Let The ePub Love Begin

Since the Amazon Kindle eBook Reader was released I loved the idea of one, I've been waiting for the right product at the right price supporting the right formats before I jumped in. I have no intention of buying a device which only does proprietary formats locked to one vendor or another. I am not going to build a collection of eBooks tied to the manufacturer of my reader, so I've been doing some research. I've found ePub to be initially baffling, but after some initial reading found it to be a brilliant, standards compliant format.

The ePub format is a renamed zip file with what amounts to a website (html pages with css styling) inside.with a few extras. The next question was how do some publishers get a navigable table of contents list. On a PC bringing up a dialogue box to jump to a page number, or scrolling down, down, down down isn't too bad, but on an eBook reader it's a non starter. For this I'm going to do a screencast tutorial at a later date.

For now I'm proud to release my Star Wars Expanded Universe short story Jump in .ePub format. This story was intended to be submitted and hopefully accepted as part of the Expanded Universe. I never got round to doing that, so it's fan fiction. The book is complete, free of charge and released under the Creative Commons licence. Feel free to redistribute it fully intact and give attributions. It is DRM free, as I am 100% against the concept of DRM.

Since it's in ePub format, ideally it'll look better on an eBook reader, but if you want to read it on your PC and have no software to open ePub then try the EPUB Reader addon for Firefox. It's what I use to test and tweak my eBook creation before it gets sync'd to the device.

Suffice to say I've had a couple of very interesting days exploring ePub, so in classic novel fashion:

To be continued...