eBooks and Publishing areas to focus on PDF

BinaryThing has announced its move to concentrate exclusively on PDF software, which means going forward, our focus on eBooks and electronic publishing coverage will specifically relate to Adobe Acrobat and PDF software. To consolidate our resources in one place, we'll be publishing all our Acrobat & PDF news and articles at Planet PDF, and we'll eventually phase out Planet eBook. We have now moved the eBook Community archive across to Planet PDF.

For eBook readers, we have just started our free PDF eBooks service at Planet PDF, giving away free classics by popular authors such as Twain, Joyce, Dickens, Kafka, Wells, and Dostoevsky, to name but a few. There's still lots of content on Planet eBooks. Below you'll find an assortment of some of the most interesting articles to appear on this site. Thanks for stopping by!

ARTS PDF launches new product to create PDF documents

BinaryThing's ARTS PDF company is pleased to announce the launch of the first true Adobe Acrobat alternative, Nitro PDF Professional -- a fully-featured PDF creation and editing product designed and priced specifically for the business user.

Index of US v Sklyarov and DMCA-related articles

Our index and time line of all Planet eBook & Planet PDF articles, as well as all the other coverage online since Planet eBook broke the story of ElcomSoft developer Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest over violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).



eBook Articles

E Ink unveils displays for phones and handhelds

E Ink has announced the development of world's thinnest active-matrix displays and recently demonstrated the technology at the Society for Information Display Symposium, Seminar and Exhibition, in Boston, Massachusetts. The company has shown two prototype displays, one (1.6 inch diagonal, 80 ppi) for small devices like cell phones, the other (240x160 pixel, 96ppi) for slightly larger handheld devices like PDAs and eBook readers. More...

A look at the new Palm eBook Studio software

Last week Palm Digital Media announced the release of its new Palm eBook Studio publishing software for personal use -- that is for people to make Palm Reader compatible eBooks for them or their friends devices but not for them to sell. This week Planet eBook took a bit of a look at the software to see how it performed. More...

The Second Gutenberg - Interview with Michael Hart

Planet eBook contributor Sam Vaknin this week speaks to the Michael S. Hart, considered by many to be the father of eBooks and eTexts. Hart gained this moniker as a result of his decision in 1971 to establish Project Gutenberg and through his tireless work running a volunteer-based organization that strives to make more and more content available to anyone in the world having internet access. Vaknin talks with Hart on why he does it and how he deals with hurdles like copyright extensions that fetter the growth of the public domain. More...

E(merging) Books

"A novel re-definition through experimentation of the classical format of the book is emerging. Consider the now defunct BookTailor. It used to sell its book customization software mainly to travel agents - but such software is likely to conquer other niches (such as the legal and medical professions). It allows users to select bits and pieces from a library of eBooks, combine them into a totally new tome and print and bind the latter on demand," begins Sam Vaknin's latest contribution. More...

Increasing sales by offering free eBooks

"Overall, an author is far more likely to increase sales than to lose them. Or, to put it more accurately, exposure in the Library will generate more sales than it will lose," says science fiction author Eric Flint. Through his experience, after setting up a free library at Baen Books, he has charted how sales of his books have continued to grow and maintain very high sell-through rates. The library offers visitors freely downloadable HTML, LIT (Microsoft Reader) and RTF format version, as well as versions for devices like Palm, WinCE, Psion and Rocket/REB devices. The method works, says Eric, because it is just like a traditional library: it encourages readers to explore new authors before asking them to pay. More...