Baen Books now available in ePub/Stanza format
Alerted by a correspondent I went over to Baen Books and checked out their free ebooks. I haven’t done this in a while, and he was indeed correct that all of their free ebooks are now available in “ePub/Stanza” format. I don’t know about the format of their Webscriptions, however, as I can’t get to the download page. The use of the Stanza name is interesting. Does this mean that we’ll see a Stanza catalog coming from Baen soon?
Our correspondent, Jim Lester also had this interesting tidbit to impart: they are using Calibre to convert the books. Here’s what Jim says:
For them using Calibre, you can verify this by looking in metadata.opf of the ePub files, I’ve only done a small sampling of the books I’ve downloaded, but the metadata section includes several elements and attributes that are indicitave of them using Calibre for the conversion, with the most obvious being:
Baen is also working on a Stanza catalog, which will presumably become an OpenPub catalog and therefore accessible by any ebook application.
Yes, it does mean that. I even mentioned it a few days ago in my review of the new version of Stanza.
There’s a Stanza catalog link posted in Baen’s Bar right now, in fact. The only reason I haven’t mirrored the link here is that Arnold the webmaster doesn’t feel the catalog is quite ready yet, and the Bar is a sort of “semi-private” place. I don’t want to deluge it with a whole bunch of non-Barflies until Arnold is ready for them.
As it stands right now, you can download into Stanza books you’ve already purchased, or Free Library books, just as you can with BookShelf. What you can’t do yet is buy books through Stanza like you can from the Stanza Store. Arnold is still working on adding that.
I’ll do a story about it when it’s ready…unless some other TeleRead writer scoops me. (Darnit, I should at least have done a post about them being in ePub format, as much as I’d been asking for that. Bleah.)
Sorry for scooping you Chris, I was busy downloading ePub version of all of my purchased books, and thought I’d share.
Paul, looks like the XML tags got left out of my quote.
Calibre is listed as the value of a contributor element. Good advertisement for Kovid, who does good work.
One other note:
I see you can download .epub, or .epub zipped.
Rather redundant, no?