I have examined the three major dynamic chess-specific ebook formats that I know about, with actual purchases:
- Chess Studio - by Gambit (Nunn’s Chess Endings Vol.1)
- Chess Viewer - by Everyman (Fighting Chess: Move by Move - sample)
- Forward Chess - by ForwardChess.com (True Lies)
Of the three, Forward Chess seems to be the best currently.
The authoring environment for chess ebooks destined for reading on the Forward Chess app is simply ChessBase (from ChessBase.com).
ForwardChess.com does not find chess masters to write books. Instead, ForwardChess services any willing chess book publishing house. Currently the list of willing publishers includes New In Chess and Quality Chess: those houses therefore do not need to hire a software development team. They tentatively intend to service unaffiliated chess authors who would traditionally be labeled as self-publishers.
ForwardChess does not edit or manually reformat chess ebooks that are passed to them by publishers or self-publishers. They merely receive the ChessBase file and produce an encrypted version that their Forward Chessa app knows how to display.
At any time in a mid-game position in the ebook, you optionally can start a chess engine to show you analysis for a move that maybe the author did not.
** I am interested to hear what other chess ebook buyers think about their experiences so far.
Kindle:
John Nunn wrote a 1001 checkmates puzzle book for the Kindle Format, which of course is not a chess-specific format (touching a notated move will not move the piece on a diagram, and no chess engine can be invoked, etc).
For the Kindle, the file format is either .mobi, or Amazon’s own proprietary ACZ or AWZ or AWZ3 (?), but not epub. See the “Calibre” software tool for details (at Calibre-ebook.com).
Oddly, the Kindle format was especially well-suited to Nunn’s book because the Kindle format has the concept of a ‘page’, whereas there is just continuous flow (within chapter) in the chess-specific format ebooks (although it might be possible to have 235 chapters?). Nunn shows a puzzle on say page 1, then repeats the puzzle with its solution on page 2. In a continuous scroll viewer this would be awkward and tedious at best.
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