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Say goodbye to dusty store rooms full of unsold books!

Digital publishing, or electronic publishing, is the process by which text and images are sent to electronic media. The growth of digital publishing has been powered by shrinking costs and greater online access. Basically, it is cheaper than ever before to publish professional work, and to make it available to a wide range of audiences, thus opening new income streams. (read more)

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E-books

E-books are essentially equivalent to printed books, only in digital form. The content can be read directly from a computer or via specifically designed hardware called e-readers. Preparing content for publication as an e-book depends upon the medium through which it will be read, but a popular format is EPUB.
EPUB is a free and open e-book standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum. Books that use this format can be read on a wide variety of devices. The latest version of EPUB is version 3 (EPUB 3), which offers an even greater potential for published work. EPUB 3 documents can include rich media and interactivity, a wider choice of languages, and improved metadata, where publishers and authors can attach pertinent information relating to the origin of the content. Version 3 also supports CSS3, an additional markup language which caters for typography in different languages and characters. It is important to bear in mind, however, that EPUB 3-ready devices and software are only recently starting to appear. You may therefore wish to offer your publication in an older version of EPUB for a broad audience, and offer a special EPUB 3 variant for those devices that can take advantage of the new developments.

International Digital Publishing Forum – EPUB 3 specifications
http://idpf.org/epub/30

There are many software tools which enable the production of EPUB files from source documents in various formats, including Microsoft Word, OpenOffice and HTML (the Web's markup language). EPUB is itself a markup language, in that the content of an EPUB file is ‘marked up’ with formats and other information. This also makes it quite easy to learn, should you be interested in knowing how to make EPUB files from scratch, or how to refine existing files. (read more)

Featured article archive

• Danger: Contains Books by Simon Worthington from a recent book I Read Where I Am publishing to coincide with the conference The Unbound Book, May 2011, Amsterdam.

Peer research

We have an ongoing research area for Publishing, below are a list of recent active areas and annoucements, feel free to join the Wiki and contribute.

• Main publishing research area
• All pages in the category publishing

Featured research

How to make an eBook

Using Mute's eBook conversion service we are documenting how you can make an eBook from a variety of sources; Quark, Indesign, Word files and Google docs (read more)

Hot topics

• Publishing to the iBookstore
• Progressive Publishing System - eBook conversion service made by Mute in partnership with LShift and MiniBar ventures and supported by the TSB.
• What's New in EPUB3?
• Publishing Magazines and Blogs to Kindle
  • In order to publish magazines on kindle you need to submit a request to become a “beta publisher.” You can do that here. According to the website application approval for “beta publisher” usually happens within 24 hours.
• We are building up a global list of POD printers
  • List of POD printers
  • Please add more!