Was wondering,

whats the 'default' e-book format? I was thinking of a basic html like all the HOWTO's you see on the internet but is there somethign different thats considered the "e-book standard" would like to do some e-book for for the local school district and offer the work over the web aswell...

using the GNU Free Documentation License. Tho, I haven't looked into alternative licenses, perhaps theirs something better fitting?

these e-books would be treated like GPL programs pretty much, add to them, modify, print, redistrobute, etc.

Well...
Most if not all the ebooks I have are in plain text, or docbook format. I've come across a few pdf and html books too, but the plain text ones are more common.

I read all my ebooks on my palm using isilo, an app that can read plain text, html.

Hope this helps
RefriedBean

I have "acquired" copies of quite a few books. A few of them are plain text, but the majority is .pdf Depending on the type of book, I prefer both formats. If it's a reading book (a novel) I prefer .pdf because I can see chapter's in the side bar. If it's a how to, I prefer html if it's long, and txt if it's short. If it's something like a dictionary type, html because of the linking to ther terms. Encyclopedia, I prefer html also for linking, but also because I like to have the "find" abilities.

But back to the point, most of my e-books are .pdf

Thanks for the info.

Is the PDF format adobe propriatary format tho?

The books we'd be making are everything from kindergarden-12th grade -- all subjects. Some books would have illustrations also.

What kind of PDF authoring tools are available for Linux?

Thanks again,
Ben.

There mostly plain text format and are in zip archieves (compressed in winzip)

There mostly plain text format and are in zip archieves (compressed by winzip)

Most of the e-books I have seen or used were in HTML format, probably to save size. A PDF file is usually larger than a HTML file, well at least from what I've seen.

htmldoc is a good one, it takes a single html file and converts it into a pdf file. I've had good luck with it. There's also the round about way of installing DocBook and using openjade and pdfjadetex. This is a good way to build a standard document that can be transfered around and not have to worry about people writing in different formats because DocBook can go to them from a single source file.

You can find all the info you need at www.tldp.org

Have you downloaded any of those $97 ebooks recently?
All this bit looks like spam to me. E-Books haven't cost $97 since 1578 (this ignores the period of March to August 1845 when e-Books were in short supply and the price went through the roof). Stop wasting your money on hard copies of e-Books when the rest of us are reading them off the internet. All of it. - end lesson.

try project gutenberg
its free!
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

(repository of books with expired copyrights that are now in the public domain)


for creating a book in PDF i woudl use some sort of LaTeX editor,
and PDFLaTeX

probabbly kile ,

though if i was lazy i would use lyx.

OO.o can output as PDF too, but i woudl only recomend it for short books

Are you living in some kind of parallel universe where things cost 10x what they are here?

Aaand back on topic:

You might be interested in plucker.