EPUB 3 export tool for Moodle Book available as free (as in freedom) software, and at no cost too!

EPUB 3 is the open standard for ebooks, and is supported by several software vendors. Among these are big names like Apple and Adobe, in Apple iBooks and Adobe's Digital Editions and InDesign, and many smaller ones, like Aldiko for Android or Megeareader for iPad and iPhone. In the Free Software world, the ebook readers Lucifox for Firefox, FBReader for Android and Calibre stands out at present. It offers much better accessibility by building making use of existing web standards, for instance complete navigation of a book's content, text reflow to fit device display, font type and size can be changed by user, text-to-speech becomes better and many other things.

OPDS is an open standard for distribution of digital resources like ebooks, and it builds on Atom/RSS to create a book catalogue feed, which can be searched, browsed and offer download, lending and selling of books.

The Swedish developer Ordbrand has created both the ebook reader Lucifox, an add-on for the cross-platform Firefox browser, which supports both EPUB 3 and OPDS. Using Lucifox, a student can browse book catalogues and download a book for immediate reading. In addition, Ordbrand has created two extensions to Mediawiki - the software used by Wikipedia. Luciwik OPDS makes every article available as an OPDS feed, and it is possible to describe and sort articles into book catalog groups like "By author", "By century", "Science fiction", "Maths", "English" and so on. Users of iPads with iBooks can browse the book catalogue with the Safari browser, users of FBReader or Lucifox which supports OPDS directly will easily browse the catalogue from within the app. Luciwik EPUB exports the article as EPUB 3 for reading in ebook readers like Lucifox, FBReader and iBooks.

It would benefit students and teachers if Moodle Book can import and export EPUB 3 books and make books from Moodle available for download through OPDS to their phones, tablets and regular computers.

Would it not be great if a school could buy a regular textbook in EPUB 3 format from a publisher, import it as a Moodle Book, create either a resource or activity of a chapter for reading, and then offer chapter questions like in a Moodle Lesson? In addition to buying ebook textbooks in an open standard format and offering these to logged in students, it could be possible for teachers and students to create their own material and offer these to each other.

To encourage this, Ordbrand has developed an EPUB 3 export tool called Lucimoo version 0.1, which you can add to your Moodle Book module - just follow the link below or download the attachment and follow the instructions in the README file - enjoy!

http://lucidor.org/lucimoo/
http://lucidor.org/
http://idpf.org/epub/30
http://opds-spec.org/