E-books - The bane and the future - E-books are rapidly becoming the future for certain areas of the publishing industry and Kerrypress has no intention of falling behind in this particular technology. The industry has yet to settle to a standard but the most universal of these seems to be the EPUB standard which is native to the Sony Reader but can also be imported into the Amazon Kindle.

Click here to download the Kerrypress Story in epub format

The Sony Reader utility for Windows can be downloaded here

The e-book section of this website will be added to very soon, so please keep looking back for more information.

E-Books features and hardware tables

Features available in the various formats

List of Hardware and which formats it supports

The most popular formats and a brief description of each

Mobipocket

The Mobipocket e-book format based on the Open eBook standard using XHTML can include JavaScript and frames. It also supports native SQL queries to be used with embedded databases. There is a corresponding e-book reader. A free e-book of the German Wikipedia has been published in Mobipocket format.

The Mobipocket Reader has a home page library. Readers can add blank pages in any part of a book and add free-hand drawings. Annotations — highlights, bookmarks, corrections, notes, and drawings — can be applied, organized, and recalled from a single location. Mobipocket Reader has electronic bookmarks, and a built-in dictionary

The reader has a full screen mode for reading and support for many PDAs, Communicators, and Smartphones. Mobipocket products support most Windows, Symbian, BlackBerry and Palm operating systems. On Linux and Macintosh applications like Okular and FBReader can be used to read non-encrypted files.

The Amazon Kindle's AZW format is basically just the Mobipocket format with a slightly different serial number scheme (it uses an asterisk instead of a Dollar sign).

Mobipocket is working on an .epub to .mobi converter called mobigen.

International Digital EPUB

The .epub or OEBPS format is an open standard for eBooks created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It combines three IDPF open standards:

• Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0, which describes the content markup (either XHTML or Daisy DTBook)
• Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0, which describes the structure of an .epub in XML
• OEBPS Container Format (OCF) 1.0, which bundles files together (as a renamed ZIP file)

Currently, the format can be read by the Sony Reader, BeBook, Adobe Digital Editions, Lexcycle Stanza, BookGlutton, AZARDI, Aldiko and WordPlayer on Android and the Mozilla Firefox add-on OpenBerg Lector. Several other reader software programs are currently implementing support for the format, such as dotReader, FBReader, Mobipocket, uBook and Okular. Another software .epub reader, Lucidor, is in beta. On October 20, 2009, Barnes & Noble announced their Nook Reader will support the epub format.

In 2008 BookGlutton launched a server-side HTML-to-EPUB converter.

Adobe Digital Edition uses .epub format for its e-books, with DRM protection provided through their proprietary ADEPT mechanism. The recently developed INEPT framework and scripts have been reverse-engineered to circumvent this DRM system.

Amazon Kindle

With the launch of the Kindle eBook reader, Amazon.com created the AZW format. It is based on the Mobipocket standard, with a slightly different serial number scheme (it uses an asterisk instead of a Dollar sign) and its own DRM formatting. Because the eBooks bought on the Kindle are delivered wirelessly over EvDO (the system is called Whispernet by Amazon), the user does not see the AZW files during the download process.

Microsoft LIT

DRM-protected LIT files are only readable in the proprietary Microsoft Reader program, as the .LIT format, otherwise similar to Microsoft's CHM format, includes Digital Rights Management features. Other third party readers, such as Lexcycle Stanza, can read unprotected LIT files. There are also tools such as Convert Lit, which can convert .lit files to HTML files or OEBPS files.

The Microsoft Reader uses patented ClearType display technology. In Reader navigation works with a keyboard, mouse, stylus, or through electronic bookmarks. The Catalogue Library records reader books in a personalized "home page", and books are displayed with ClearType to improve readability. A user can add annotations and notes to any page, create large-print e-books with a single command, or create free-form drawings on the reader pages. A built-in dictionary allows the user to look up words.

Desktop Author

Desktop Author is an electronic publishing suite that allows creation of digital web books with virtual turning pages. Digital web books of any publication type can be written in this format, including brochures, e-books, digital photo albums, e-cards, digital diaries, online resumes, quizzes, exams, tests, forms and surveys. DesktopAuthor packages the e-book into a ".dnl" or ".exe" book. Each can be a single, plain stand-alone executable file which does not require any other programs to view it. DNL files can be viewed inside a web browser or stand-alone via the DNL Reader.

DNL format is an e-Book format, one which replicates the real life alternative, namely page turning Books. The DNL e-Book is developed by DNAML Pty Limited an Australian company established in 1999. A DNL e-Book can be produced using DeskTop Author or DeskTop Communicator.

Portable Document (PDF)

A file format created by Adobe Systems, initially to provide a standard form for storing and editing printed publishable documents. The format derives from PostScript, but without language features like loops, and with added support for features like compression and passwords. Because PDF documents can easily be viewed and printed by users on a variety of computer platforms, they are very common on the World Wide Web. The specification of the format is available without charge from Adobe.

PDF files typically contain brochures, product manuals, magazine articles — up to entire books, as they can embed fonts, images, and other documents. A PDF file contains one or more zoomable page images.

