Witcherley Books

Great Stories - Fantastic Characters - Quality Puzzles

books on publishing

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Useful Programs for ePUB Creation

We have recently started converting our books for ePUB format, and, although we’ve not used all the following, these are the programs we looked at using to create the files. Although we are novices at ePUB creation, with a background in IT and in software development we are sufficiently familiar with using diverse tools, reading format specification, and writing CSS and html. If this list is a bit daunting then there are many many companies around who will convert your books (from various original formats) to ePUB for you.

Programs

Adobe InDesign

http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/indesign.html

Unfortunately this is now only available on a SaaS (Software as a Service – or ‘Cloud’) basis, and is pretty expensive. There is a free 30 day option however so if you only have one book, and a short timescale then this might be an option. There is also a month-by-month and other subscription models – but all pretty expensive. It is however one of the industry standard applications.

QuarkXpress

http://www.quark.co.uk/Products/QuarkXPress/#1

This is also now available as a SaaS application. This also has a free 30 day option. It is now at version 10, however version 9 is available on eBay. You need a licensed copy if you get one from there though as you’ll need to upgrade to at least version 9.2 to be able to export ePUB files, although upgrading to the latest version available would be best. This is another industry standard application, and is the one we chose to use – however it isn’t without it’s problems.
It has Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) setup for the ePUB to use. During the setup you see the standard default layout, and you can’t change how this appears or add new options. You can overwrite the default CSS files with your preferred layout however – it is a bit messy but it does, with a little patience, work in the end, and for the second and subsequent books is actually not too long to setup.
It allows you to add some metadata that is exported with the file, although it doesn’t allow setting all metadata fields that are possible.
This was a useable tool (at v 9.5.2), despite it’s inadequacies and we’re pleased we decided to persevere with it.

Sigil

https://code.google.com/p/sigil/

This is a donation funded application, and we found this extremely helpful. It allows you to look inside the ePUB, and display the contents. You can choose to see the html or the display format. Any amendments to the HTML are displayed immediately. It shows you all the metadata so you can add or remove items in that.
It also has two handily file checking tools: one FlightCrew lets you check the html, and the second is a link to the W3C website where the CSS files are validated.
An excellent tool, and if you know html very handy.

Calibre

http://calibre-ebook.com/

This is a donation funded application, and is excellent at converting between different eBook formats. We did a trial with a conversion from an html formatted book (from a MS Word export to filtered html) to an ePUB, and the files created are excellent. As it is a ‘free’ tool we were concerned that the resulting ePUB might be a bit ‘noisy’ , i.e. have a lot of unnecessary html – but the files it produces really are very clean and very good. It could also handle one situation that QuarkXpress didn’t get right (it rendered a space between two underlined words correctly, or how we wanted it anyway – where QuarkXpress lost the space, e.g. does this work).
This includes a number of tools that allow you to view eBooks, edit eBooks, to change the format, and to load to different devices. We have largely used it to view ebooks and to load them to different devices for testing.
If we’d reviewed the generated ePUB files before getting QuarkXpress we probably would have stuck with this tool. It is much simpler to use and generated a file first time that actually took us 6 or 7 attempts to get back to using the other tools.

FireFox eReader

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/

This is an add-on to donation funded FireFox Mozilla. It lets you drag and drop the ePUB files into it and will render them for you into a displayed version. It is useful for testing the layout works.

ePUBChecker

http://validator.idpf.org/

This ePUB checker comes from the people writing the ePUB standards. It will tell you if you file complies with the ePUB2 or ePUB3 standard. If you are planning to use a website that is a distributor of the resulting ePUB, then you will need to have a ePUB file that passes the tests in this. Even if you load the ePUB file directly to some eRetailers then a prerequisite is often that the file must pass this checker – so it is worth checking the files yourself before loading them. If you have a lot of files to check then you can download the ePUBChecker and run it with a Java command, or just use the website link to browse to the file you want to check.

Kindle Previewer

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765261

Although this is for Kindle formats rather than for ePUB, it is a useful final check that the file is ok. It will convert the ePUB into the required format depending upon the device you want to check it in, and will show you the format of the ePUB book as it will appear on different Kindle devices.

