The ePub format (acronym of the english expression Electronic publication – electronic publication) is an open source format resizable, which allows to change the type font and adapt font sizes and screen to the needs of each reader. From 2013 the international publishers association established ePub format as standard, and today, the National Library offers a representative sample of its funds in this format as versatile and flexible, to facilitate the reading of major works from our collection.

The project to create ePubs, integrated within the framework of BNElab and boost strategy for the BNE to the reuse of your data and digitized resources in a first phase of nearly 1,000 titles in ePub, becoming quickly one of the services most used in digital library (has come to expect around 400,000 downloads per year). In 2023 the second phase of the project, which is the collection of ePubs over 1,330 titles, covering all kinds of works and thematic and paying special attention to these headings, which have become public domain in recent years.

The objective of this conversion project to ePub is double: not only allow the reading of these works in electronic devices and thus be able to offer new formats for access to digital collections for the BNE, but also the process leading up to the conversion to ePub implies the correction of texts obtained through automatic optical recognition of documents in PDF. This will help generate new data sets, “clean” and structured, which may be useful for the improvement of the searches or application of digital tools of textual analysis.

Thematic and works

In relation to the works that make up the collection of ePubs, these cover all types of organized into 22 thematic sub-collections, including Women, Philosophy and Psychology, History, Literature of the century of gold and of the 19th and 20th centuries, Travel or Biographies. Most of works are available in english, but also provides a good number of works in co-official languages (catalan, galician, basque) in addition to a wide selection of titles. Thus, there were now more than 1,330 work to which can be accessed from BDH for visualization or free download.

Most of the collection consists of works representative of the Spaniah cultural heritage and literary with featured titles of the medieval literature as Cárcel de Amor Diego of San Pedro or of the Spanish Golden Age, as Novelas ejemplares of Miguel de Cervantes, El criticón by Baltasar Gracián or La Araucana Alonso by Ercilla y Zúñiga. Are representative also works of great figures of spanish and hispanoamericanas letters from the 19th and 20th centuries, with names like Gertrudis Gómez of Avellaneda, Benito Pérez Galdós, Carolina Coronado, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Miguel de Unamuno, Ramiro de Maeztu, Rubén Darío, Federico García Lorca or José Martí, among others.

From a thematic perspective, the collection has been enriching with sub-collections covering fields as varied as the philosophy, with titles like The Be Beautiful and the Sublime Immanuel Kant or Maximum and thoughts of the prisoner of Santa Elena of Napoleon Bonaparte; biographies of Velázquez or Rafael del Riego; works of religion and mystic as Cantar de los cantares or Obras espirituales by San Juan de la Cruz; and translations of classic literature as Resurrection from Lev Tolstói, Vanity Fair of W. M. Thackeray orThe Divine Comedy by Dante Aliguieri. Women collection also offers a representative sample of funds of literature and feminist thought present in the BNE: authors as concepción Gimeno of Flaquer, Carmen de Burgos, George Sand and Emilia Pardo Bazán are already part of our collection.

A collection created by and for citizenship

Since its inception the collection of ePubs was designed with the prospect of inclusion and openness to all the people, so that any person concerned could not only access and enjoy the array of works in ePub format, but also participate in its constitution. Thus, citizen participation has been key to amplify the set of instruments that today form the collection of ePubs at the Spanish National Library.

Through a public form reflects the suggestions of new works to the collection, taking into account to be the basis of digitised works present in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. This form has been key to meet the needs and interests of the current society, allowing in addition to active listening and incorporate these proposals to grow the BNE collection.

From this link you can access the form, open to new proposals.