While printed books surely offer unparalleled haptics, smell and decoration, there are some situations where e-books are just are good enough. That’s why our team developed a feature that was missing so far from Wikipedia’s Book Creator: Standard compliant (EPUB) e-book export. Owners of a e-book readers will probably appreciate the difference this makes compared to the PDF export: With EPUB you are able to reflow and resize the content of your e-book to your own liking.
An introduction to EPUB export
The news were broken earlier this week on the Wikimedia Foundation Blog. Next to some traditional media like CNN, NBCNEWS the news were broadly re-published and commented by various tech magazines like The Verge, Life Hacker or Gizmodo. Wired sticked to its 5 reasons why e-books aren’t there yet and cluelessly ignored the news, while some mobile and e-book centered mags, welcomed the addition enthusiastically. Even here in Germany the news were spread by some of the most popular IT news sites like Heise and Golem (even twice). We weren't expecting this at all and are very happy about the warm response for this new feature.
Behind the scenes:
brainbot technologies - expert in remix publishing
The software was developed by brainbot technologies, the company behind the PediaPress service. brainbot technologies builds software and services for the transforming publishing industry. Our fields of expertise are topics like e-books, multi-channel publishing, print-on-demand, integration of community content as well as content remixing, bundling and un-bundling. So, if you would like to benefit from more than five years of experience in creating and operating a worldwide on-demand printing and e-book service for a top ten website like Wikipedia, or if you would just like to invite us for a drink (e.g. at the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair): Feel free to contact us.
