)

Kerning play

Found this on the web and enjoyed a lot:
http://type.method.ac/#
It was really fun, to see how you compare your kerning abilities with the professionals. Well I presume the actual comparison is done against the results of a kerning algorithm ... At least this is what I would do.
If I think a little I'll say that I am not that happy to be compared and loose to an algorithm but hey ... it happened to other much bigger than me :)

To tag or not to tag ... choices in digital clasification of items

A couple of days ago I had a discusion regarding the options available for organising items in a system.
Initially the system had followed the traditional way of using a tree and attaching item to the tree branches. It worked ok but new times give new ideeas and the tagging concept was put on the table.
Nothing new ... a lot of flame wars betwen the tagging fans and the rest of the world. Everyone thinks he has the answer.
Is there really an answer?
Is there really a choice?

If you think a litle .... you will see ... there is no real choice.
I think that it is more like a matter of understanding the concept of organising things, how we do it and how we visualize things.
We are naturally organising phisical things ... books, underwear, CD's, and so on.
We are used to put those things in physical repositoryes ... a box, a drawer, on a shelf etc
Those physical items and the physical repositories we use for them are right there at hand .. one book existing on that specific shelf ... one CD siting in that specific box.
There is one instace of the book and one instance of the shelf in the same place and the same time.
We make at any one time a choice to store the item in one specific place clearly identified.
When you go digital things change.
Now you work with files or with records in a database.
You can easily create a new instance of the digital item or even smarter you can use links to have the same item in different places at the same time. Wow .. that's really diferent.
The fact is that we humans are very stuborn and prefer to use concepts that are already in place. Against the usual thinking we are not very adaptable.
In order to manage things we first created the ideea of the tree ... each file was attached to a branch and we were happy with that.
We know that with a physical item this is the way to do it. Everybody considered the ideea to attach a file to multiple folders and subfolders on your disk drive as stupid and here we were ... with limited options of using a digital repository.
And here is how we had the hyerarchical way of organising digital item ... and it was usefull for organising documents based on a taxonomy.

Then somebody said that this is not flexible enough becouse it did not let us attach the item to multiple branches at the same time and a great new ideea was imported ... most probably from the library world ... let's attach to each item a number of tags that describe it in all details.
And we created the tagging system of organising electronic things and it was usefull when you needed to know what subjects a web article was covering.

Then somebody came up and said that if we use tags we cant organise the items in a hyerarchical way so we have to come back to the tree ... but he wants also the flexibility of the tags .... and here we have a mixed system.

Does it make sense for you to consider that an evolution?
From a technical point of view nothing stop a programer display the hyerarchy of the tree in a tagged interface and viceversa. Tags or trees they are the same ... you either atach the item to a property (the tree branches) or atach the property (tags) to the item. Saying that this is different is like saying that 2 + 3 is bigger than 3 + 2.

I wil not say that this is the definitive article on that subject. It will be to easy. I just hope that somebody out there will get the ideea and realise that you just change the interface and have the advantages of the other system.

The only matter in discusion is to take a closser look at your taxonomy ... this is the real issue. Is the taxonomy that you intended to use for tagging different in any way than the classes defined in the tree?


Have a good day ... and only deal with great taxonomies :)

Ebooks in Europe, US and everywhere

I am from Europe and I am proud of that.
The printed book came up here, the radio, the web ...  Skype started here too.
It is not the fact that we invent things here ... it is just the fact that we take something that actually existed before and we put meaning in it.

What eBooks have to do with this?
If you looks at the world market for ebooks you will see that something does not really works.
In US the eBook market become a really important piece of the puzzle. You have to publish in order to have your content on those shiny iPad's, Kindle's and Nook's. But is this really publishing or is it something else.
How many of those readers of eBooks on iPad's, Kindle's and Nook's are really readers?
How many of them are reading for the pleasure of reading and how many are reading just because this new toy that "was bought 'cause everybody does it" has to be used for something.

I am not criticizing the wave of nice to have gadgets. The technology is really helpful and I am earning my daily living from it. The fact that people buy those tablets and readers it is actually a good thing because in the end they will really use them for something and all of us will benefit from it.

What I am criticizing is the fact that the ebook as it is right now it is not a real book and has no power to win real readers. A real reader buys a reading product and he enjoys the product and the use of that product.

