4 posts tagged ePub
Enter Bookle — a straightforward, elegant EPUB reader for Mac OS X that maintains your library of EPUBs, available now from the Mac App Store for $9.99. Bookle 1.0 is intentionally simple, since Peter and I wanted to get something out quickly and then react to requests from users, but it has all the core features needed to read DRM-free EPUBs.
As an author of books delivered in a DRM free ePub format, this looks nifty. I also like that they have released just enough to allow for customers to decide what features get added in the future.
Bookle costs only $9.99, and it’s available from the Mac App Store.
I’m glad to see an ePub reader with a great UI hit the Mac market. I thought Apple’s education announcement last month would include an iBooks for desktops, but sadly it did not.
A lot of people seemed upset with iBooks Author’s EULA after Apple’s announcement of the program. Basically, it gives content creators the ability to distribute free books in just about any way they’d like, but specifies paid books are only available though the iBooks store. The author of this article brings up some good points:
Folks are calling the software “Author” but its real name is “iBooks Author”. That kind of sums it up. This is software designed to help you author books for iBooks.
Apple isn’t giving us a new piece of software to create enhanced eBooks. It’s giving us an easy way to create great looking iBooks for sale in the iBooks store.
The author also points out that while the EULA limits your rights to sell iBooks through other avenues, it does not claim any ownership over the actual content of your work.
In addition, if you want to give your book away you can use Apple’s tools to produce a book that you distribute any way you want. I don’t have those rights when I write for any other publisher.
This article suggests Apple is set to unveil a “Garage Band for e-books” on Thursday, which I would love to see happen. The article doesn’t mention it, but I’d also like to see a version of iBooks for the desktop.
PugPig is HTML5/CSS3 publishing platform. This one is not free, but it does look like it has some more professional features over similar, open-source projects such as Baker.
[Check out the framework here] (http://pugpig.com/).
