I’m at JISC’s #dev8D conference. There’s no end of developer challenges but I’m not a developer. Still, here’s an idea that maybe someone will pick up and run with:
The use of eBook readers is on the rise. Anyone with an iPhone, Android phone, as well as Kindles and Sony Readers, has an eBook reader.
Institutional Repositories provide scholarly articles in PDF format, which eBook readers don’t handle very well at all, especially the phone versions.
Why not provide a Word-to-PDF conversion facility in your repository? EPrints currently offers Word-to-PDF conversion durinng the deposit process. Why not Word-to-ePub format, too?
Why not provide an ePub file as an alternative to the PDF download? ePub is a free, open, standards-based (XHTML/CSS) file format for eBook Readers. There are many advantages for the reader to having an ePub version rather than a PDF version when using an e-Book reader. i.e. better page navigation, search, bookmarks, variable font sizing.
There are PDF-to-ePub converters on the web, so technically it’s possible. They are a bit hit and miss, but so are the Word-to-PDF converters.
Anyone interested? I’d be keen to help if required.
It’s a bit of shame that a near-proprietary format like PDF has become the de facto standard format for Repositories. If we could get master deposits in an XM-friendly format (LaTeX?), presumably we could then convert to PDF/ePub on the fly?
I guess there’s no easy way of back-converting what’s deposited into a more open format…