Thursday, February 18, 2010

The epub book format supported by the iPad

A short chat on ABC Radio about the epub book format which seems to have emerged as the standard format for electronic books.



Listen out for the first use of the term "nerd herd" on ABC radio.

4 comments:

  1. ePub has the potential to be open but publishers and platform vendors still insist on DRM (digital rights management). ePub supports vendor specific DRM formats.

    Apple it seems will use Fairplay on iPad which means books bought for iPad won't be readable on other devices. At this stage Kindle is the most versstile as their DRM'd format can be read on many different platforms including PCs,iPhones,Blackberry and coming soon iPad and Mac.

    So alas ePub has the potential to debabelise eBooks but only if we migrate to a universal DRM format (as seen on DVDs).

    See http://www.teleread.org/2010/02/18/adobe-confirms-apple-will-not-use-their-drm/

    ReplyDelete
  2. My hope is that the DRM is there to apease the publishers who are in a panic at the moment. Eventually it will be dropped like it mostly has with music.

    epub is relatively straight forward to implement and my hope is that we'll see lots of sites with a little epub download link for their longer articles.

    ReplyDelete
  3. How can I read kindle ebook on PC?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. Patrick, there is an application from Amazon to do this available here

    ReplyDelete