ePub Books Blog

EPUB Creation: When Subject Matters

Whether you call them categories, subjects or genres, the style you give to your book is vitally important, perhaps especially so in these times of the digital marketplace. Being placed correctly in digital book stores and libraries can help in both regular searches and with discovery techniques such as “similar titles”.

The EPUB format has been developed to allow your work to be properly tagged with as many genres as is necessary to describe the title correctly, allowing any eBook reading system to categorise your books appropriately.

If you’re creating your EPUB file manually then you’ll need to open the .OPF in your favourite text editor. Then inside the metadata tags you need to add your subject tags.

Here are some example genre entries;

<dc:subject>Fiction</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Comedy</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Satire</dc:subject>

You can add as many subjects as you like, though it’s probably best to keep things focused–adding 50 tags will be just as bad as adding none.

The arbitrary keyword or phrase you use inside the subject tag has not been standardised by the IDPF, but I would recommend using the BISAC, LoC (Library of Congress) or other standardised system.

At this point you probably think there’s nothing more to be said on the topic, however… Read the full article »

Experiment: Advancing ePub with HTML5 Video’s

There are a number of people in the eBook world who really know their ePub format – luckily for us they enjoy sharing this knowledge among the community. One of these such people is Bookworm developer, Liza Daly.

There’s a lot of a misconception around the ePub format with the belief that it is not a very advance format to work with, this is certainly not the case. Being based on several web standards, ePub can do pretty much whatever those standards can do themselves.

In a recent blog post, Liza conducted an experiment to include a HTML5 <video> in an ePub file, which she accomplished by using out-of-island XML mark-up. Okay, so this is something of a hack, and very few ePub readers will render the content (although Bookworm does), but this just goes to show there’s some power in the ePub standard.

All you ePub developers out there might want to keep an eye on Lizas blog as she will be sharing lots of ePub tips throughout this month.

Creating an ePub document from XHTML

In my last post I talked about the ePub Books Project and how I plan to convert Project Gutenberg .txt eBooks to the ePub format and how I will make these eBooks available for download from ePubBooks.com.

I already have in place a converter to transform the PG .txt files to a TEI Master Format and also an XSLT script to convert these into XHTML. The final task now is to create a converter for TEI to the ePub format.

Before I attempt to write this converter I will need to have a much better understanding on how a book is laid out inside the ePub OEBPS Container Format (OCF) .zip archive. So I set about taking my XHTML output file and breaking it up into the appropriate parts ready to be packaged in to an .epub file.

On the whole this went fairly smoothly, although I did encounter a couple of issues, which I’ll explain at the end of this article.

Read the full article »

TOC tutorial on how to read O’Reilly ePub books on your iPhone

Andrew Savikas over on the O’Reilly TOC has written a nice tutorial on how to read your O’Reilly ePub formatted books on the iPhone using Stanza.

One thing to note about this is that he was only successful in doing so when using his MacBook Pro, he was unable to say the same about the process using Windows.

After reading his article, I have to say the whole thing seems really easy!

Andrew did bring up one of Stanza’s failings, “A lot of the formatting isn’t (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.” Perhaps it’s understandable about tables but I am surprised that lists are not yet supported. However, the app is still in beta and we know that Lexcycle are working hard on improving it.

One thing Andrew noted in his post was that O’Reilly are also looking into releasing their titles as individual iPhone Apps. I’m not convinced by this approach myself, but hey, for you iPhone users it will if nothing else give the proper formatting that O’Reilly intended

Okay, there’s a long way to go before ePub is a format that all devices can read properly, however it’s great to see that the industry is still moving forward.

Looking for a guide to creating ePub documents?

I created this site because there are very few blogs, mailing lists and other resources on the ePub standard. I wanted to try and bring together the few that there are in one handy place, in the hope to make this information easily available.

I am no ePub expert myself so I’m continually searching for new information and resources to help me learn. One very useful tutorial I found was the ‘Epub Format Construction Guide‘.

Not only is this guide about creating ePub documents, it also gives some nice insights into the compliance of the ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) reader, still the most conformant reader at this time. A couple of surprising things about ADE v1.0 is that it does not support certain CSS attributes. Two big surprises were; text-transform and text-align: justify.

The tutorial itself is more like an “annotated example”, if you just wish to construct an ePub document in a quick hassle free way then this will help tremendously. Once nice thing I like about the guide is that it highlights the areas which need to be altered on a per project basis.

In the future I’m hoping to find more detailed tutorials so if you need more in-depth information, you’ll just have to reference the IDPF specifications.

You can read the ‘Epub Format Construction Guide’ at www.hxa7241.org.