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Comparison of EPUB Download Sites

Where to Get the Most Readable e-Books

Before I compare websites where you can download e-books in the EPUB format, I should tell you that I just got a Sony Reader Pocket Edition Silver PRS-300SC from my husband on Valentine’s Day. I’ve spent a bit less than a week with my new e-book Reader, but I’ve crammed a lot of reading and researching into the past five days. I’m pretty well versed in typography, and I have been disappointed with the readability of some of the e-books I’ve put on the Reader. Having viewed various books on the Reader, I don’t blame the Reader; I blame the formatting of some e-books. In an effort to find more readable e-book formats, or styles, I went a-searching, and these are the results of my trials.

PDF was not designed for e-books

PDF at default size (S)

First off, I found that PDFs are difficult to read on the Pocket Edition. I discovered this when I went to my local library’s digital download site and downloaded four books by Nicholas Sparks — all formatted in the same way by Warner Books in PDF. The margins were huge, the font size small, and the font face’s x-heights very small. (To oversimplify, x-height is the difference in size between capital letters and lowercase letters. Fonts with small x-heights look classy, but are not readable at smaller sizes.) These books were impossible to read at the default “small” size on the Pocket Edition. Not only that; the printer’s crop marks were visible, which made the margins even bigger since what I saw on my screen included extra margins that shouldn’t be visible to the consumer.

PDF at medium size (M)

I had to set the text on these PDF books to “medium” size to make them readable. That makes the type large enough, but it breaks the formatting. Chapter headings show up two or three pages into the chapter rather than at the beginning of it. Lines occasionally break early or, worse, words break from one line to the next.

No doubt, PDFs like these might be readable on a larger Reader, such as the Daily Edition, but I prefer the compact simplicity of the Pocket Edition, and I think digital libraries should make their digital books look good on smaller devices. Instead of offering PDFs of hard cover books, perhaps they could offer PDFs of paperbacks, because they are formatted to be more readable in small form, where you will find thinner margins and more readable fonts.

EPUB was designed for e-books

Ideally, a text should be readable on any device. I have been a proponent of device independence for years now, and I suppose I knew that PDF was not a device-independent format, but reading PDFs on a small device really made me see it. I suppose that is why the EPUB format was developed with e-book readers in mind. Unlike PDF, EPUB e-books are designed to be readable on screen as opposed to on paper. I notice that, with the EPUB format, I don’t see misplaced chapter headings or lines and words breaking up. I notice the default font faces and sizes tend to be bigger and more readable; for instance, the font sizes are a couple-to-four points larger, and the font faces may have larger x-heights.

I’ve been experimenting with several EPUB download sites this week. I also searched the web to see if there was anything written comparing EPUB download sites, but I couldn’t find anything. So here is my — albeit limited — comparison of the EPUB books I’ve downloaded from (in alphabetical order) epubBooks, Feedbooks, Google Books, the Greater Phoenix Digital Library (powered by OverDrive), The Gutenberg Project, Smashwords, and the Sony Reader Store.

All EPUBs are not created equal

When I download EPUB books from the Greater Phoenix Digital Library, which offers books from OverDrive, I don’t know what I will get from book to book. One is readable at default size while another is more readable at medium size. EPUB books from OverDrive offer the benefits of the EPUB format I listed above, but there is no standardization. Still you can get some good EPUB books. At the time of this writing, though, the selection of EPUBs is limited; there are only 653 EPUB titles while there are 15,831 PDF titles.

EPUB from Google Books

When I download EPUB books from Google Books, I notice typographical anomalies due to OCR scanning errors. (OCR stands for optical character recognition, a program through which a scanned image of text is run to convert it from a picture of text to actual text.) Due to these uncorrected OCR errors, nonsense characters may appear on the page, lines may be broken in strange places, and letters might be missing here and there. Free, yes, but not very readable. On a positive note, Google offers a way for readers to report scanning errors so they can improve Google Books for the public good.

