[Today's guest post is by Keith Fahlgren. - Liza]
The three ePub specifications (OPF, OPS, and OCF) include a lot of detail on ebook metadata and markup, but do not include a technique for describing covers. Despite this omission (a fix is being discussed), there are some widely adopted approaches for marking up covers that will [...]
If I say that a document is in “XML”, I’m not really saying anything very specific. All I’ve told you is that the document has some text wrapped in various angle-brackets, and that those angle-brackets are “well-formed.” A well-formed XML document just means one in which the angle-brackets open and close in a predictable [...]
ePub books are supposed to have a unique identifier: the Dublin Core identifier found in the OPF file. Unfortunately, the ePub spec doesn’t have any mechanism to enforce the uniqueness of the ID, so we live in a world where in fact many many epubs don’t have truly unique identifiers (or indeed, any identifiers [...]
Some of the most useful tools in ebook development are open source. Calibre and epubcheck especially come to mind. If you find a bug or want to request a feature, what are the best ways to ensure your needs get attention?
Submit a patch
Of course the holy grail for the lazy open source developer is [...]
One of the great things about sitting on 30,000+ ePub books (as uploaded to Bookworm) is the ability to look at what’s happening in real-world ebook production. Today I’m examining file size, which is useful if you happen to be doing resource planning for a cloud-based ebook reading system.
Smallest 1.6 kilobytes
Largest 233 megabytes
Total # [...]
We’ve been quiet about it, but Bookworm has had an API now for some time, which developers can use to write library management clients or external reading systems. If users trust your site, you can ask them to supply their API key and integrate your ebook-related functionality with their Bookworm account. Please send [...]
This was an experiment and is a bit of a hack. Most people seeking to embed video in ePub should use the Flash method described earlier.
I wanted to see if could construct a valid ePub file using HTML5 (in this case, employing the HTML5 <video> element). The problem is that ePub only supports one kind [...]
Since Bookworm has support for video you may want to experiment with creating your own video ebooks. Here’s how to do it and still create a valid XHTML 1.1/ePub.
Assuming you have a Flash movie called Creative_Commons_-_Get_Creative.swf and a containing XHTML page called chapter-1.html, put this in your OPF:
<!– Flash video [...]
This is an experimental new feature but of course a very cool one: Bookworm can now display and play ePub books with embedded video.
Whether the video will actually play depends on the epub file’s formatting and the capability of your web browser. Bookworm also needs to register the particular file type.
Supported video formats:
MP4
OGV
SWF
In later [...]
I’ve only got one hour to make today’s post so I’m using one of my lifelines: a few pointers to early posts on this blog you may have missed.
This one, from July 2008, describes an experiment using the Processing graphical programming language.
I imagine applying techniques such as this to create algorithmic, generative book [...]