I made available my first ePub file today.

Screen shot

EPub is the current de facto standard file format for ebook readers. After a bit of reading, the format is not too difficult since all the files are plain-text XML files or images. The various metadata files are ePub-specific XML. The content is XHTML. The graphics can be in any number of formats. The whole lot is compressed into a single file using the zip “standard”, and suffixed with a .epub extension.

Since much of my content has been previously saved as TEI files, the process of converting my content into ePub is straight-forward. Use XPath to extract metadata. Use XSLT to transform the TEI to XHTML. Zip up the whole thing and make it available on the Web. I have found the difficult part to be the images. It is hard to figure out where one’s images are saved and then incorporate them into the ePub file. I will have to be a bit more standard with my image locations in the future and/or I will need to do a bit of a retrospective conversion process. (I probably will go the second route. Crazy.)

Loading my ePub into Firefox’s EPUBReader worked just fine. The whole thing rendered pretty well in Stanza too. More importantly, it validated against a Java-based tool called epubcheck. Whew!

While I cogitate how to convert my content, you can download my first ePub file as well as the beginnings of my ePub creation script.

Enjoy?

P.S. I think the Apple iPad is going to have a significant impact on digital reading in the very near future. I’m preparing.

Tags: ePub

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “My first ePub file”

1. Michelle says:

   March 22, 2010 at 8:42 am

   Your first ePub looks great in Stanza desktop. I love ePubs.

   I can’t say I’m totally on board with the iPad personally (as you’ve probably seen (repeatedly) on Facebook, I’m getting the Notion Ink Adam this year pretty much no matter what: http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-adam-hands-on-0969281/).

   But I am really interested in what the iPad is going to do for the popular perception of digital reading. I hope it’ll at least bust up the “I can’t read on a screen!” statement a little.

2. Michelle says:

   March 22, 2010 at 8:43 am

   Ooh, I obviously botched that URL. Here: http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-adam-hands-on-0969281

Creator: Eric Lease Morgan <eric_morgan@infomotions.com>
Date created: 2008-05-26
Date updated: 2010-05-09
URL: ./