Finding my favorite EPUBs

EPUB from Feedbooks on Reader

I actually made my greatest discovery while away from my Sony Reader. I had my Google Nexus One smart phone with me (as always) and I searched the Android Market for a good e-book reader. Being unimpressed with FBReader, I downloaded Aldiko and was blown away. Not only does it have a great user interface and even a way to download free and paid books directly in the app; it has a partnership with the best EPUB library I have found yet— Feedbooks. I downloaded an EPUB book from Feedbooks to read on my Nexus One and I loved the formatting. Very nice and clean. Interested to see how Feedbooks EPUB books would look on my Reader, I downloaded a few and put them on. Gorgeous! Almost every book I’ve downloaded from Feedbooks has the same formatting, or I should really say, style. Seeing the same style across multiple titles might bore some people, but I appreciate the beauty, dependability, and readability of the Feedbooks style. In addition to being an EPUB resource, they are a publishing platform, and they “consider that the structure of a text is very important.” It’s all about structure, baby! Not presentation. Yet, by offering EPUB books with solid structure (XML) and readable style (CSS), they make for a very nice presentation. I might even think of publishing something with them. (P.S. Feedbooks did not pay me to write a glowing review of them.)

I also discovered Smashwords through Aldiko. Like Feedbooks, it’s a place to get both free and paid e-books (in EPUB and other formats) and it’s also a publishing platform. I don’t like their site as much, though, nor do I like the style of their EPUB e-books. It seems fairly similar from book to book, but it’s not as elegant and readable on my Reader as the e-books from Feedbooks.

Classic EPUBs from the source

EPUB from Gutenberg Project

When I looked at the first pages of the EPUB books I downloaded from Feedbooks, I saw that most of the texts were actually from The Gutenberg Project. So I went to the source to see how I liked their EPUB downloads. Their downloads page for each title says the EPUB download is, at this point, “experimental,” but I found the e-books I downloaded to be just as readable and error-free as those from Feedbooks. They just didn’t have as pretty a style, in my opinion. Still, it’s not so much about style as it is about readability, for me, so I consider Gutenberg a good place to download EPUB books.

Speaking of EPUB books, there is actually a site called epubBooks, and went there to download a couple of books as well. I was surprised to find that they did not have A Room with a View or even anything by E. M. Forster, but they did have Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as did every other place I went to. I found it to be error-free, at least in the first pages I viewed, and simply styled. I don’t like their site navigation as much as others, but I still consider it a decent place to look for EPUB downloads.

A one-stop shop when you need it

The last place I went to download EPUB books, ironically, was the ~~Sony Reader Store~~ [closed March 2014]. One of the reasons I wanted a Sony Reader is because I am a cheapskate* who would rather borrow books from the library than pay for them. Unfortunately, the Sony Reader Store does not have any free books. They do, however, have two different editions of Frankenstein for 99¢ or less (and, inexplicably, some that cost even more). I don’t see any reason to pay for an electronic book in the public domain that I can download free elsewhere, but the Sony Reader Store does make for a seamless process of browsing, downloading, and installing e-books in my Sony Reader Library. It’s probably ideal for people who are not comfortable with downloading and file management, because the Reader Library application takes care of that for you when you buy books from the Sony Reader Store.

EPUB by MobileReference

For the sake of good reporting, I plunked down $1.94 for two editions of the same book— one published by Mobile Reference and the other published by B&R Samizdat Express. The publication by Mobile Reference was formatted just like all the others: flowing text in a font readable in the default “small” size on my Sony Reader Pocket Edition. The publication by B&R Samizdat Express, on the other hand, was styled with a font size that was unreadable in the small size, and it had bigger margins than any of the other editions I had downloaded.

EPUB by B&R Samizdat Express

*Actually, when I just have to have it the day it comes out, I’ll buy a book and donate it to the library after reading it. I’ve donated a lot of books to the library over the years, but mostly I just borrow nowadays. Speaking of donating, if this article helped you make some money-saving decisions, then please consider donating a dollar or more to my blog. Thanks!

February 20, 2010
My first blog post using WordPress for Android

WordPress for Android was released on February 2, and I downloaded it from the Android Market today for my Nexus One. Now I’m posting a blog entry with it. It looked like it hung just now when I tried to select Categories, but other than that, it’s pretty nifty. Oh– I just realized I just had to click the refresh button to the right of Categories and I got a list to choose from. Not bad!

February 4, 2010
Google Voice calls are NOT free!*

*For cell phone users.

Too much hype has been made about Google Voice being free. As a poor sap who just got a bill this morning for $140 *over* my regular monthly bill from T-Mobile, I can tell you that Google Voice calls are not free. Google Voice calls are calls to an intermediary phone number (in my case, one in Palm Springs) that count against your plan’s minutes. T-Mobile charged me for every minute over my “included” minutes. And I went way over my minutes because I thought that my Google Voice calls didn’t count against my minutes. Boy was I wrong.

