Gulliver’s Travels ePub eBook – Test Release
Back in September I came clean about my ePub Books Project, a project to convert the .TXT eBooks from Project Gutenberg into the IDPF epub eBook format. After many months I have finally finished the conversion programming and I’m now preparing development of the epubbooks.com distribution platform, which will allow anyone to come by and download ePub books for free. I’m looking to go live by the end of 2008.
Although I am happy with the current formatting of the epub files I wanted to turn to you, the ePub community, and ask for your feedback in the hope that the improvements you submit will make these ePub eBooks even better.
ePubBooks.com eBook Features
- Linked Footnotes – each footnote number is a link, click on this to see the footnote. Click on the same number to go back to your original page.
- Images – Some titles will include images. Italicised image titles when available.
- Nicely formatted titles, subtitles, etc.
- Paragraph indents – Except on first paragraph of a chapter/section (more paper book like)
- Block Indents – Small left/right indents on block quotes, letters of correspondence, songs, etc.
This is just a small selection for some of the formatting features I’ve implemented.
Please Note: Not all features will show on every reader/device (Stanza on the iPhone does not use the files built-in CSS styles.)
Download the ePub eBook
The title I’m making available as a pre-release download is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – this has many features which show off my conversion. As this eBook contains images it is quite large, weighing in at over 5MB.
The test book has now been removed. You can find the final release here;
Gulliver’s Travels (Final)
All comments, on both the frontend formatting (indents, italics, etc) and the underlying code (OPF, NCX, XML markup) is very much appreciated.
This eBook can be read using Adobe Digital Editions, Stanza (desktop and iPhone version), Sony Reader (PRS-505 and PRS-700), BeBook and the FBReader.
Enjoy!
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December 3rd, 2008 at 3:49 am
FYI, Stanza will render styles, but only if you enable them in the settings. Styles are not enabled by default.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
Works great! Looks amazing. Checked a bunch of links and they were all good. Footnote 2 wouldn’t work on the Large setting for a PRS-505, but worked on the others.
THanks!
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
@Marc. Thanks. I’ve just tried it now the styles turned on and it looks much better. One or two things need fixing though, which I will do that later today.
@joe.
many thanks! I don’t know if there is anything I can do to fix the footnote problem – sounds more like a quirk with the Sony – but I will certainly take a look.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:30 am
The author should be “Jonathan Swift” not “Swift, Jonathan”. The latter is correct for the sort order in the opf:file-as parameter for the creator tag, but the data for the creator tag should be the canonical name of the author. The comma will cause some ebook software to interpret the book as having two authors separated by commas.
See the specification for an example: http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf/OPF_2.0_final_spec.html#Section2.2.2
December 5th, 2008 at 9:34 am
@Matt. I was hoping someone would comment on this! I must admit that I did not think about the comma issue.
I’ve been in two minds on how to deal with the author names. The reason for using the last name first was to aid in author search when a user has dozens, if not hundreds of books in their library. If reading systems used the opf:file-as attribute for sorting then there would be no argument.
I would really like to get other users feedback on this. If anyone has thoughts, or even just a preference, then please do leave a comment.
December 17th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
When creating footnotes I recommend that the id is placed on an element which contains all of the footnote, not only the number of the footnote. In this case you could put the id on the “li” element (in cases where the footnotes aren’t in a list you should enclose the footnote in a “div” element with an id).
If you don’t do this then it’s harder for the reading system to make a guess how long the footnote is. A reading system that wants to do something creative with the footnote, like showing it in a pop-up window, needs to have a clue where it ends. For example, if you view epub-test-20081202.epub using Lucidor 0.5 and move the mouse pointer over a footnote link only the number of the footnote will be shown in the pop-up window.
The same applies to all kinds of links, by the way, not only links to “footnotes”. For example, if you have a link to a specific section of a text, then the link should point to an element which encloses all text of the section, not to an element which only encloses the header or the first paragraph of the section.
Another thing you may want to consider is to include an alternative style sheet more suitable for viewing the document on a large screen. The side margins look a bit narrow when viewing it on a computer screen, but I guess small margins makes sense for portable ebook readers.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
How footnotes are handled is definitely worth looking into a little more. Reading systems will certainly be more creative in the future so if possible it’s worth trying to accommodate.
Making the margins narrower was a concious decision. I will take another look at the IDPF specs to see what options there are for loading alternate style sheets.
Many thanks for your insights!