Other eReaders

There are other free eReading programs that work on PCs, tablets and phones, and it is worthwhile trying the file out in a few as different readers render the html slightly differently and some settings don’t work in one but do work in others – you may need a combination of approaches to satisfy as many eReaders as possible.
A search for ‘ebook reader’ will find many tools, or ‘ebook reader yourdevicename’ will find ones for a particular device.

7-zip

http://download.cnet.com/7-Zip-64-bit/3000-2250_4-10905593.html

As the ePUB file extension is basically a .zip by another name, a file unzipping program like 7-zip is also useful.

Standards

idpf

http://idpf.org/epub

This is where you can read more about the ePUB standards. It includes a list of the metadata fields that you can set, as well as the html that is in the standard, and the format of the different ePUB files.

Daisy

http://www.daisy.org/daisypedia/daisy-standards

Daisy standard also includes other metadata values possible; it gives information on making ebooks more accessible.

Originally posted on wordpress.com on 20 July 2014.

We’ve upgraded our version of QuarkXpress to 2019 but no longer use it to create ePUB files. The above tools are all still available, however we now use jutoh (www.jutoh.com). Many other indie-publishers are using Vellum. Calibre is still a good option. For children’s books then Kindle Kids Creator produces the MOBI files but not the ePub.

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Reading About ePub

We thought we’d better find out a bit about ePub files before we started converting our Kindle ebooks. Mainly because there are many more devices and retail sites to cater for when building ePub. Originally with just Kindle files, we only had one device supplier to consider, and as we’d used Amazon’s kindlegen program to generate the files it has all gone fairly smoothly. But would ePubs be more complicated? Many publishers use conversion companies, however with one of the company partner’s having a background in IT we thought we’d give it a go at DIY.

Before doing so a bit of background reading was in order. We wanted to make sure we considered any known incompatibility problems, to make sure our files were as clean as possible when we did eventually create them, and to try to find the lessons others had already covered. So here are a few of the books we read when looking for tips on what to do, and more importantly on what not to do.

SmashWords Style Guide

An excellent guide. SmashWords use their own program (their ‘meat-grinder’) to convert ebooks submitted to their platform to all major devices. This is the setup guide for their submissions, and is a good overall guide to how to set up and check your files.

What is EPUB3 by Matt Garrish

This is a very good guide to the new ePub3 standard by Matt Garrish, who is on the standards group. Although there are very few devices yet that can read ePub3 files it is still worth reading the guide now.

Accessible EPUB3 by Matt Garrish

Again on ePub3 so the devices aren’t really available yet but this is an extremely helpful guide to making the ebooks more accessible or usable by people with some ability to use the reading devices in the standard way.

EPUB From the Ground Up: A Hands-On Guide to EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 by Jarret Buse

This covers ePub2 and CSS, and a bit on ePub3 and HTML5. Although initially disappointed in this book, mainly as it didn’t have the values we needed to check at the time, in the end we found it was useful and overall a worthwhile investment. It isn’t comprehensive but has enough information to get you going and points you to some very useful tools – largely free or donation based ones.

Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5 by Robin Nixon

This is really for website developers, but the CSS and HTML bits are useful. And the HTML5 can be useful when building ePub3 files in the future.

HTML FIXES FOR KINDLE by Aaron Shepard

Even though this is for Kindle and not for EPUB it is still useful as it contains some workarounds to consider if things don’t display correctly. But you have to decide for yourself if the workaround is worth doing, or if it is a quirk of a particular device, or of that device’s operating system at that particular time.

Originally posted on wordpress.com on 08 July 2014.

Six years in and the understanding we achieved of ePubs by reading the above still stand us in good stead. All these booksare all still relevant. Probably the most useful were the Smashwords Style Guide and ePUB from the Ground Up. We also now use Google Search to find the relevant formats in the standards on idpf.org.

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Background Reading on Publishing and Business

In preparation for generating books and ebooks and undertaking marketing and book promotion we’ve read quite a few books on publishing and on business generally. All of these have been added to our GoodReads shelf – here is a link to our background reading shelf with the ratings on how useful we’ve found them, or with no rating if we’ve not read them yet or they are for reference:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/22807393-twbc?page=1&shelf=publishing-background-reading&view=table

Originally published on wordpress.com on 20 June 2014.

This GoodReads bookshelf has been kept up to date by adding other publishing books that we’ve read.