Michael Cook | epub Blog

Gulliver’s Travels EPUB eBook

Back in September I wrote about my epubBooks development; a project to convert the .TXT ebooks from Project Gutenberg into the IDPF’s EPUB format. After many months of hard work I’e finally finished the conversion tools and I’m now preparing development of the website itself, which will allow anyone to download my EPUB books, and all for free.

Although I’m happy with the current formatting in the EPUB files, I wanted to turn to you, the ebook community and ask for your feedback, in the hope that the improvements you submit will make these EPUB ebooks even better.

EPUB Book Features

Linked Footnotes – each footnote number is a link, click on this to see the footnote (I’ve actually made them all endnotes). Clicking on the notes number takes you back to the original page.
Images – Some titles will include images.
Nicely formatted titles, subtitles, etc.
Paragraph indents – Except on first paragraph of a chapter/section – as is usual in paper books
Block Indents – Small left/right indents on block quotes, letters of correspondence, songs, etc.

This is just a small selection for some of the formatting features I’ve implemented.

Please Note: As certain systems enforce their own stlying by defaults, various features will display differently. UPDATE (2011): This isn’t as prolific as it used to be.

Test the EPUB

The title I’m making available as a pre-release download is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – this has many features which show off my conversion. As this eBook contains images it is quite large, weighing in at over 5MB.

The test book has now been removed as you can find the final release here;

Gulliver’s Travels (Final)

All comments, on both the frontend formatting (indents, italics, etc) and the underlying code (OPF, NCX, HTML markup) is very much appreciated.

This ebook can be read using Adobe Digital Editions, Stanza (desktop and iPhone version), Sony Reader (PRS-505 and PRS-700), BeBook and the FBReader.

Enjoy!

Can we hope for an Amazon and ePub union?

EPUB formatted books as an industry wide standard is what I, and many others want. But can we achieve this without Amazon’s adoption — at least with ePub support on their Kindle eBook reader.

It will certainly be a lot easier to have a standard eBook format if Amazon joined the ePub party. I’m reluctant to say it but all current indications show that Amazon will not adopt the ePub format in the near future – but perhaps there is hope.

Recently we have seen a flurry of publishers and eBook projects (including yours truly) adopting the ePub format and a number of these are pushing their titles onto the iPhone/iPod Touch platform via the Stanza eBook reader. Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg are the two big projects but we now have Pan Macmillan offering commercial Tasters and in the last few days BookGlutton announced that they have joined forces with Stanza. Interesting times ahead for sure.

With all this recent iPhone/eBook activity I am asking myself, where is Amazon? The Kindle is certainly making waves with big sale numbers but this is probably nothing compared to iPhone sales. This makes me wonder if Amazon will start making their titles available on this platform and if so, what format will they use. If they use their own eBook format (AZW), they would need to release a dedicated ‘Amazon eBook Reader’ — how many different iPhone reader applications will people accept?

Everyone around here knows that having one standard eBook format will better serve everyone. If Amazon opens their Kindle to the ePub format and strikes a deal with a company such as Lexcycle (Stanza) they could kill two birds with one stone. Hmm, perhaps an Amazon/Stranza union is a little too much wishful thinking.

Providing direct purchase and download would make Amazon a serious option for any iPhone or iPod Touch user, and vise versa.

So, can Amazon leverage the iPhone to further dominate the eBook market and can they continue to resist the ePub eBook format?

Disclaimer: The Amazon/ePub logo I created is intended just for fun.

EPUB Preflight (Style Checking)

Paul Norton from Adobe Digital Editions has now released the epubpreflight validation tool. This small utility is meant as a compliment to epubcheck and is used to check that your ePub files are suitable for Mobile devices. There are many guidelines that need to be followed when developing ePub for mobile devices that are not mentioned in the EPUB specs, so this is going to be a very welcome tool.

Here’s a list of things that epubpreflight currently checks for;

Content files that are empty.
Content files that are over 300KB.
Image files that are empty.
Image files that are over 10MB.

As you can see the list is rather small at the moment but this will grow in time. On the DE blog, Paul also mentions that he would like to see a set of configuration files that could test for specific platforms (ADE, PRS505, conversion to other formats, etc.)

It’s going to be a good number of years yet before mobile devices have the power to parse very large files (images, chapters, etc) so it’s going to be in everyone’s interest to see this tool developed.

Using Q tags in ePub documents

Recently I’ve been making great progress on my ePub converter but in the process I’ve come across a few areas that have needed some thought. For this short article I’m going to discuss the XHTML Quote tag.

When looking though the IDPF OPS specs I noticed that <q> tags are allowed within ePub documents. As I mark up all quotes in my master TEI documents with a <q> tag I was really happy to see this. However, when I came to test my files in Adobe Digital Editions none of my quotes showed.

