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Betting on the future of the book

Visiting London Book Fair last week, many of the stands offered ebook technology or outsourcing for legacy format conversion services. Ebooks might seem a seductive bet to the publisher looking anxiously towards the all-digital future, but I find it hard to imagine …

Current state of formats and platforms

Remember the old days when PDF was pretty much the only way to distribute content and those PDFs were read on computer screens? PDF still lives, of course, but now we’re also faced with offering content in mobi and EPUB …

What devices and formats do your customers prefer?

Most publishers create ebooks in all formats figuring it doesn’t matter whether mobi is more important than EPUB or if the content is read on an iPad more frequently than on a mobile phone. That approach means these publishers have …

High-quality PDF-to-EPUB conversion

How many times have you opened an ebook and noticed awkward hyphenations or other conversion errors? I still see this in the majority of the ebooks I buy and it’s clear these are the result of someone not paying attention …

Ebook problem areas that need standardisation

The “best price” phase of TOC NY 2013 registration is about to end. Don’t wait or you’ll end up paying more than you would today. To save even more on your registration, sign up here and use the discount code …

Christopher Schmitt and Simon St. Laurent discuss HTML5

HTML5 author Christopher Schmitt talks with O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent about why it's a great time to be a web developer.

Neat visualization of download ratios for ebook formats offered by O'Reilly

We track the ebook formats customers actually download, and from the start PDF has been the dominant choice. But as this post's associated chart shows, there's been a steady shift toward other formats.

Neat visualization of download ratios for ebook formats offered by O'Reilly

We track the ebook formats customers actually download, and from the start PDF has been the dominant choice. But as this post's associated chart shows, there's been a steady shift toward other formats.

PDFXML versus XPS versus SVG Print?

I think we have to be much smarter in how we think about standards. It is easy to think about them in terms of agreements or libraries or mandates: all planned and directed activities. But I don't think that will work in this kind of case, where there are multiple, rival technical ecosystems. They don't want to agree. They have fans who don't want to look at alternatives. And they all are probably open enough to squeeze under the rosy gate of legitimacy from a public policy view. So to get convergence we need some other strategy. I suspect that the situation with SVG Print, PDF and XPS is the same as with OOXML and ODF: the route to convergence may not happen at the level of markup harmonization at all, but instead by the support of plurality.

Printing with Flex

Printing is not really a strong point of Flex. Have you ever tried to print complex documents? Do reports always look fuzzy and take forever to actually print? On the quest to print high-quality reports with Flex I wanted to...

Running Flex Applications Within PDFs

The entire family of Adobe Acrobat 9 products feature a Flash runtime, and Flex applications can now be embedded in a PDF. You can embed an XML document into a PDF, include a Flex application that reads the XML data,...