Using ePUB

The Bad News Gets Worse

My dislike of Kindle (A.K.A. Mobipocket) is only about its presentation limitations. I guess that comes from being a high volume producer and having to deliver the bad news about the Mobi limitations to publishers every day. And now apparently Amazon announce that their non-forward compatible format will be available on the non-backwardly compatible Windows 7.0. That all seems such a move in the right direction! Especially if we really want to make compelling e-books that are not poor cousins of print but rather a new publishing genre. So many exciting publishing opportunities crushed by Mobi-mediocrity and Win-unwind.

When Amazon announces support for e-pub, that will be something to announce (of course if they ever do they wont include SVG support and will use some quirky rendering engine). E-pub may not be perfect, but it is about a zillion light years ahead of the '90s crap being shoved into our lives as innovation.

AZARDI Update

We have been receiving a lot of feedback about AZARDI recently, most of it complimentary and helpful, and some installation problems.

I just need to make the announcement that we are a little hung up on resources at present. AZARDI is a "part time" development. We are planning a more aggressive development program next year.

Meanwhile I would like to thank the over 20,000 people who have downloaded AZARDI for their support (OK, it's not many - but we get excited with one!) and comments. Also the over 250,000 ePub book downloads of titles this year is exciting considering the limited number of titles we have on offer. There is obviously a demand. We will be adding to this shortly with some exciting new "beyond Gutenberg" additions that are under preparation.

Infogrid Pacific is a small development and services company first and foremost, and our support to the community is made with our personal excess capacity. However we are committed and passionate about the ePub format and new content production and distribution paradigms. Stay tuned. 

Kindle. The Curse of E-Books

With Amazon releasing Kindle internationally, e-book strategies have been set back a decade and once more the e-book production quality bar has been moved into the mud. Mediocre e-books of all types can now be purchased internationally by all, and probably publishers and e-book aficionados will be grateful to Amazon.

I am a bit sad about this, and was always glad that the unavailability of the Kindle internationally, and restrictive international distribution deals, constrained the Kindle STD to American shores. Now we all get the opportunity to catch it.

Fortunately e-book standards have come a long way since 1999. E-pub has virtually no restrictions on layout and styling, within the constraints of reflow, which means some pretty neat books can be created.

There is even an emerging e-book designer skill set developing, we like to think we are in the vanguard here. There are some very exciting trade books being produced, suitable for on-the-go reading and reference and sometimes, with some content, the e-book is more valuable to the user than the print book.

Amazon - Sirloin to Mincemeat

Of course in its market wind-up Amazon did the con job and said to publishers send in your e-pubs and we will automatically convert them to Kindle - we have the technology! its supports the IDPF 1.0 and IDPF 2.0 epub format.

Now for those in the know, there have been many complaints about the nasty conversions Mobigen does. Realistically that is the nature of a free conversion utility. You get exactly what you pay for.  If e-pub books are made well, they will never convert to Mobipocket (aka Kindle) using the lousy convertor. And they shouldn't for a lot of reasons.

Azardi R2-2 Minor Feature Update

We have uploaded a new release for AZARDI (2009-06-02). This is a minor feature change release.

When using edit mode, this release saves the content files in the zip package as deflate rather than store by default (except the mimetype file which is always stored). This has the dual benefit of reducing the ePub file size and overcoming a minor bug in the Sony devices that expects zips to be deflate compressed and therefore miscalculates resource.

Download AZARDI 2-2 from here.

Source code will be available on the Version History page in approximately seven days.

ePub and everything else

ePub was just one of the outputs for Book: The Sequel, produced using IGP:FLIP and output to print and e-book formats simultaneously at Book Expo America. Read the whole story on the Publishing with XML Blog.

Azardi R2-1 Update

There has been a minor update to AZARDI, which may be useful for some users.

The default application paths can now be changed to any location Windows disk location.

To do this go to the application installation directory and find the file config.txt. Here you will see three path statements for the library, cache and reports directory. Edit these for your own requirements. The application creates the directories in the cache and reports location so you only have to provide the main path.

If you don't have a problem with the earlier fixed installation path, there is no real reason to upgrade until a later full feature update. This small usability change has been made at the request of a number of users (including me!).

eScape Linux Version Available

We have just announced the release of the Linux (deb) version of eScape over on the Publishing with XML Weblog.

AZARDI- Release 2. Now it Reads, Checks, Edits, Repackages

If you are serious about creating excellent ePubs with full specification conformance; or if you are a publishing professional looking for more quality control over ePubs delivered; then the new release of AZARDI is probably a must have tool on you desktop (if you have a Windows OS that is!). The new release has both the promised Reference mode ePub Package Checker, and a bonus Component Editor built right in.You can read more about it and download it here.

The one tool lets you read, validate and edit/repackage your ePubs. With a little interface familiarity, it takes just seconds to make major changes and corrections.

Been there. Done that. Not!

After more than a decade of digitizing and processing everything: trade, academic and education books, preservation archive content; in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic,  Malay, Thai and a few other languages, you start to think you have seen it all.

We have had enough "One chapter" books for these not to be considered a rarity, but just last week we got our first ONE PARAGRAPH book. Yep! No kidding. 485KB - one paragraph, one book. Forget about test cases, we didn't even think it was needed (and hopefully wont be needed again).

Azardi - ePub Reference Version

The next version of AZARDI is due out shortly - this week hopefully. The "big thing" is this version will have a Reference mode. In Reference mode AZARDI will give an ePub Wedge Report (Pass/Fail) by component, plus a detailed printable HTML report for audit, or wallpaper or whatever. So now you can validate ePubs right on your desktop while you are making them, and then continue to read the file.

This is a more transparent report than epubCheck insofar as it tells you what is being checked. It is also a little educational. It has no bias to devices or usage (eg. We don't care if the files are too big for ADE or Sony devices, but the file detail report can be used for device applicability assessment).

The tests AZARDI will run and report are listed below. These tests are for ePub in this version, Daisy is still a way off - if ever. Any comments on the check points are most welcome.