Since the format is designed to reproduce page images, the text traditionally could not be re-flowed to fit the screen width or size. As a result PDF files designed for printing on standard paper sizes are less easily viewed on screens with limited size or resolution, such as those found on mobile phones and PDAs. Adobe has addressed this by adding a re-flow facility to its Acrobat Reader software, but for this to work the document must be marked for re-flowing at creation, which means existing PDF documents will not benefit unless they are tagged and resaved. The Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) version of Adobe Acrobat will automatically attempt to tag a PDF for reflow during the synchronization process using an installed plugin to Active Sync. However, this tagging process will not work on most locked or password protected PDF documents. It also doesn't work at present (2009-10) on the Windows Mobile Device Center (Active Syncs Successor) as found in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This limits automatic tagging support during synchronization to Windows XP/2000.

Multiple products support creating and tagging PDF files, such as Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator, OpenOffice.org, and FOP, and several programming libraries. Acrobat Reader (now simply called Adobe Reader) is Adobe's product used to view PDF files, with third party viewers such as xpdf also available. Mac OS X has built-in PDF support, both for creation as part of the printing system and for display using the built-in Preview application.

Later versions of the specification add support for forms, comments, hypertext links, and even interactive elements such as buttons for forms entry and for triggering sound and video. Such features may not be supported by older or third-party viewers and some are not transferrable to print.

PDF files are supported on the following e-book readers: iRex iLiad, iRex DR1000, Sony Reader, Bookeen Cybook, Foxit eSlick and Amazon Kindle DX.

Plain text files

E-books in plain text exist and are very small in size. For example, the Bible is about 4 MB. The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only text files (unlike most other file types) to be interchanged and readable on Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, and other systems. These differ in their preferred line ending convention and their interpretation of values outside the ASCII range (their character encoding).

Hypertext Markup Language

HTML is the markup language used for most web pages. E-books using HTML can be read using a Web browser. The specifications to the format are available without charge from the W3C.

As markup language, HTML adds especially marked meta elements to otherwise plain text encoded using character sets like ASCII or UTF-8. As such suitably formatted files can be, and sometimes are, generated by hand using a plain text editor or programmer's editor. Many HTML generator applications exist to ease this process and often require less intricate knowledge of the format details involved.

HTML is not a particularly efficient format to store information, requiring more storage space for a given work than many other formats, even if images are not used to illustrate it. The format does not describe pages and has no facility to store multiple things (images, etc.) in a single file. Often e-books in this format will store one chapter per file.

Open Electronic Package

OPF is an XML-based e-book format created by E-Book Systems.

TomeRaider

The TomeRaider e-book format is a proprietary format. There are versions of TomeRaider for Windows, Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC), Palm, Symbian and more. Several Wikipedias are available as TomeRaider files with all articles unabridged, some even with nearly all images. Capabilities of the TomeRaider3 ebook reader vary considerably per platform: the Windows and Windows Mobile editions support full HTML and CSS. The Palm edition supports limited HTML (e.g., no tables, no fonts), and CSS support is missing. For Symbian there is only the older TomeRaider2 format, which does not render images or offer category search facilities. Despite these differences any TomeRaider ebook can be browsed on all supported platforms. The Tomeraider website claims to have over 4000 ebooks available, including free versions of the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia.

Arghos Diffusion

The ARG format is an XML-based proprietary format developed by the French firm Arghos Diffusion. ARG files use a proprietary DRM and encryption method and are readable only in the Arghos Player. It supports various input formats for text, audio or video, such as PDF, WMA, MP3, WMV, and allows multiple interactive functions such as bookmarking, advanced plain-text searching, dynamic text highlighting, etc.

Other Services at Kerrypress

Kerrypress has extensive typesetting facilities ranging from Desk Top Publishing, which we use for small brochures and simple books, through to the XyEnterprise "XML Professional Publisher" dedicated batch process typesetting system for larger projects and for those requiring extensive use of embedded commands for automatic generation of running heads or footnotes.

Please take the XyEnterpise XPP tour to appreciate the power of the XPP system.

The addition of a full XML/SGML facility within the Xyenterprise product allows us to run in native XML or SGML without any data conversion. This has resulted in very competitive prices for processing XML and SGML titles.

We also have years of experience of Looseleaf typesetting, especially in Tax and Law subjects, and are currently handling many projects of over 8,000 pages each.

CD/DVD rom production

We also use our expertise to supply copies of the data for the books we typeset for use in CD/DVD Rom formats, and using our full Data Conversion facilities we can supply this data in any form the customer requires.

Typesetting capacity

Our capacity currently stands at approx 600,000 pages per year, and our customers have become used to an unsurpassed level of accuracy, combined with a commitment to keeping to very tight schedules within a very competitive pricing structure.

Data Security

Being heavily involved in Legal and Tax typesetting, we appreciate the necessity for absolute security and integrity of data. To this end all data is updated at every stage of production, and backups of this data are made on a daily basis to CD Rom, DVD-RW and to DAT tape, with these backups removed to secure premises away from our main computers.

In this way, we know that we shall never be able to lose more than a few hours work, and even in the event of a major fire or system crash, we could still maintain the urgent deadlines demanded by our customers.

Data conversion facilities

Our data conversion facilities are second to none. We are able to take data from any system in common use in the last 15 years, and convert it either into our own coding system for typesetting, or into any other Word Processing or DTP format for return to the customer.

Challenge us!!!

We have never yet been asked to convert files we cannot read, you may be the first, but we doubt it!