When we read on a tablet or any reading device we enjoy the device not so much the book.
What is the relation between this and the Europe invention's portofolio.

Well ... I hope it has.
The eBook of today it is like the print before Gutenberg. It was invented before but it was not actually used.
The US citizens are open to new things. That's good for them and for the market they are living in. In Europe things are different.
I've just read a story today that was saying that in Russia the black market for eBooks is covering 100 000 titles. The legal market offers just 60 000 titles. Russia is not really a reference for Europe but it makes my point in the fact that there are readers but not buyers of ebooks.

It is not the about paying for something when you can take it for free. It is the fact that a lot of people do not see value in those books.
Let me give you a hint to support this concept of "no value".
A large part of my work is related with the are of publishing services. In this business I deal with lots of publishers who want to have the books converted in EPUB or kindle format ... the money ... peanuts.
For peanuts money you get .... well ... peanuts. That's what they get back from most suppliers and that's what the reader is supposed to buy.

May be not all readers are wiling to pay real money for peanuts related books.
May be this is the reason that European readers are not that much into eBooks.
Let's hope that somewhere not far into the future somebody with the same logic will manage to come up with an idea that will make the books real products. I have my reasons to think he will be from Europe.

Chocochoix

Not really related with the publishing business but an interesting idea anyway.
A long time buddy sent me the final product of a start-up that he envisioned for the last 12 months and now became real.
He is involved in advertising and his usual projects are production related ... customized campaigns, gifts, guest books and everything related. He thought that it will be a nice idea to come up with a product that is already destined to be customized and the product of choice was chocolate.
You can find out about his project following the link.
Hope you will enjoy the idea as much as I enjoy the chocolate :)

How many pages in a book

Just found a very interesting statement about the recommended book size:
 “A book should be like a woman’s skirt—long enough to cover the subject but short enough to keep it interesting.”

Anything more than that does not worth mentioned :).

Quark Xpress file stamp ... how to recognize file version

I am more than sure that you already know that you can recognize a quark file by looking at the beginning of the file with a notepad or other text editor.

Anyway, for anybody that needs to refresh this info here are the rules:

1. If the string starts contains "PR3" this is a Mac file
2. If contains a "II" this is a Windows file
3. If the version code is "?" this is an Xpress 3.x file
4. If the version code is "A" this is an Xpress 4.x file
5. If the version code is "B" this is an Xpress 5.x file
6. If the version code is "C" this is an Xpress 6.x file
7. If the version code is "A" this is an Xpress 7.x file

Hope that this little spinet will save you a couple of minutes.
Enjoy.

Apple textbooks and EPUB 3 vs. EPUB 2

It took some time to get back with a new post. May be the fact that nothing really interesting happens should be considered a reason.
Well .. actually things happen but are any of those things really revolutionary?
The last few days I was bombarded with information about the Apple textbook initiative. This really looks revolutionary but it is not. It is just a company that has enough power to try to disrupt what everybody thinks that it has to be changed. On the other hand they are trying to much to secure the revenue from this. This is too visible to alow the program to be revolutionary. They are just flexing some muscle.
On the other hand I can't say I don't appreciate the effort. At least they do something. This is not somethig to be said about anything in the commercial or open source / public area.

To be fair I did not even bothered to look for details about the format. I suppose they decided to do what it takes to have something viable and this is what they should. If you care too much about the standards nothing new will get in front. The format is just a matter of strategy ... Tim Cook is good at executing things and I'm sure it has the strategy. Considering the fact that they havea product on the market they definitely have also a vision .... whether this vision is correctly targeted with the strategy and aligned with the market capacity to absorb something new is another thing to be seen.

The apple textbooks offer text wrap around objects, multimedia content and .. and actually that's all we can say about them.

If we look at the features that EPUB 3 bring on, I don't see a good reason for them to depart too much from the standard:

Feature	EPUB 2	EPUB  3	Functionality
CSS3 support	No	Yes	Better control over line break, hyphenation etc.
Multiple style sheets	No	Yes	Supports the ability to include multiple style sheets allowing for improved layout control
Embedded fonts	No	Yes	Allow fonts to be delivered along with the EPUB file.
SVG support	No	Yes	Bring on the vector graphic functionality to EPUB area. It was strange not to have something like that in a pure electronic publication.
epub: type	No	Yes	Support for semantic meaning
epub: trigger	No	Yes	Support for creation of  user interfaces for controlling multimedia objects.
XHTML 5 support	No	Yes	Inherits most of the definitions of semantics, structure and processing behaviours from HTML5
MathML	No	Yes	Direct embedding of MathML supported ... enables rendering of mathematics content as text instead of images
Scripting	No	Yes	Support for scripted content, ie interactivity, using JavaScript language
Audio&Video	No	Yes	Inherits support for HTML5 rich media elements

Apple had anything at hand in the standard. May be they just played with the implementation. This remains to be seen.
Wish you all the best.

