Articles Available in ePub Format

September 9th, 2011

As of now, my articles are publicly available in ePub format in addition to PDF format. I hope this will allow me to make them available to an even wider audience. If you use an e-reader (e.g. a Kindle), a tablet (e.g. an iPad or a Galaxy Tab) or a smartphone for reading, this format might lead to a more pleasant reading experience for you.

So why not take the opportunity to take a look at some “classics”? The following works are available for you in ePub format:

• Forms of interaction in the blogosphere
• Approaches to unify complexity and usability in application software
• The teachlet concept: possibilities and limits of a teaching form for software design discussions
• Modeling stateful systems in Java

Let me know if anything doesn't work for you or you notice any problems with the ePubs. I've never done this before and there may be errors that have crept in. Thanks to the people on the e-reader forum who eagerly tested on various devices and gave me feedback.

What Is an ePub, Anyway?

The ePub format is a standard for electronic books. For e-readers and other readers with small displays, PDF files are of limited use because they have a fixed layout (often A4), so either the font is tiny or a line doesn't fit on the screen, so you're just scrolling back and forth. The ePub format, on the other hand, allows for flowing text that can adapt to the viewing situation. More info as always on Wikipedia.

Aside from flexibility, there's something else I like about the ePub format: it's much, much easier to edit the files than PDFs. (There's also DRM for ePub, but I'll leave that aside. Doesn't affect my files, after all.) This means that it is now much easier for you to actually exercise the rights granted to you by Creative Commons to adapt and process my texts.

Technically, ePub files are little more than zipped (X)HTML with some sugar, so if existing ePub editors like Sigil aren't enough for you, just unzip the ePub file, fire up vim / emacs / a text editor of your choice and make something creative out of my texts (respecting the corresponding CC license, of course)!