Does the ultimate epub wiki already exist?

[faintdreams]

I know mobileread is a great resource and forum for all things ereader, and ther are several free epub catalogues / distributors on the web, but is there a single place that lists them all?

I recently bought the Sony reader touch - thanks for everyones' advice and input on that btw - and I have come to the conclusion that epub books display the best on it and it also seems to be becoming the defacto format for e-books., (at least until the reading devices default to an affordable A4 form factor, then I'm guessing that pdf will become the norm.)


So if there were an epub wiki would you use it or contribute to it? I don't want to build one if one already exists, but I think that wikia.com would be a good (and open and more importantly FREE) place to house one.

When I say epub wiki I mean place that
a) Describes what an epub file actually *is*
b) has tutorials on how to get your file format of choice into epub format
c) has links to free epub files with a brief description of item linked to.

I just want a single repository which allows you to find epubs  and epub information easily!
(Wikia won't allow hosing of the files directly and that way lies a can of worms anyway).

I should mention that I'm only talking about legal and open source or creative commons  and / or copyright-free works here, not pirated materials.

So what do yo think of the idea?

Does it not already exist because no one would use it / contribute to it or just because it's a bad idea ?

Comments

[elf]

I love the idea of an epub wiki!

It doesn't exist because epubs are *new*, and nobody's put together a wiki for them specifically. Two years ago, I'd never heard of epub; I was reading ereader PDB, which was duking it out with Mobipocket for industry dominance. Before that, Plucker was the format of choice for ebook geeks--at least, for those who didn't have an EReader for .imp ebooks.

Part of the reason there's no wiki is probably 'cos the previous ebook formats were all proprietary and people couldn't put together huge swaths of useful public info about them, and if the company that supported it ever vanished (embiid.com), the format went away as well.

Epub's likely to become the main format because it's open-source & based on HTML, which has plenty of support. It's possible that PDF will become the norm, but not likely unless publishers start putting out multiple PDF editions for different screen sizes for the same book. Which I don't see happening. They're not even setting the metadata on their PDFs now; I don't think they're going to deal with multiple page layouts.

Re: Wiki--I'd use it, and would like to imagine I'd contribute to it (at least as much as "scrounge up useful links & info elsewhere"). Would really love to see a "how to build an epub file from scratch" tutorial, and something about "CSS for ebook readers--what they accept & what they ignore."

I suspect that "links to free epubs" should probably be "links to sites with free epubs." All of Feedbooks is available in epub. And huge sections of Gutenberg. Individually-formatted epubs that are free to distribute can be hosted at Mobileread.

Would love to see (& help assemble) a list of places to get non-DRM'd epubs, free or not. (And tutorial on how to edit non-DRM'd epubs to the formatting you like.)

Would also be nice to have reviews of epub publishers, noting which ones are doing good formatting & which ones aren't bothering.

[zats_clear]

I'd be thrilled if someone would just tell me how to take a word doc and change smart quotes to dumb quotes so I can save the doc to PDF and convert to EPub (I have ways of doing that) and NOT have ?? everywhere the stinkin' smart quotes were.

::ahem::

Yes, I'd love it if there were an EPub wiki!

[amalthia]

I made a Ebook Formatting Tutorial with epub in mind.

I don't think I covered smart quotes...

[cyprinella]

It's been a while since I've done that, but I believe what I ended up having to do was turn smart quotes off in Word, and then do find and replace through the document.

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