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.
The “epub Best Practices Guide” can be found on the Adobe site (sroll down a bit): http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/
This has been previously mentioned on both TeleRead and MobileRead. The guide is a bit Adobe slanted, but overall good information.
Thanks for the link Joseph. There are several other useful links on the Digital Publishing Technology Center site which will be of interest to anyone wanting to publish in the epub format.
I have to move apartments over the next couple of weeks but once I settle in I will bring together all these great sources here on epubbooks.com
The hxa7241.org tutorial has a bad error in it. The zip command compresses the mimetype file, so the epub doesn’t validate with epubcheck (and probably won’t work in the Sony reader and others). You need to do this in two commands:
zip -X0 filename.epub mimetype
zip -X9Dr filename.epub META-INF OEBPS