The illustrious Kat Meyer retweeted a link that made my jaw drop: Introducing epubjs
To celebrate TOC I’m announcing an early prototype of epubjs: a pure Javascript ePub reader. The entire application is only 11K (plus 53K for jQuery 1.3).
This is a pretty rough release, still very messy, but I’m hoping to evolve it into a lightweight reader that authors or publishers could add to their websites with minimal technical expertise.
Currently the reader works only in Firefox and requires that the ePub be expanded out in the top-level folder containing the JS code. (There are some issues related to browser security, and that it’s only been tested with this single ePub, and that I wrote a lot of this on the train ride down to New York).
Red emphasis by me.
Today, everyone has heard about the debut of the abominable Kindle 2 from Amazon.
It has a dirty secret: It cannot do ePub file format ebooks. ePub is what all of the major — and many independent — publishers have chosen for eBooks.
Previously, I’ve whined about my desire for Stanza to port its eBook reader to the Palm Pre. Stanza can do ePub.
But right now, this sample application — in JavaScript, which the Pre uses — shows that ePub is possible on the Palm Pre.
Who will give it to us?