Upon further investigation, I found that you could use Google Voice to make unlimited calls if you added your GV number to a carrier plan that allowed you to make unlimited calls to a select few numbers— plans like My Circle, Friends & Family, A-list, and MyFaves. I don’t know about other carriers, but guess what? T-Mobile doesn’t offer MyFaves anymore. So your only option for “unlimited calls” is a more expensive unlimited calling plan. And if you pay for that, then what’s the point of using Google Voice?

Google Voice provides some advantages over calls made the regular way, such as the ability to record calls (with the other party’s knowledge), the ability to send and receive SMS (not MMS) without it counting against your text limits (if you don’t already have an unlimited text plan), the ability to receive voice mails over the Internet and have them transcribed for you (as long as you don’t mind that Google is mining your messages for consumer data about you), and the ability to have both your cell phone and home phone ring when someone calls your Google Voice number. All those features may be worth it to you if you understand that Google mines every word in your phone calls, text messages, and voice mails. But as a way to save money? No, sir, no, ma’am. Google Voice calls are NOT free.

Google Voice is not a VoIP service. If you want that, get Skype. That’s what I might do now that I’ve learned my hundred-and-forty-dollar lesson.

Did this review help you? Did it save you $140? If so, would you reward the time I took to write this for you by giving me a small donation of even $1? I work hard on these blog posts and I do them without sponsorship from tech companies or advertisements. If you like, please give.

January 25, 2010
Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop

I was honored that a participant in my Vague Language (VL) workshop for ASL interpreters was moved to write this review for our local chapter of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (Arizona RID). The writer wishes to remain anonymous, but I found out who they are and got their permission to publish their review on my website. I assure you that this review was entirely unsolicited and is reprinted here in the writer’s original words. Here it is!

Hi everyone. I was able to attend the workshop this past Saturday by Daniel Greene entitled, “Just What They Said: Retaining Ambiguity When Interpreting Vague Language.” This was an excellent workshop for a number of reasons and I’m thrilled that Daniel has taken it up to present this topic because it is one thing I know I have struggled with and it hasn’t been addressed enough in regards to the work we do as interpreters. There was so much that I learned.

It was all about vague language of course which has really been brought to light, I think, by video relay interpreting but certainly applies to the work we do in education. It is a fairly new topic in linguistic studies too. It is the concept that people do use vague and unspecific language in their everyday interactions and often it is for a purpose that they are being vague. This brings up the question, do we as interpreters then clean it up and make it clear, do we interrupt the conversation to get clarification, or do we just render the message as vague as it was given? Keep in mind it might be the person’s goal to be vague.

For example: a teenager might wish to cover up the truth to avoid getting in trouble; a teacher might wish to protect a student’s feeling when giving feedback about work; a person might just be trying to be polite in their use of words; a doctor might wish to be less direct about a person’s life expectancy; a counselor might purposely need to ask an open ended question without leading the client with examples. How much of this can and should an interpreter try to clarify?

(more…)

October 3, 2009
Pros and cons of photo sharing on Facebook vs. Flickr
I’ve been uploading photos to Flickr for over three years and Facebook for over a year, and I’ve been thinking lately about what I like and dislike about each service’s photo sharing functions. Here are my thoughts on Flickr vs. Facebook’s “Photos” application.

Flickr Advantages:
- Photograph Data
- High-Resolution
- Keywords Tags
- File Hosting
- Public Access
Facebook Advantages:
- Friend Tagging
- Click-thru Albums
- Large Private User Base
- Simplicity
Flickr for Photographers; Facebook for Friends

The way I see it in a nutshell is: Flickr is for photographers; Facebook is for friends. Flickr is a photographer’s paradise. It is full of professional, artistic, high-quality photographs and — unless the photographer prohibits it — photograph data (EXIF & IPTC; i.e., aperture, shutter speed, light sensitivity or ISO speed, etc.) You can learn a lot about how certain effects are achieved by viewing the “More properties” link under the “Taken with a [Camera make-and-model]” link. Yes, of course Flickr is also for amateurs and snapshots. It’s not all art gallery stuff. But where it really shines is in the sharing of the photograph as an art form. Photographers can upload at very high resolutions, and viewers can click the “All Sizes” button above a photo (if the photographer allows it) to see the photo at higher resolutions. Higher resolution images may also be accessed by viewing Slideshows or by browsing Flickr with Cooliris.

