In October 2011 the Language Technologies Unit prepared a report on e-publishing on behalf of the Welsh Books Council, as well as technical guidelines for the creation of EPUB eBooks. These documents are available from the Welsh Books Council website:
E-publishing in Welsh Report
E-publishing – Technical Guidelines
E-publishingTechnical_Guidelines170212_-_golDECHE was a project to republish important Welsh language books essential to scholarship through the medium of Welsh that are not in print, as e-books. It was funded by Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, the Welsh-medium college which has branches in most universities in Wales.
Not only does digitizing the publications make them accessible to students and researchers and safeguards them for the future, it also makes it possible to publish them as EPUB and MOBI (for Kindle) files and as PDFs. The e-books are available for download from the Coleg Cymraeg’s Library of on-line digital resources, Llyfrgell y Coleg.
Also, digitizing these resources enabled us to create a new Welsh language research corpus, which may be accessed from the Welsh National Corpus Portal.
This project finished at the end of July 2016. However, if you know of any scholarly Welsh language books which are out of print, and that would be useful to publish as ebooks for Coleg Cymraeg students, please let us know. We continue to gather a candidate list of suitable books for digitization in a future project.
During the summer of 2011 the Welsh Book Council commissioned the Language Technologies Unit to undertake research in Welsh language e-publishing. The Welsh Book Council published this report in October 2011, and at their request the LTU also prepared detailed technical guidelines for publishing in EPUB format.
Subsequently, the Welsh Language Board awarded the LTU a small grant to create a web-based application to aid publishers prepare Welsh language texts in EPub format.The website checks your text for common problems with creating Welsh language e-books, for example problems with accents on ŵ, Ŵ, ŷ and Ŷ before converting everything to an E-Pub file. Users can download the completed E-Pub files and publish as they wish.
Go to http://techiaith.bangor.ac.uk/e-gyhoeddwr
This application was developed by Dewi Bryn Jones and David Chan.
