v 1.4 r2  Release Date: September 24, 2001

CREATE YOUR OWN ELECTRONIC BOOKS

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) has become the standard for publishing documents, both on the World Wide Web and CD-Roms, and is also used for many application help files. Why? Because it is platform independent, and the document format is not proprietary to any software company, unlike most word processor formats.

However, there are some drawbacks with using plain HTML.

1. The documents can be easily downloaded into someone's word processor, and your hard work suddenly becomes their own copyright work. Copyright law is international, but first you need to discover that your copyright has been infringed, and then you have to have the money to run a court case. Of course, there's nothing to stop a plagiarist from changing things around enough to beat any copyright action.
   
2. Hackers can modify html documents and repost them unless they are on a read only medium like a CD-ROM. How do you know that the HTML files you got from the web are actually the ones that the author uploaded? Most likely they will be, but you can't tell.
   
3. A web document is broken into pages. In addition, good design uses frames to ease navigation, plus graphics to enliven and illustrate the text. This can mean that a 150 page document might have 400 or 500 files to distribute, which can be a nightmare to coordinate.

Help is at hand. The Publisher suite from Fugue Software permits all the associated files for web pages to be packaged up into a single file (EBK File or ebook which stands for Electronic Book), which is encrypted. A royalty free viewer that supports standard HTML v3.2 is also supplied to view the documents within these encrypted files.

Thus there is only one file to distribute, containing all the files for your HTML documents. You don't have to worry about losing one file, or cluttering up the user directory with several hundred HTML and graphics files.

The Publisher program can create and modify these ebook files, as well as view the contents, but it cannot extract the contents to disk. It also encrypts the EBK file so that it cannot simply be loaded into a word processor. This makes it extremely difficult for someone to steal your content.

In addition, you can password protect individual documents in a EBK file, so that people viewing your published ebook cannot view protected files without the password you supply them. You can also issue different passwords to different people.

Each copy of the Publisher program includes a signature that identifies the registered owner. Anyone creating a publisher file using their own registered copy of Publisher will leave their own signature in any files they publish. No other copy of the publisher program will change an ebook file unless the signature matches. Even the evaluation copy will leave a signature, but you should be aware that files released with the evaluation copy will always contain the same signature, and can be changed by any other copy of the publisher.

The file is encrypted, so anyone trying to make changes using a hex editor will be thwarted. Changes to just one byte of the file will corrupt the encrypted data, making it impossible to decrypt the file.

The viewer supports standard HTML v3.2 including frames, GIF, JPG, BMP and PNG graphics formats, MPEG, WAV and AVI multimedia formats. The viewer is free, and may be freely distributed. It can also carry your registered name.

It is now possible to publish electronic books using the Publisher suite from Fugue Software.

Downloads

• Download evaluation 32 bit version of software for Windows 9x/NT/ME/200x. Includes both Publisher and Royalty Free Viewer. (2.9M)
• Download 32 bit Viewer only (Royalty Free) (2.1M) (ZIP Archive)
  
• Download 32 bit Viewer only (Royalty Free) (2.2M) (Self Extracting Archive)
  
• Download evaluation 16 bit version of software for Windows 3.x. Includes both Publisher and Royalty Free Viewer. (1.9M)
• Download 16 bit Viewer only (Royalty Free) (1.2M) (ZIP Archive)
  
• Download 16 bit Viewer only (Royalty Free) (1.2M) (Self Extracting Archive)
  
• If you can't or don't wish to download, you can order your evaluation copy on disk. (See below for pricing)
  
  

Pricing (All prices in Australian Dollars)

(about 2/3 of US Dollars, so $A40 is about $US26.67, $A25 is about $US16.67)

Australian residents please add 10% GST

Send mail to sales@FugueSoftware.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 1999 Fugue Software
Last modified:  April 24, 2001