Flickr: Open, Moderated Publishing

Another advantage of Flickr is its open, public presence on the World Wide Web (which I spelled out to emphasize the “worldwide” part). Photographers and viewers alike can tag photos with verbal keywords, which in turn allows photos to be found in keyword searches within Flickr and even within WWW searches. I have sold several photos that people found on my Flickr photostream through keyword searches. To aid in the worldwide sharing of photos, Flickr allows photographers to moderate and filter content through SafeSearch settings. This means that a photographer posting a photograph of a nude subject can flag that photo “Moderate” or “Restricted” and that photograph will only be visible to viewers who have configured their SafeSearch browsing settings to allow them to see Moderate or Restricted photos.

Flickr: Hosted, Copyright-filtered Publishing

Flickr also aids in the worldwide sharing of photos by implementing CreativeCommons labeling and filtering. If I want to restrict the use of a particular photo I post on Flickr, I can label it “all rights reserved.” But if I want to allow people to use it for non-commercial purposes as long as they don’t alter the image and as long as they give me credit, I can label it “Attribution-NoDerivs CreativeCommons.” Finally, another major benefit to photo sharing on Flickr is hosting photos on Flickr for use in web pages elsewhere, such as blogs. I have many photos in my blog, but they are all hosted on Flickr. For those of you who are less tech-savvy, that means that I upload the photo files to Flickr and the images you see on my blog are merely displayed on my blog even though the files reside on a server (file storage space) elsewhere. I also allow people to blog my photos as long as they leave the original photos on Flickr and merely embed image links in their blog pages. So again, Flickr is a great service for the storage and sharing of high-quality photographs.

Facebook’s Killer Photo App: Tagging Friends

Facebook, on the other hand, is great for sharing photos of friends with friends. Facebook has a killer feature: the ability to tag your friends in the photos they’re in. When you’re tagging photos, you just click on your friend’s face and begin typing their name in the field that pops up. Facebook auto-completes, so as soon as you see your friend’s name from the list of similar names, you click the check mark next to the name and – voila! – your friend is tagged. Clicking the tag takes you to that friend’s profile page, and on the left sidebar of their profile page, you’ll see a link that reads “Photos of ___.” Clicking on that link takes you, in turn, to a page of all the photos anyone has tagged them in. This great feature allows many different people to post photos of the same person and allows many different people to tag this person in photos, and then Facebook aggregates all these tagged photos of a certain person into one place. Cool!

Sure, you can add “Notes” to photos in Flickr, and if I’m in a photo, I can add a “Note” to the photo saying “That’s me!” and Flickr will automatically add a link to my photostream. But I can’t add a note to a photo and have it automatically link to someone else’s photostream. And not all my friends are on Flickr; in fact, most of them aren’t. [Update on October 22, 2009: Flickr just added a people-tagging feature.]

Facebook: All my friends are on it!

Which brings me to another advantage to photo sharing on Facebook: most of my friends are on it. Chances are, most of your friends are on it too. Now, I can upload a bunch of photos to Flickr and mark them “Private: Friends Only” but that only works for my friends who are on Flickr, which ain’t many! Facebook, on the other hand, is a place where I can upload photos of my friends for my friends to see.

Case in point: a little over three years ago, I took a bunch of photos of coworkers at a company picnic. I wasn’t sure they’d all want to be on the World Wide Web, so I uploaded them to Flickr, marked them “Private: Friends Only” and send invitations to every one of those coworkers to join Flickr as my friends so they could view the images. Half of them joined Flickr just so they could see the photos. Most of them didn’t leave comments, and none of them (except the two who were already using Flickr) ever used Flickr again, to my knowledge. At least I never saw any photos in their photostream. Three years later, I took a bunch of photos at an Interpreter Appreciation Dinner, and almost every single one of the people at that party was on Facebook! This made it easy to upload all the photos into an album, tag everyone in the photos, and instantly share memories of the event with not only my friends but their friends as well. Now, all the photos I tagged of those people will show up in those people’s Facebook profiles under “Photos of _____.” Yet no one in the rest of the world can see those photos. They are “private” yet they are shared and enjoyed by many friends. Major plus!

