Just a short note that I’ve added a new page to Ebook Friendly. This time it’s a glossary of terms most often used to describe ebooks, ereaders and digital publishing. It’s strange that such useful, simple glossaries related to ebooks are not easy to find on the web. And if you can eventually find them, they are not easy to go through.
I wanted to keep explanations as simple as possible – and tell what those terms mean to the reader than going into technical details.
If you’re an ebook newbie, I’d love to hear your opinion: is this glossary simple and clear enough? If not, I’ll rewrite it.
eink should probably be a _specific_ type of epaper, as opposed to a “special” type of epaper.
I would cull the alternate spellings a bit e.g. eink (e-ink, eInk).
“You can change font size and typeface.” is not epub-specific. It should be listed under Mobipocket as well (preferably specifying that this is in contrast with PDF), or not at all.
self-publishing: “extremely popular” is a bit partial. Perhaps make it a comparitive – “has become much more popular”? I’m not sure that “growth of social media” really helps make the point either. If you really need to mention social media, then you’d need to define it, no?
“unprotected” — I think “DRM-free” is more common, informally. I can’t remember seeing “unprotected” on a retail site — it doesn’t sound very encouraging!
I would introduce Kindle as “a brand of _ereaders”_. It’s less confusing, and it doesn’t stop you mentioning that there’s also a tablet version.
You say ADE is free; you need to say the same for Calibre.
For Calibre and ADE, it would be nice to provide links.
If you can fix the CSS, that would be nice too. (Hint: look at the bottom of the screen – then press “page down”).
Alan, many thanks for the feedback, will edit the glossary to improve it according to your suggestions.