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.
no subject
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.