epub recommendations in epub format, please?

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Hello,

As an implementer, I would be happy to get a nice epub file for each epub recommendation.

Thanks!

Alain Couthures
W3C Invited Expert
http://www.agencexml.com
Bordeaux, France

Have you had a look at the EPUB samples project?

There are many free ebooks available there, and the site includes a feature matrix for discovering which books contain which features.

Thanks for this link.
I tested with Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre and a Kobo reader and the rendering is not excellent: the IDPF logo appears on top of every page at bizarre location and the links don't work...

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Is this a specific book you're having issues with or something else?

Yes, I am referring to http://epub-samples.googlecode.com/files/epub30-spec-20120228.epub. It works but this is not the "good looking" book I wish I had.

Ah, okay, I see now. I opened that file and Readium and didn't see anything wrong with it, so wasn't sure if you were looking at something else.

I think Readium is in error, although I suppose it's arguable how background images should be applied in reflowable contexts. The logo has been set as a background image in the CSS, so if you treat each new page as a new document and re-apply the background image you get what you're seeing. That appears to be the approach ADE takes, where Readium just applies the background image once.

I'll see what I can do to fix the file.

Hi, what Matt pointed to was a compilation of vetted EPUB 3 samples. Adobe Digital Editions and Calibre do not presently support EPUB 3. No equivalent set of vetted samples exists for EPUB 2 which is in the process of becoming obsolete (although since EPUB 3 reading systems have a conformance requirement to also support EPUB 2 I would expect this to ultimately be part of the related project to develop an EPUB reading system conformance test suite - see http://idpf.org/news/epub-reading-system-conformance-test-suite-project-... .

There is substantial backwards compatibility between EPUB 2 and 3 but these samples were prepared specifically to showcase EPUB 3 features not for graceful degradation on EPUB 2 reading systems. 

Kobo supports EPUB 3 but their support has rapidly evolved until quite recently and you should make sure you are testing on the latest app / device with latest firmware upgrade. I'm not sure whether their oldest devices can be upgraded. 

The BISG EPUB 3 support grid is a resource for understanding which EPUB 3 features are supported on which reading systems, particularly helpful during this period of transition between versions. It's at: http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-12-152-epub-30-support-grid.php .

 

 

I did a tweak to float the logo to the right instead of relying on background image position, but as Bill notes there's only so much we can do to ensure consistency across incomplete 3.0 implementations (or older 2.0 ones). What I've done does not substantially change the original intent, but even just doing a quick skim in ADE 2.0 I was seeing other issues for which we simply couldn't do anything (example blocks appear to have all whitespace compacted, for example, making them largely illegible).

The markup tweak I did may not work in other older reading systems, either, but should degrade a little better. I'd strongly recommend using Readium, if you can.

Unfortunately there aren't many readers for EPUB3, for desktop I'd recommend the readium reader, this is an open source reader from IDPF that is actually an extension to google chrome and therefore works on all platform that chrome works.
As for tablets, iPad iBooks has pretty good support but still not complete.
For android, sorry for the self advertising but to my knowledge the first one to fully support EPUB3 on Android is Helicon books Gyan reader: http://www.heliconbooks.com/article/reader

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