How long the filename can be?

A friend asked me a very simple question.
And lucky me I had a computer in front to check my answer before telling him something stupid.
The question was: "I am on a Windows 7 machine. And it looks like I am not able to put my files in a deep subfolder. How many characters are allowed in a Windows 7 path?".
My first thought was to say: "around 32k". Before saying I've checked the info and it looks I was wrong.
The 32k is ok for the filesystem but the operating system is a different story. According to MSDN

"In the Windows API (with some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters."

This is definitely something to keep in mind when you work with lots of files folders and data in general.

Not so much about publishing but ...

Asked about what industry I serve the answer is always "information industry". One of the aspects involved in this is programing, development of web applications and so on. In fact all of them are formatting, processing or distributing information.
I do a lot of my projects in Python and one thing that I've faced several times was the classic file upload.

Here it is the smallest snippet of Python code I use for that:

input type="file" name="selectedfile"
input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Upload"

upload_dir = "c:/"
fileitem = request.file('selectedfile')
name=fileitem.filename[string.rfind(fileitem.filename,'\\'):]
fout = file(str(upload_dir+name), 'wb')
while 1:
  chunk = fileitem.file.read(1000)
  if not chunk: break

fout.write (chunk)
fout.close()

I've looked over the web for something like that and all solutions looked like incomplete and not that direct.
Hope you will find it useful.

The better eBook

Yesterday I wrote about making an ebook from an art book. It was like a call for ideas. And here it is one sample of that. An article struck me right this morning: Future of publishing: Reinventing the concept of the book
It is a pleasure to see that somebody understand the real use of the interactivity in the books life.
I'll try to search for more products like that and post them here. Would be an interesting journey.

Make an ebook of that

The news that draw my attention this time is about a special book. I is something like an art book for chiefs. You can find it here.
I bet it is a delight to turn a pages of a book like that. On the other hand I wonder something very simple. Are we able to put such a feeling into an ebook?
I'll start the answer to that using another question: What is that thing that makes an art book?

If you read the article you understand some of the aspects:
- Special support (art-quality paper and a kitchen-proof plastic-coated manual)
- Very good design (most cookbooks are very good at that)
- True workmanship (50 people participate to this project for as long as 5 years)

I think I've already answered the main question.
I'm not worried about the support. You just have to think about a case enhancement for one of the leading slates on the market. Take an iPad for example, put it in a nice leather cover and here you have the support. Shiny, and very luxurious.
What about the rest? Well the rest is the same old story. Designing an ebook is like doing the same thing for a good book. You just have more freedom to use not only good typography and nice images and lots of free space but also new media and smart features to surprise the reader.
Depending on the features you want you can create an entire app to serve as a book or if you want to have it cross platform create it as a PDF using all the clever things the format provides.
Actually if you sell the device with the book already loaded you might find that the production costs are lower than the paper version.
Here we are again with the same old question: Why nobody tries to create good looking ebooks? Or may be I don't know about them? Please be so kind and give me a sign if you know about any.

Protected or not ... The PDF story

I definitely don't want to start a flame war regarding the DRM capabilities of the PDF format or of any of the asociated solutions. This is the year of the ebook so the inevitable happened. A friend asked me to give him some options to chose from in order to publish his books in PDF format and have at least minimal protection for it.
This was a trigger for an interesting ride. Interesting because I realized that in order to have a winner you have to define the most important features.

I am at least a little technical inclined and I understand the concept of features, benefits and advantages from a technical standpoint. On the other hand I am not the owner of the content and I don't intend to use such a solution at least for the short-medium term.
Given this situation, how do I select the best DRM solution for PDF? The answer is ... I can't select it.
I can continue of course by listing here long tables with features bet let's be fair. Who will read them?
Instead I will just give you my Top 3 DRM solutions for PDF protection and list some aspects that I consider relevant when I chose them.

