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Ebooks and Epublishing 
The Ebook
Ebook Readers
Open Ebook (OEB) Specification
Copyright Protection
Electronic Publishing
Resources and Professional Organizations
 
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Resources and Professional Organizations

1stBooks Library, in business since 1997, publishes new and previously published books in Adobe's PDF format and sometimes also in paper. They claim to have over 3000 ebooks available. Many are free, and download as text (.txt) files. A $20 membership buys a 20% discount on all titles. Unpublished authors pay a setup fee and deposit, and then receive 100% of sales until their deposit is recouped; thereafter, the royalty is 30%.

Association of Electronic Publishers is an attempt to guarantee some ethical standards and win some respectability for qualifying e-publishers.

BiblioBytes, on the Internet since 1993, provides the full text of books for free, readable in your browser. They pay royalties to their authors based on advertising revenue (each page view includes a banner ad).

EbookNet offers news and information on ebooks and ebook readers, as well as forums, a free newsletter, and free ebook downloads.

EBX Working Group, spearheaded by Glassbook, is working on a copyright protection standard for ebooks called the Electronic Book eXchange system (see the Copyright Protection section). The latest draft of the specifications, which has a lucid and useful overview, is available at their site.

The Everybook Dedicated Reader: a big, fancy, expensive, and as yet future alternative to the other ebook readers.

Fatbrain's Ematter is an online publisher of book-length and shorter documents. The documents are uploaded by authors, then encrypted in Adobe's PDF format and made available for purchase at the author's chosen price. Once downloaded, the documents can be read and printed using Adobe's Acrobat Reader (a free application), but not digitally copied. Ematter keeps 50% of each purchase. All editing and design is the responsibility of the author.

Glassbook: an emerging player in ebook reader software.

Mary Wolf's Guide to Electronic Publishers lists over 30 links to "royalty-paying, non-subsidy" e-publishers.

Netlibrary claims to have the world's largest library of ebooks. Registered users are allowed to read the books online.

The OEB Web site. The Open Ebook Authoring Group, made up of the major ebook reader manufacturers, a few large publishers, and Microsoft, among others, released the first Open Ebook Specification (OEB 1.0) on September 16, 1999. The specification is based on XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, and is intended to provide publishers and software and hardware manufactures with a standard, open, ebook format.

Open Ebook Validator. Created by Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group (STG) and NuvoMedia, maker of the Rocket Ebook, this free piece of software--currently in beta--tests documents for conformance with the Open Ebook Publication Structure Specification. The OEB standard is an attempt to standardize the format of ebooks so that they are viewable on a variety of readers.

Peanut Press is a publisher of ebooks for Palm OS and Windows CE platforms.

Project Gutenberg has been in existence since 1971. Its goal is to make public-domain literature free and accessible to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. All titles are transcribed by volunteers and made available for download in "Plain Vanilla ASCII," the most basic of file formats, readable by any word-processing program. Currently there are approximately 2000 "etexts" (books) available.

The Rocket Ebook site: Learn about this ebook reader, buy it, shop for Rocket Editions, see news and events, etc.

SoftBook homepage: learn about the SoftBook Reader, order it, find ebooks, read about the company, etc.


 

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