A thousand downloads a month may not seem significant, but that growing number potentially represents customers that we would not have reached had the DAISY format not been available. And because the accessibility features found in DAISY have been folded into EPUB 3, the growing number of DAISY file downloads argues for the digital  publishing ecosystems–publishers and reading vendors alike–to move quickly toward EPUB 3, while making sure we understand and apply the new specifications around navigation, semantic markup, media overlays, and so on.

To get a handle on the specs, check out Matt Garrish’s practical (and free!) Accessible EPUB 3. In addition to providing a nice primer on the subject, Matt argues eloquently that, if you’re a publisher, accessibility is really about making your books more available to more readers, and reaching these readers will play a crucial role in the shift to digital:

Accessibility is not a feel-good consideration that can be deferred to republishers to fill in for you as you focus on print and quick-and-dirty ebooks, but a content imperative vital to your survival in the digital future.

In light of the increasing DAISY file downloads that we’re seeing, Matt might be onto something.

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These files are now available for download in your account on oreilly.com. If your ebook bundle includes a Mobi file (and more than 90% of bundles do), you can download the updated, KF8-compliant Mobi file now. (Note: All O’Reilly Media files are now available in KF8. Partner publishers will come soon.)

As always, our ebook bundles are DRM-free. See this page for instructions on loading O’Reilly Mobi files to your Kindle.

We’ve optimized our Mobi files for Kindle Fire by taking advantage of KF8′s support of @media queries. While @media queries have been commonplace on the web for some time, they are just now making their way to ebook ecosystems. KF8′s support of @media queries allows you to create an ebook that looks and potentially behaves differently based on your reading device.

For an example of @media queries in action, see the image below, which shows how the same Mobi file appears on a traditional Kindle (left) versus the new Kindle Fire (right):

Click to enlarge.

Amazon’s support for @media queries makes this possible, and O’Reilly is among the first publishers to employ this feature across all of its Kindle content. Here are some of the new features that you can expect to see on your Kindle Fire (enhancements vary by book):

• Color images
• Syntax-highlighted code
• Improved layout and design with CSS3
• Embedded code font for better legibility and glyph support

Here are some screenshots from our newly optimized Mobis:

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Starting this week, our books will begin to be available in KF8 format through Amazon’s Kindle Store, too. Download the updated files via the “Manage Your Kindle” page. Remember that buying direct from O’Reilly gives you access to lifetime, DRM-free updates in all standard ebook formats.

Related:

• iPad vs. Kindle Fire: Early impressions and a few predictions
• Kindle Fire: Three pros, five cons

To address some of the most common questions we get, I recently added a page on oreilly.com. I cover three main topics:

• “Hidden” features — handy things you can do that aren’t always obvious in the UI
• Long code lines — my attempt to help users deal with the question we get most often on the support queues
• Extracting the EPUB files — yes, there is an EPUB file in that app, and you can get to it quite easily

I hope this page is useful to you. As we continue to receive feedback from our customers, I plan to add more tips and information.