Here they are:

Top 3 DRM solutions for PDF protection

1. LockLizard PDF Security: http://www.locklizard.com/pdf_security.htm
2. Vitrium ProtectedPDF: http://www.protectedpdf.com/
3. FileOpen Toolkit: http://www.fileopen.com/products/fileopen-toolkit/


Now the reason for the positioning of each of those suppliers/products:

Locklizard has a very easy to understand business proposal. The price is there on the website and you know what you buy. You start at 2495 USD per year or a 4995 USD for a perpetual licence.

Vitium ProtectedPDF looks like a more complete document protection solution. At first sight it is cheaper too at a 1200 USD per year price tag. There is an issue that minimize those advantages. The licensing scheme was created in such a way that it sound like "Hey, we are here to take your money not to give you a solution". May be it is just me but I don't like that. On the other hand If you want to start small and don't expect to distribute many document to many readers then Vitrium has definitely a leg start becouse of it's low price.

FileOpen Toolkit it is ... how should I say? It is a framework that offers you a lot of flexibility. That comes with a price. They don't give us an estimate of costs. You don;t know how much It will cost you to create that book selling machine of you dream. Of course, we can always ask but when it comes with software licenses + some development and integration costs we can be sure the price tag is not very low. Anyway it worth keeping an eye on them. Who knows what the future will offer us.

Hope that you will find this post useful. It is not the definitive guide you probably expect to find but it gives you a lead. I wish you all the best in your own research and hey .. if you find some usefull information on the subject you can always come back and make sugestions here.

Google eBook device? May be sooner than expected. Hope so.

After the disappointing launch of the Nexus S, who by the way looks very dull, a news cached my eyes (see it here). Google buys eBook Technologies.
For whom is not aware of, eBook Technologies is the company that continues the legacy of the defunct Gemstar ebook effort. Yes it's thru, somebody still sells those good old REB devices (renamed ETI-2 ... you can see it http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/EBookwise-1150). The litle one especially is a better reading tool than most if not all of the current one. It has good battery, decent screen and fills very well the hand.
As a sideline, a book has to feel god  when you grab it. I was disusing with a friend about a new collection of books published by a newspaper (yes I know, the world is turning on it's head), and compared the feeling of those books with an older collection, published 30 years ago or so. The old ones are heavier and it's fells nicer when you grab it, hold it and turn the pages. That's the true book feeling. The ebook producers should take notice.
Anyway, coupling this devices with the recently launched Google ebook store (http://books.google.com/ebooks) it looks like there is something in the gun. I'm sorry for Apple and Kindle but if Google is doing it's homework well they will have a run for their money. The iPad is not at all an ebook reader (don't mess with me on that ... please try reading one month on it until you've lost the whaaaaa factor and get back here) and Kindle is just an improvised one (if you get out the ePaper screen, there is nothing to remember about it).

I'll be patient. Hope Google will surprise me and do a good move on that front.

eBook design

At least it happened. Somebody tells the truth: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/01/ebook-design-conversion-quality.html
The best thing that can happen in the ebook world is to begin working on the design side of the page. It is really strange the fact that so many good publishers that have good looking books in print avoid doing the same thing on the electronic side.
Wake up please.
Just converting to EPUB is not enough. You have to put something else in that file to make it a readable book. A page means typesetting, spaces and proportions. If you put also some video and sound you have to be more than a simple designer ... better be a director.
Enjoy reading the article.

Library with ... no books

The title sounds strange so first thing first, please read here: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/july/enginbooks-072610.html
Now think again. what happened there it's logical. What is the role of the library in fact. Storing the book is definitely not an object of a library ... more of an archive. The library has to put you in contact with the information. How is doing that it's a matter of creativity.
And a librarian has to be creative.
Good job Stanford.

ePub ebook WYSIWYG editor

I know, sounds unreal but finally happened.

Somebody ... Thank you Strahinja! ... finaly did it and now we have a working and truly a very useful ePub ebook editor.

You can find the project and download the package from: http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ 

What's more:

• You can edit directly the packaged file
• It helps you edit the syles
• You have also an image viewer showing all the images included in the book
• There is an metadata editor in the Tools menu
• A TOC editor is found in the Tools menu as well

There is also a manual if you are the kind of person who reads manuals.

It looks nice as well:

There is not much more to say. It is a nice piece of software that is simply doing the job.

Enjoy