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

2010-07-01: AZARDI is no longer in development or support by Infogrid Pacific.
It can still be downloaded

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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.