Earlier this month BookGlutton announced their ePub API. This neat little tool gives everyone an easy way to convert HTML files to the IDPF’s ePub format.
At present the API is in public beta and currently only converts ‘simple’ HTML files, it also lacks both image and CSS support. Still, don’t let this put you off, the potential here is great and is certainly another step in the right direction. As time goes by the API will certainly get better.
To show the kind of acceptence ePub is gaining this tool also caught the attention Keith Fahrlgren over at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Blog who certainly seems encouraged by this and feels that it is “the first step in lowering the barrier to entry to creating EPUB documents.”
Many other people around the net have shown a strong interest in the API, with most believing this is a first step in encouraging developers to create more ePub tools.
If you wish to try it out yourself go visit the BookGlutton ePup API page, there’s also some instructions there to help get you started.
An update on this–today we released new features on the conversion tool. It now supports multiple files (in a Zip archive), images, external stylesheets, and Flash. It also offers more options for setting metadata–language, title, author, rights, and description. We increased the upload size limit to 10 MB, so you can experiment with larger files, and we optimized the file heirarchy for easy conversions to web sites. As always, we appreciate feedback.
Aaron
Thanks for the update Aaron, adding images and CSS stylesheets is a major step forward!
I’m not sure if I’ll utilise the full 10MB upload but I will certainly give it a test drive at some point over the next few days.