Photos on Facebook: Easy to Post, Easy to View

Oh, and Facebook is easy to use. You click on the thumbnail size of a photo to see the photo full size (which, on Facebook, is only about 600×400 or 400×600 pixels at most) and then you click on the full-size photo to see the next photo. You can keep your hand in one place, resting your palm on the mouse and click-click-clicking to flip through a whole album of photos. There’s no “Slideshow” widget on Facebook (Flickr has one), but it sure is easy to click through a whole album in a matter of seconds or minutes. Flickr, on the other hand, forces you to click on a little square thumbnail less than an inch in diameter to advance from one photo to the next, and that little thumbnail moves from place to place on your screen depending on the width of the photo on each page and/or the width of photos people embed in the comments they make on those photos. There’s no resting the hand on the desk and click-click-clicking in place with Flickr, no sir! But it still beats Facebook hands down for photo quality and information.

Speaking of information, though, Facebook makes it easy for me to upload photos when I don’t care as much about quality or information. I know my photos are not going to be seen at high resolution on Facebook, so I don’t have to worry about pixel peepers. And Facebook doesn’t punish me by uploading images without titles the way Flickr does. If I upload without titles on Flickr, my images will be titled “IMG_4087” etc., and if I want them to be “untitled” I have to manually go through and delete every filename. When I don’t care about titling or captioning photos on Facebook, no big deal! Just upload them and Facebook doesn’t insist on titles and captions. (In fact, there really are no “titles” on photos in Facebook; there are only “captions” below the photos if you want to put them there.) I don’t have to worry about tagging my photos on Facebook, either. Of course, that’s also a disadvantage, because it makes it impossible to aggregate your photos by keyword or search photos by keyword, but again, Facebook is about people; Flickr is about photographs. That’s an arguable generalization, but there you have it.

Flickr and Facebook: Each Has a Place in My Heart

So what does this all bring me to? How do I use Flickr and Facebook now that I’ve analyzed each service’s photo sharing utilities? Well, I still adore Flickr. I’ve been a Pro member for three years and I just spent another $47.99 to be a Pro member for another two years. I will continue to use Flickr for the sharing and hosting of high-quality images I want to show off to the world and mirror on my blog. I will continue to use Flickr for the sharing and searching of photos by keyword. I will continue to learn from photographers and teach photographers by sharing my photos’ EXIF data and reading the EXIF data on great photos so I can peek into the camera settings used to achieve them. I will continue to geotag my photos on Flickr and look at other geotagged photos so I can teach and learn about this world we live in. (Yeah, I didn’t mention it, but another bummer about Facebook is the lack of geotagging. Oh, well.)

When I take photos of friends at parties these days, I almost never think of putting them on Flickr. I just put them on Facebook, where almost all my friends are! I tag my friends in photos. Once in a while I’m disappointed when friends untags themselves in photos I’ve posted of them (maybe they thought the photos were unflattering even though I thought they looked great), but more often than not, my friends like my photos such much they make them their buddy icons, at least for a while. It’s nice to know there’s a ready-made user base of friends to share photos privately with. And not just “here’s a photo of you,” which anyone could do with email for the past two decades, but “here’s photos of us all, y’all!” It’s the communal, networked, interconnected sharing of photos which is so much fun on Facebook.

So, there you have it! Here’s a recap for those who skip to the bottom of things:
- Public photos on Flickr
- Private photos on Facebook
- Keyword-tagged photos on Flickr
- Friend-tagged photos on Facebook
- High-quality, high-resolution photos on Flickr
- High-familiarity, medium-resolution photos on Facebook
- Photographer’s paradise on Flickr
- Fun for friends and family on Facebook
Of course I oversimplified things here. I know all the widgets and twiddles on Facebook and Flickr, but this blog entry was more for me to share my overall perspective than to get into a didactic tutorial about how to use each site. I hope you enjoyed reading this and find it helpful.

What do YOU think?

I look forward to hearing from you, either on Facebook or here on my blog. How do use use each service? What are the pros and cons in your experience? Has your use of Flickr changed since the advent of Facebook? Do you ever untag yourself from a photo on Facebook, and if so, why? Do you wish Flickr allowed the tagging of friends? (Who knows… days, weeks, or months after this blog entry is posted, they just might implement it!)[On October 22, 2009: Flickr added a people-tagging feature.]
August 4, 2009