On Mar 29, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Phillip Smith wrote:
> Slightly off-topic... but here's a great little article on eBook formats from our fellow Bricoleurs at The Virginia Quarterly Review:
> http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2010/03/25/doing-ebooks-wrong/
Thanks. :) I'm working on a follow-up about Apple's failure in providing an e-book reader for periodicals. Right now, most major publications are developing stand-alone apps for reading their magazines/newspapers, which is both dumb and necessary. Dumb because the notion of buying and installing an individual application for every publication that you want to read so much as a single issue of is just goofy. Necessary because, for subscribable publications, there's really not a better option. So there's a huge hole in the iPad market right now. Of course, given that the iPad doesn't come out until Saturday, it's possible that this will be remedied shortly.
I've been doing a lot of research here into producing an e-book version of each issue of VQR (we've outsourced the development of one for our April 1 issue), and it's surprising how wrongly many outlets are doing it. The ePub format is straightforward enough that I think we can produce a pretty good ePub straight out of Bricolage. It may not be good enough to provide to customers at that point, but I think it could reduce the conversion work by about 90%.
Is anybody else producing e-books with Bricolage?
Best,
Waldo
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