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Planned - After Launch

Offer ePub support for Authors.

A wild Xial appears! 8 years ago updated 8 years ago 9

As an author, I would love to see support for ePubs for story downloads. ePub is a very open format that supports text formatting, embedded images, and the like, and is supported on multiple platforms.

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Planned - After Launch

We'd love to do this; putting this one in the list of things to develop post-launch!

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Maybe also add an option for 'send this to my device' and allow users to specify the email address for their e-readers. I know the Kindle can do this.

As I recall, the Kindle is the only device line that can do this, and epub isn't supported on the platform. Only Mobi files, and Amazon's proprietary format.

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I want to see this as well, but please, don't allow people to micromanage the formatting of their own stories like SoFurry. The ePub files that SoFurry makes from those stories are barely readable at best, and unusable at worse. It's made even worse when you can't override the font-size and font-family chosen by the author...

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As an author, who does story commissions, I would love to able to send someone not only an RTF file (as some people do prefer them) but also an ePub file and allow them to upload it to google play and other areas. it'd also make it easier for others to read.

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I really appreciate the love that's been shown so far in favor of ePub support.

For those tuning in later, or just wondering why I'm pushing for this so much, here's some answers:


Tablets and ebook readers have become much more popular over the last several years, with ease in portability of a computing device being much easier than lugging around a stack of papers. ePubs are a zip file with formatted pages inside that can convey a story with or without images, fonts, and overall formatting to make it easier for authors to share the love they've forged from their keyboard. When fed to a proper app that can read these files, of which there are plenty, or placed on a device that can read them directly, such as the Sony PRS-T2, Barnes & Noble's Nook series, and many others...


We get the luxury of turning pages with the press of a button or a simple tap on the display, instead of trying to drag up and down and trying to keep track of where things are when reading a story. We get that level of ease that a person flipping through a stack of images already gets everywhere, and it helps to make reading cool again.


There are already libraries (bits of script) out there for developers to use to add this functionality, and it would let us as a fandom provide reading material where libraries (book huts) are still struggling.

As well as pretty much any android with an app. I did this for SoFurry, I search for some high rated stories or some by keywords and then open to tabs and go on a download spree clicking the link and closing the tab and have a download folder with tons of the epubs, then I just drag them all to android phone/tablet and read them on the 'bookshelves' at leisure. Very handy for offline or remote reading without having even a 'mobile friendly' webpage still making you scroll oddly and have excess formatting and not saving place if the screen cuts off sometimes. With all the features of this site though being live scrolling and pinging for notifications, that'd be a little bit of background data constantly hitting your connection.

Yep. That's another really good reason that I'd love ePub support: I tend to download a batch of stories to a Dropbox folder that's only accessible by my devices. I'll then retrieve a handful of them to my devices in question over wi-fi, and can read offline.

Each device will sync my place in a story back to Dropbox, so if I start a story on one tablet, then later move to another tablet or my phone, the data hit is minimal: The reader checks to see if there's a bookmark, offers it to me, and pulls that point. Data cost at that point? 32 bytes, if I did it over my cellular data. :)

+1
Answer
Planned - After Launch

We'd love to do this; putting this one in the list of things to develop post-launch!

Awesome, glad to hear that, indeed! :D