Digital Editions

Adobe is pleased to announce, in conjunction with Sony, that Adobe Digital
Editions now supports the Sony Reader 505. On July 24th, Sony posted
the firmware updater to their website. Now people owning the Sony 505
can upgrade their Sony 505 and use it with Digital Editions.

The updater is available here:

http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=PRS505

Be sure to get the full update. You need to upgrade your Sony EBook
Library (EBL) FIRST, then should automatically download and run the
updater for your 505. Doing the steps this way ensures that you have
the right drivers for Digital Editions and the Sony Reader to
communicates with. Once you have done this, Digital Editions will
automatically recognize the Sony Reader and it will appear as a new
bookshelf (or up to 3 if you have smart cards inserted) in your library.

You will need to authorize your Sony Reader in order to use it with
protected books that you have bought or borrowed online. Note that this
also means that you will need to authorize Digital Editions if you have
not already done so. Digital Editions will walk you through these steps
with a wizard.

Once you have authorized your Reader you can drag and drop books back
and forth between your PC and your Reader. You can even read books off
of your friend's Reader (though you cannot transfer books from his
Reader to your PC or vice versa).

The full text of the Sony press release is here:

http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/e_bo
ok/release/36245.html

The new Sony Reader supports display of PDF in both normal and "reflowed" modes. In the reflowed modes, the reader takes the original content and reflows it at a larger font size. The result is surprisingly good. Most books such as novels reflow almost perfectly (though the odd word will be split or two words run together). But you will find that the more complex the content, the less satisfactory the result.

EPUB is also supported by the Sony Reader and there is lots of EPUB content appearing, both public domain like feedbooks.com and elsewhere. Most of the major publishers have also promised to support EPUB and there is a lot of content in the pipeline.

This is an exciting time and we are looking forward to being part of it.

Posted by Ric Wright at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're using the DocBook XSL distribution you've probably already seen that DocBook XSL 1.74.0 has been released with ePub support. Note that the 1.74.0 release is an experimental release, and is made available for testing and evaluation. See the release notes for a note about DocBook dot-0 releases.

Continue reading "DocBook XSL - ePub target is ready for wider testing" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Digital Editions 1.5 now released
(May 14, 2008)
Adobe has updated its popular Digital Editions software, a lightweight, rich Internet application for reading, acquiring and organizing digital books and other publications. Version 1.5 features enhanced DRM flexibility through named activation so that users can move content across platforms and mobile devices using an Adobe ID. In addition, ADE 1.5 is localized in French and German and has support for Mac® OSX 10.5 (Leopard). Adobe Digital Editions supports both PDF and IDPF EPUB, a standard format designed to reflow for the screens of mobile reading devices, which has gained broad acceptance among book publishers.

Adobe Digital Editions has over 1 million installations since the June 2007 launch. The new software will be automatically provided to users who have installed Digital Editions 1.0, and is available at the product site .

Adobe has also released an updated Digital Editions installer and launcher for distributors of eBooks. The installer is used to detect and install the latest version of ADE for retail or library customers of Adobe eBooks. The software is free to use and available with implementation instructions .

Posted by Ric Wright at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

While the Best Practices document (over in the Adobe Developer Connection) had the recommendation that books be broken up into chapters, it wasn't clear when you needed to break a document up further, or when a book was small enough so that one XHTML file was sufficient.

With the recent update to the document (version 1.0.2) we've given you information on how big the chapters can be.

Continue reading "File size limits in Digital Editions" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

We've created a Developer Center area for Digital Publishing. What does this mean? Well, it's a lot of technical information around EPUB, Adobe Digital Editions, and ADEPT. Of particular interest today is also the "Best Practices" Guide. Those best practices will help publishers create EPUBs that work great across a whole spectrum of devices.

Anyway, the Best Practices, and lots of other useful information can be found over at the Developer Center:
Digital Publishing

Posted by Paul Norton at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)