After seaching around the net I also noticed that <q> tags are not supported by all web browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer). Liza Daly has also noted that the HTML 5.0 specs will depreciate Q tags – will a version of XHTML follow suite in the future? Will a future IDPF OPS spec implement that future XHTML spec?

(FYI, Liza mentioned that she is currently working on implementing <q> tags in her Bookworm reader, with a work around for IE.)

This is an area which I believe ePub developers should give some serious thought over. Even if Adobe DE go ahead and implement this feature, other readers may not necessarily follow suite.

For my own project I have decided to convert all my <q> tags into regular “quote” characters. Providing more safety both now and in the long term.

W.H.Smith’s are now selling ePub eBooks!

During the Digital Lunch seminar at this years Frankfurt Book Fair, Michael Vantusko from Overdrive commented that W.H.Smith was one of their eBook customers. As I was updating the epubbooks.com homepage I thought I’d check them out to see if they actually have them online yet. I don’t know the date W.H.Smith went live with their ePub books but they currently have almost 6,500 ePub titles.

As Overdrive also distribute to Waterstones I would imagine that the W.H.Smith eBook collection will grow quite quickly. It’s great to see more stores offering ePub formatted books to the consumers – perhaps this extra competition will result in lower eBook prices sooner rather than later.

There is however quite some way to go before the number of ePub titles reaches the overall eBook numbers. Here’s a quick breakdown of the current eBook titles in the W.H.Smith eBook store;

Continue reading “W.H.Smith’s are now selling ePub eBooks!”

epubBooks at Frankfurt Book Fair 2008

I was very lucky this year to be able to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. As it was only going to be a one day affair for me I choose Thursday, the day of the Digital Lunch: Digital Publishing and the EPUB Standard’ seminar.

Before the session got under way I had a quick look around the ‘Digital Market Place’ Hall and came across the iRex Digital Reader stand where they were showing off their DR1000 model. Along with having a basic reader they also have two models with a Wacom touch screen and one of those with Wi-Fi. All models have a 10.2 inch display (1024×1280 pixels) – so no need to go zooming in on your PDF files now. This looks a great piece of equipment. After checking out the iRex stand I then made my way down to the IDPF session.

There were four speakers at the Digital Lunch, Michael Smith (IDPF Executive Director), Michael Vantusko (Overdrive – unfortunately Steve Potash could not make it), Fionnuala Duggan (Random House Digital Group UK) and Robert Nell (Sony Reader).

Mike Smith got things started with an outline of the IDPF and the ePub format. He discussed the amazing sales figures we’ve been seeing in the eBook world and the uptake of the ePub standard from publishers and conversion houses.

Continue reading “epubBooks at Frankfurt Book Fair 2008”

Bookworm will not reject valid ePub – but are you valid?

Liza Daly from threepress.org has just released an article outlining problems she is having with users uploading invalid ePub formatted documents to Bookworm; an online ePub book reader. It’s very important for anyone developing ePub eBooks to produce valid markup. Not only will Bookworm give desirable results when rendering, but you’ll also be covering yourself for any future rendering engines and conversions you might need to do.

It’s actually quite surprising how many errors are showing up from files submitted to Bookworm. You should go over to the threepress blog for a full explanation, but here’s a list of the main errors;

Missing required attributes in the metadata
Metadata that hasn’t been proofread
Improper nesting of the ePub zip file
Items declared in the OPF file that are missing from the archive
Invalid XHTML

Points 1 to 4 are really quite vital, although it is understanable for many documents to have invalid XHTML. Still, if it is within your means, I would try to control this the best you can.

I have plans to write some detailed articles regarding the creation of both the NCX and OPF files found in an ePub document, so keep a lookout for those.

Digital Lunch: IDPF at Frankfurt 2008

Next Monday will mark the start of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair. The IDPF will of course be attending, and also presenting a session entitled; Digital Lunch: Digital Publishing and the EPUB Standard.

Mike Smith (IDPF Executive Director), Steve Potash (Overdrive), Fionnuala Duggan (Random House Digital Group UK) and Robert Nell (Sony Reader) will be talking about the “effects on Publishers, Channels and Devices – Market Experience with the Sony Reader and other Software using EPUB”. eBooks is currently the fastest growing segment in the publishing industry and with sites such as Feedbooks.com delivering over 2,000,000 titles in the last few months alone, the ePub book format is set to dominate the eBook world.

If you’re going to be at the Frankfurt Book Fair then I recommend attending this session. This will be taking place at 12:00 o’clock on the Thursday (16th October) in Hall 4C, Alliance Room.

Creating an ePub document from XHTML

In my last post I talked about the epubBooks 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.

Continue reading “Creating an ePub document from XHTML”

epubBooks Project Part 3: ePub conversion and epubBooks.com development

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.

Continue reading “epubBooks Project Part 3: ePub conversion and epubBooks.com development”