New Zealand gets its first 1000 ebooks – in EPUB
By Paul Biba
This is from eReport:
While commercial publishers work on their project to bring 1000 Great New Zealand ebooks to market, the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) has been quietly working to convert its collection to free downloadable ebooks — 1150 of them available right now.
The NZETC is afilliated to Victoria University in Wellington and has been busy digitising works of historical and literary interest for several years.
According to Project Manager Jason Darwin, they had been following the ebook market’s development closely and decided the time was right to jump in and help. They made the excellent decision to convert their collection to the ePub format.
NZETC had already been storing their texts in an XML format for online viewing so it was a relatively straightforward step to convert them to the ePub format using an automated system, says Darwin.
Like any automated system, they won’t have the finesse of a carefully hand-crafted book but they are perfectly fine and readable. I’ve just downloaded My Life by Jean Batten to my iPod Touch. It’s great to have such a wealth of New Zealand material now to enjoy.
Epub is the same format that commercial New Zealand publishers are planning to use so it greatly expands the available market here. And there are some real classic gems.
Leave a Reply