Starting a thread for discussion of our first round of e-books; Endymion Wilkinson's "Chinese History: A New Manual" 5th edition (which anybody with even a passing interest in Chinese history ought to own) and two collections of graded graded reading materials: Sinolingua's "Graded Chinese Reader" series and some packs of news articles from The Chairman's Bao. All available in "Add-ons." They're accessed through the document reader interface, but are standalone purchases and do not require our document reader add-on to use.
This was yet another backport from 4.0 - something which, like other backports (experimental OCR on iOS, e.g.) was isolated enough from the rest of Pleco that we could get it out early without too much extra coding work. We're not using EPUB for this but using our own proprietary system, so we can eventually do stuff EPUB doesn't support like incorporating e-book content into dictionary search results, and in terms of how these behave in Pleco, they'll feel much more like text files than like EPUBs because they're running through our own text rendering code instead of through an embedded web browser. We're actually planning to support EPUBs on Android through this system - basically when you open the EPUB we'll strip out some formatting and convert it to a Pleco document internally; with this release, we're probably about 80% of the way to having EPUB support on Android. (we'll eventually handle EPUBs this way on iOS too in place of the current approach of viewing them with a poky embedded web browser)
This was yet another backport from 4.0 - something which, like other backports (experimental OCR on iOS, e.g.) was isolated enough from the rest of Pleco that we could get it out early without too much extra coding work. We're not using EPUB for this but using our own proprietary system, so we can eventually do stuff EPUB doesn't support like incorporating e-book content into dictionary search results, and in terms of how these behave in Pleco, they'll feel much more like text files than like EPUBs because they're running through our own text rendering code instead of through an embedded web browser. We're actually planning to support EPUBs on Android through this system - basically when you open the EPUB we'll strip out some formatting and convert it to a Pleco document internally; with this release, we're probably about 80% of the way to having EPUB support on Android. (we'll eventually handle EPUBs this way on iOS too in place of the current approach of viewing them with a poky embedded web browser)