Over the last few weeks several people have emailed asking if epubBooks.com has been abandoned – the answer is a resounding No! Okay, I know I’ve not been very active recently so please accept my apologies for that.

The reason for such limited activity is that I am working very hard on developing the new site for epubbooks.com – yes, the blog and current resources will still be accessible. The new site will allow you to download all kinds of different EPUB books, including many from the Project Gutenberg archives.

If you don’t know what my ePub Books Project is, here is a short summary.

The project was started to provide free downloads of nicely formatted EPUB files, the majority of which will be taken from the Project Gutenberg archives. These will not just be plain TEXT files enclosed in an EPUB container, but fully converted to XML (of a TEI flavour) which are themselves converted using XSLT into professional quality EPUB files. Here are some of the features;

• Properly formatted and displayed Chapter Titles/Subtitles.
• Footnotes which are Linkable (forward and backward) for instant access
• Books with Illustrations will also be available.
• Text Formatting (italics, etc.)
• Nice indents for block quotes, letters of correspondence, epigraphs, etc.
• …and many more features

The new web application is the biggest project I’ve developed to date and so is naturally a challenge to my programming skills, which is why it’s taking some time to complete, however things are going very well.

The basic skeleton of the site up and running and I am now working on programming for usability. Of course it’s these less obvious items which are some of the hardest things to programme, so at this time can’t give an accurate launch date. Rest assured it will be sooner rather than later.

Thanks for your patience and understanding and do keep checking back regularly for any new updates.

In October 2007 the IDPF elevated OPS 2.0 to an official standard and it was from this point I realised that we might well see the ePub format adopted worldwide as an eBook standard.

Planning started on how I would go about converting my TEI eBooks to the ePub format. After plenty of research I decided the best solution would be to utilise XSLT.

Okay, so I’d never actually used XSLT before, but how hard could it be?

TEI to XTHML Conversion using XSLT

In June 2008 I set to work on teaching myself this new language, XSLT, getting thoroughly confused in the process. So after a few weeks I decided I needed help and while on a trip to London, I popped into Waterstones and bought the book XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 by Michael Kay – only the paper edition though ;-)

This gave a big boost to my skills and from this point on I made quick progress…well, quick by my standards.

I worked through some examples from the book and a few I found online but basically I got stuck right in with converting my TEI files. I decided on outputting to straight-up HTML code as I am quite advanced in coding XHTML and CSS and would be able understand better what was going on.

After many false starts and rewrites I finally finished writing my Super-Lite TEI to XHTML conversion script. Here’s a rundown of some of the features;

• Simple Front matter section; Title, Sub-title, Author(s), illustrator(s), Publisher(s), original published date (where given in the source), etc.
• TOC and Footnotes – generated automatically.
• Book, Volume, Part and Chapter sections.
• Paragraphs, Tables, Quotes [within Quotes within Quotes], Italics, Superscript, etc.
• Images with headings and descriptions, when available.
• Blockquotes – enclosing letters of correspondence, line-groups and other quote passages.
• Epigraph, Preface, Introduction, Prologue, etc.
• Page breaks, thought breaks, etc.
• CSS stylesheet additions of ID and Class attributes have been added where useful.
• Text alignment; center, right, indenting, etc.

TEI to ePub Conversion using XSLT

This now brings us to the current state of the project, the next task is to create ePub versions from my master TEI eBooks. I believe most of the hard work regarding the XSLT scripting was done with the TEI to HTML converter so with luck I should be able to get this next script out of the door pretty quickly.

Initially I will just work on books without images although I will try to get some converted early on. There will be a lot more work involved in producing image books and I would prefer to have a reasonable catalogue as quickly as possible.

During the learning phase I will be posting articles to the ePub Books blog following my progress. Although I’ll be working with my custom TEI format I’m hoping these short articles will still be useful to anyone who is considering creating ePub books but is not already an expert in related technologies.

Making ePub eBooks Freely available for Download

The next challenge will be to find a way to make all these ePub books available for everyone to download. I could put together a very simple website with the books listed but I really want to make this not only a super easy but also enjoyable experience so I’m currently searching for another solution.

I’ve looked over a number of open source projects including Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, in conjunction with extensions and also some commercial applications. I wasn’t able to find anything commercial and all the Library scripts I found still meant I would need to hand code way too much. But now I think I have now found a solution using part open source and part commercial. I’ll go into more details once I’ve finalised this.

With luck I should have something ready and in place before the end of 2008. Once I reach this goal I can then concentrate on creating more eBooks from the Gutenberg archives. Of course I will start with the obvious Classics, which should keep me busy for a good few months, but will also be setting up a system for book requests.

As books with images take longer to convert I won’t be providing too many to start with. Although I do already have 15 titles in the TEI format, so I will make these available as soon as possible.
I hope you’ve found this set of articles interesting and are as excited as myself about the future of ePubBooks.com.

We are seeing more and more tools for creating ePub files being developed and the latest to join the throng is the tei2epub converter from threepress.org. This one however is aimed more for developers than the end user, unlike the BookGlutton ePub API.

tei2epub is being developed by Liza Daly and is written in XSLT, although it does utilise a little Python. I know nothing about Python but from what I can make out this is mainly for creating the actual files and final .epub container (which is actually just a renamed .zip file).

This converter really interests me as I already have my own converter (pg2tei) for creating TEI documents from plain text files, as found on Project Gutenberg. I recently started teaching myself XSLT so will follow the development of this for sure!

I don’t have a Python processor installed so haven’t ran any files through this, though I have taken a quick look at the source code and it looks quite straight forward. I believe this uses the official stylesheets written by TEI, so the tei2epub converter should be quite simple to follow, even for those of us whose XSLT skills are not yet well developed.

If you’re interested in both TEI and ePub then this is certainly going to be useful to add to your toolkit.