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andym · 09-12-2007, 03:34 PM

As to ManyBooks. epub is nothing more than a fancy wrapper for xhtml. If you check out the ManyBooks iPhone download setting this already comes in a folder with an xml manifest so producing all the bits and bobs to make an epub document shouldn't be a difficult job for them. The really difficult job is getting the good-quality html/xhtml input to start with.

As far as I can work out, it will be open to different content producers and vendors to produce encrypted versions. I'm assuming that just as now you will be able to buy e-books with Mobi DRM which will work on different machines and I expect the same will be true for Digital Editions. But you won't be able to open Mobi books with Digital Editions or visa versa. I can appreciate people's reservations about being tied into the products of one company but at least the software will be available for a number of platforms so you aren't tied into one piece of hardware.

A couple of things I'm surious about and maybe someone here knows the answer:

- I find the mobipocket pagebreak tag really useful for new chapters etc. It is of course not part of xhtml. The CSS 'page-break-before' attibute only works with print stylesheets (SFAIK) is there a standard-compliant way to have page-breaks?

- html (and SFAIK) xhtml are pretty awful for formatting poetry on small screen devices (one of the standards even recommends using pre-formatted text). Mobipocket have supports a p 'align=poetry' but it's not a good solution (to put it mildly). Is there a better solution somewhere in the eBook standard (eg 'XML islands' whatever they are)?

09-12-2007, 03:34 PM	#16
andym Groupie Posts: 189 Karma: 793 Join Date: Oct 2006	As to ManyBooks. epub is nothing more than a fancy wrapper for xhtml. If you check out the ManyBooks iPhone download setting this already comes in a folder with an xml manifest so producing all the bits and bobs to make an epub document shouldn't be a difficult job for them. The really difficult job is getting the good-quality html/xhtml input to start with. As far as I can work out, it will be open to different content producers and vendors to produce encrypted versions. I'm assuming that just as now you will be able to buy e-books with Mobi DRM which will work on different machines and I expect the same will be true for Digital Editions. But you won't be able to open Mobi books with Digital Editions or visa versa. I can appreciate people's reservations about being tied into the products of one company but at least the software will be available for a number of platforms so you aren't tied into one piece of hardware. A couple of things I'm surious about and maybe someone here knows the answer: - I find the mobipocket pagebreak tag really useful for new chapters etc. It is of course not part of xhtml. The CSS 'page-break-before' attibute only works with print stylesheets (SFAIK) is there a standard-compliant way to have page-breaks? - html (and SFAIK) xhtml are pretty awful for formatting poetry on small screen devices (one of the standards even recommends using pre-formatted text). Mobipocket have supports a p 'align=poetry' but it's not a good solution (to put it mildly). Is there a better solution somewhere in the eBook standard (eg 'XML islands' whatever they are)? Last edited by andym; 09-12-2007 at 03:42 PM. Reason: (already covered by Nick B)