In a somewhat related vein, I’m especially interested in the direction and progress of the DE version for the Sony Reader. Either directly or by leaning on Sony, you’d do well to offer heavier fonts, at least as an option, so the E Ink screen is easier to read in dim light. Your thoughts on this?

An aside: the newer Reader is a considerable improvement over the old one in the contrast area, but it’s still not the same as an LCD in that regard.

Thanks!
David

I still would like to see Adobe post a document that lists exactly which parts of the OPS spec that DE supports currently and perhaps when we can expect the rest of the spec to be supported.

The article posted at the following address mentions a few things that DE does not support, but the article doesn’t seem to be officially from Adobe. I assume the author either had some inside knowledge or used trial and error to determine what didn’t work (as I am doing).
http://www.hxa7241.org/articles/content/epub-guide_hxa7241_2007.html

Your suggestions/ctiticizms all make sense. In terms of drop caps, I’d need to see the code.

Digital Editions is slower than it could be, but 8 seconds is certainly way too slow. By chance, are you trying to format your book as a single gigantic XHTML file? If so, break it up into small chapters - that should help performace a lot.

In general, questions for Adobe are better go to http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/ - you are really lucky that I looked at this entry again.

Peter

Is there a document that spells out exactly what subset of the OPS spec that Digital Editions supports?. This would help quite a bit. I have been using trial and error to see what worked and what didn’t.

I have had two problems so far. One is related to rendering and the other to the DE interface.

First, using CSS to create drop caps works, but the positioning of the initial letter and the succeding lines isn’t correct. The drop caps display correctly in IE6, Firefox 2 and the Lector plugin.

Second, there needs to be a “Back” button or other means to return from a hyperlink jump. I want to hyperlink a word, which jumps to an entry in a glossary. This works, but then I have no way to return to where I was reading. Every method of implementing “Back” functionallity that I have tried returns me to the start of the document, which is not good. Hyperlinking every glossary word to reverse jump is not only needlessly cumbersome, but doesn’t work if more than one word in the text is linked to the same glossary entry.

Not exactly related to the above, but to DE overall, is how slow it is. Opening an epub ebook, paging to a new chapter (when using separate files for each chapter) take a very noticeable time. When clicking on a hyperlink, it takes 8-10 seconds to actually jump to the target. Something is wrong here, when these things take so long on a modern P4 computer with 1GB of RAM. I have done these type of things on old, much slower PDAs, without noticeable delay.

One last interface suggestion: give us some way to change the program colors. That dark grey on black may look cool, but it isn’t very easy to see.

None of this is intended as critisism, but is given as customer feedback, in the hope that DE will improve.

You can quote me to Greg on this.

Peter Sorotokin

Digital Editions lead engineer

Adobe Systems Inc.

I am writing an article on ebooks, and .epub, but one main concern is over whether the DRM could actually hold the format back from a consumer point of view.

Could, for example, the big software and publishing houses hijack this format and use it to increase revenues from ebooks?

Cheers

http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Default.htm

Thanks, Jon, and other contributors to the IDPF “standards” (hopefully).

Regarding Adobe’s “extensions” in Digital Editions (DE), it is my understanding that any conforming EPUB will render in DE according to the requirements of the IDPF specs, and does not need to include any “extensions” to properly render.

Now, if DE does not properly render ordinary EPUB’s (those without any Adobe extensions), then I’d like to know (and I do plan to experiment with this soon.) Tamas, do you have reason to believe this is the case? If so, what are the specific extensions required to make an EPUB look decent in DE?

Btw, most of the EPUB’s that the major publishers will produce will be done by commercial conversion houses, and at least for the conversion houses I’ve talked with, they will not use InDesign to generate the EPUB Publications.

I understand what you are saying but I disagree.
The de-facto implementation of the IDPF standard is Adobe’s Digital Editions but to really get the useful capabilities of it you need to use Adobe’s creation tool the reason being that they extended the specification in their implementation but did not document these extensions - at least not for the public.

IDPF/epub is all about preparing Adobe to survive in a post-paper world where the electronic representation of text on paper (PDF) will no longer be meaningful. Kudos for Adobe for realizing this and taking steps… but it’s not really an “open standard” then, is it?

In the future, we’ll work on improving the overall look of these epub files and would also like to add a “custom epub” feature on the website, where anyone will be able to easily customize the CSS and layout of the book.

Fortunately there are a lot of people adept at composing css.

what I can’t figure out is what table support means. OPS requires table support, but Sony Reader and Mobipocket offer little if any support for it.

—–

Jon, we’re all waiting Your article would be very helpful, although I would prefer someone wrote a simple tool to handle much of the manual formatting for me.

EPUB is simply a zip file that contains an OPS Publication. In turn, an OPS Publication is simply a file set containing one or more XHTML 1.1 documents (representing the ebook content), an XML file called the “Package” (which contains metadata, a table of contents, and other optional stuff), along with optional CSS style sheets and PNG/JPG images.

An OPS Publication is not that much different from a standards-conforming web site, for gosh sakes!

I use a plain text editor to produce OPS Publications. Others may wish to use some tool to create the XHTML 1.1 document(s) and the Package.

On the other side of the coin, if Opera and/or Firefox so choose, they could quite quickly add a module to their browsers to render EPUB Publications. I’ve actually approached Håkon Lie at Opera about this possibility.

My Lordy, I really do need to write the “EPUB Demystified” article that’s been burning in my mind for the last few weeks. All the misconceptions floating around about EPUB, especially David Moynihan’s article, which definitely need to be cleared up.

Btw, for those who wonder who I am, I’m one of the principal technical contributors to the three IDPF standards which underly EPUB, so I do know a little bit about the EPUB open standard.