Unless you were in a science-free vacuum last week, you probably noticed the publication of over 30 ENCODE articles in a number journals, including BioMed Central's very own Genome Biology and BMC Genetics. Or if you didn't notice the publications themselves, you probably caught some of the controversy over 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 YouTube beginner'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 an iPad app containing 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 each Genome Biology and BMC Genetics 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 a collection 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.