Home » Writing & Publishing » E-Books » New e-authoring tools coming soon.

New e-authoring tools coming soon.

© Richard Loeffler

OverDrive Inc. announced and is demonstrating a new suite of .NET ePublishing services that instantly convert website articles, documents, books, manuals and just about any page into attractive Microsoft Reader e-book. If combined with OverDrive Connect DRM, copyrighted material can also be protected by using Microsoft Digital Asset Server technology.

Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive stated at Seybold San Francisco this week that, "OverDrive is working internationally with book publishers, online newspapers, magazines, educational, research site, and enterprise webmasters who will be offering their communities the option to "really read" their web content offline with Microsoft Reader. OverDrive Connect is an extraordinarily powerful combination of services that provide all readers enhanced offline reading of web content".

Websites only need to add a link to OverDrive's servers. When a user selects the article, document, or any other web page content with the link on the page, OverDrive Connect Server grab the pages being viewed and instantly serve them back to the user in e-book format. OverDrive Connect Servers contain software programs and intelligence to transform web page content into highly formatted e-books and optionally deploy Digital Rights Management services to the content. The service supports adding custom cover art and banner or other advertising or branding into the instant e-book created.

Which leads us to another news announcement this week. Microsoft has announced two new products today, both of which will be released in October -- at the same time as the much awaited release of Microsoft Reader 2.0. The Dictionary Authoring Kit (DAK) 1.0 and finally a creation piece of software for those who want to create their own e-book in .lit, Microsoft Reader format, Read in Microsoft Reader (RMR) 1.1 Tool for e-book Creation.

The essential features of Microsoft Reader 2.0, says Dick Brass, "include a new user interface with design improvements that enhance how the reader interacts with the book, improved content availability across multiple devices, and the addition of text-to-speech features."

The new Dictionary Authoring Kit (DAK) 1.0 will allow publishers to create specialized e-books for use with Microsoft Reader's "Lookup" tool which lets the reader find the meaning of words in the e-book. For readers, this will mean they will be able to access a much wider, more selective group of reference books most suitable for them, instead of just the standard dictionary that is available free. The press release describes the Dictionary Authoring Kit as "a collection of tools, data files, documentation, the build engine, and sample files and projects used by publishers to create dictionaries."