Screen shot 2010-08-27 at 9.12.38 AMYesterday Apple came with an update to their office solution, iWork. The update 9.0.4 is important for all of us still dreaming of a paper free life. Pages can now export documents to ePub, the chosen format in iBooks (iPhone/iPad) and many other eReader devices.

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The added ePub support in iWorks makes it a lot more convenient for scientific staff and students to make use of the iPad in their work and studies.

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It is important to note that export to ePub only works with the word processing templates and not with the beautiful page layout templates. You might also loose some of the formatting. Apple has also provided a support page describing the differences between ePub and PDF, and a very helpful Pages template for use in creating an ePub.

Liza Daly has tested the ePub support in Pages, and she has comments on Apple’s XHTML:

<div class=”s2″>This document will show you how to use paragraph styles to create a publication that looks great..</div>

She found that this was the paragraph style, and this is not acceptable. <p> is what is semantically accurate.

A few word about Pages: The word processor comes with with advanced tools for writing and easy page layout, and it can also open, save, and email Microsoft Office files. You can also share all your work on the web on the iWork.com service.