This post from August 2008 contains some my thinking at the time about how to make ebook reading and shopping experiences more social. I’m surprised that none of it has happened yet; even the limited lending feature of the B&N Nook doesn’t really...

InDesign CS4 is one of the most popular tools for creating ePubs, but the range of options it provides when exporting can confound many users. While I’m not a wizened InDesign expert, I have accumulated a set of choices for the various options that...

Languages aren’t just written right-to-left or left-to-right, of course. They can also be written top-to-bottom, as in Chinese. How can you indicate that a block of text should be rendered vertically rather than horizontally? In ePub, you can’t. I...

Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left (RTL) rather than left-to-right (LTR), as in European languages. When dealing with only one of those scripts at a time, computers generally handle the directionality well by just falling...

The three ePub specifications (OPF, OPS, and OCF) include a lot of detail on ebook metadata and markup, but do not include a technique for describing covers. Despite this omission (a fix is being discussed), there are some widely adopted approaches for...