BooksForABuck, owned by Rob Preece, a much-valued member of the TeleRead community, has started using nonDRMed ePub by way of BookGlutton‘s free online converter.
Rob’s first ePub title is Glass Hours, Cathy Richardson Dodson’s a time travel romance, which will also be available in HTML and other common formats.
The advantage of ePub is that it’s not only nonproprietary but also will be in use as a distribution format by large publishers. And as a consumer format, too, in time—an alternative to the Tower of eBabel. Rob is helping to blaze the way. Congratulations to him and also BookGlutton’s Aaron Miller (another TeleRegular) and Travis Alber. In case you’re curious, yes, software exists to read ePub—notably, FBReader, Adobe Digital Editions and the OpenBerg Lector browser add-on. DE will soon be running on the Sony Reader.
Ahead I’ll reproduce the note that Rob wrote me. Meanwhile I’ve encouraged Rob to catch up with Aaron and Travis and see about a logo that would say "NonDRMed ePub" (perhaps there can be a contest later to give others an opportunity). No DRM to herd you into any particular vendor’s product!
Even companies such as Adobe would benefit since ePub would be more trustworthy and popular as a standard without DRM to gum it up. Let publishers be free to use DRM if they want. But I suspect the marketplace will eventually punish them, regardless of whether or not the device limit argument flies right now. DRM is an e-book sales toxin. For example, you can’t own books for real, not if the technology changes or you move on to the "wrong" kind of machine in the future and your current format(s) won’t work out.
In case you’re curious, the unofficial logo above comes from Travis. I’d suggest that both she and Aaron investigate the legalities before unleashing the "NonDRMed ePub" logo. Let’s hope that the IDPF actually embraces Travis’s work.
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Hi David,
With the beta release of the easy-to-use ePub converter over at Book Glutton, a free ePub creation tool now exists, and the (free) FBR Reader means that ePub formatted books can actually be read. The Book Glutton converter isn’t ideal in terms of formatting, but it certainly creates readable text, which is the major criterion for the novels I produce.
So, over at BooksForABuck.com, I’ve decided to add ePub to my supported file format list. I’ve added my first ePub-formatted book (a time travel romance novel entitled GLASS HOURS by Cathy Richard Dodson) today. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be working on updating my backlist.
Truthfully, I don’t anticipate any surge of sales as a result. Today, ePub is a nearly invisible blip on the ePublishing radar. Today, adding ePub simply means one more file conversion process–and one more step in change management. However, eBabel is a weapon eBook skeptics have used against us for years now–and ePub means taking a bit of ammunition away from them, and in the long term, I can even envision that ePub might make my life easier and enhance sales.
By the way–I know the ePub logo you’ve been using isn’t official. However, it’s as close as we’ve got. Who do I need to contact to get permission to use it?
Don’t know if you’re interested in posting this on TeleRead (if so, please feel free) but I thought you’d be interested as one of the two or three biggest ePub supporters in the world.
Rob Preece
Publisher, www.BooksForABuck.com
