Unless you were in a science-free vacuum last week, you probably noticedthe publication of over 30 ENCODE articlesin a number journals, including BioMed Central's very ownGenome BiologyandBMC遗传学. Or if you didn't notice the publications themselves, you probably caught some of thecontroversyover the (allegedly) misleading "junking 'junk' DNA" angle much of the media coverage adopted. Or if you didn't notice the controversy, you might at least have stumbled upon Tim Minchin narrating a YouTubebeginner's guide to ENCODE, in a way that only a ginger could.

BioMed Central and the other publishers involved have aimed to be innovative in how the ENCODE articles are made available. As part of this initiative, we have joined together to produce aniPad appcontaining the complete official article set in a navigable format. However, we do recognize that, as sad a truth as it may be, many ENCODE enthusiasts do not have ready access to an iPad and so are unable to benefit from the app.

We at BioMed Central wondered what we could do to help out these iPad-less unfortunates. After much deliberation, we have decided that it is probably too costly to provide an iPad to eachGenome BiologyandBMC遗传学reader. So, instead we have settled for plan B, which is to host on our website all the individual ePub files we created for the iPad app, so that anyone with an eReader (or ePub-reading software) can make use of them.

The ePubs can be downloaded from the "viewing options" panel on the right hand side of each article page, and we've handily grouped together all the ENCODE articles on acollection page. Please do get in touch with any feedback that you may have on the ePubs, as we would be interested to hear your views.