The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
Would you like to have your genealogy book or your society's newsletter available as an ebook? There is a large reading audience that is taking advantage of the many convenient mobile reading devices on the market now. The popularity of these devices for reading books, newspapers, and magazines continues to explode. The reading public seems to love them, and the people who publish the ebooks definitely love the low cost of publishing this way. You could be one of these.
Put into the right format, your genealogy book or your society's newsletter can be read on any of the many available ebook readers, including iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story. The "secret" is to publish the document in EPUB format. With the tools described in this article, that is easy to do.
EPUB is a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and is designed for “re-flowable” content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. Both large publishers and individuals use EPUB for distribution and sale of electronic books. There are also conversion houses that create EPUB files as a service to their customers. In all cases, the resulting EPUB files have the extension .epub.
Millions of books are already available in EPUB format. Many of the books sold by Barnes and Noble, Sony, and other electronic publishers are available today in EPUB format. In addition, all the public domain books in Google Books are available in EPUB format among others. As readers of this newsletter know, Google Books includes thousands of books of interest to genealogists.
Of course, many of the same books are also available as PDF files and can be read with many handheld ebook readers. However, the text and pictures in PDF files often do not display well on the smaller screens. In contrast, EPUB documents will display documents as "re-flowable" pages. That is, each line is word-wrapped appropriately for the size of the screen being used. EPUB documents usually do not require scrolling from side to side or even up and down in order to read the text.
EPUB books also can support DRM (digital rights management) to prevent unauthorized copying of the documents.
Software is available to read EPUB files on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers as well as on all the handheld ebook readers mentioned previously. Strangely, Amazon does not offer EPUB format on its popular Kindle ebook reader.
Millions of book are now available in EPUB format. First, many of the books sold by Barnes and Noble, Sony, and other electronic publishers are available today in EPUB format. In addition, all the public domain books in Google Books are also available in multiple formats, including EPUB. Of course, Google Books includes thousands of free books of interest to genealogists.
Many of the same books are also available as PDF files and can be read with many handheld ebook readers. However, the text and graphics of PDF files often does not display well on the smaller screens. In contrast, EPUB documents will display documents as "re-flowable" pages. That is, each line is word wrapped appropriately for the size of the screen being used. EPUB documents usually do not require scrolling from side to side in order to read the text.
EPUB books also may support DRM (digital rights management) to prevent unauthorized copying of the documents.
Creation of an EPUB document can be difficult if performed manually. However, creation of EPUB files is easy with the use of any of several software tools available today.
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