Threepress Consulting blog » epub zen garden

New ePub Zen Garden style: Tribute by Gordon Grace

Liza Daly — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:10:14 +0000

This is a lovely style (I like the “Part” pages especially) with a great cover:

Thank you to Gordon Grace for providing it!

New ePub Zen Garden styles: Seneca, Carter, Jost

Liza Daly — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:13:09 +0000

Three new styles for ePub Zen Garden from Mike Fallows, who has also blogged about his contributions, describing the various inspirations.

Seneca

Carter

Jost

New ePub Zen Garden style: Gibson by Adam Scott

Liza Daly — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:40:23 +0000

The ePub Zen Garden was featured in the recent article Web Standards for E-books by Joe Clark at A List Apart. I highly recommend it.

Thanks to that publicity bump we’ve got a new contribution: Gibson, by Adam Scott. Thank you!

Three JavaScript ePub Readers

Keith Fahlgren — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:09:27 +0000

The last few weeks have seen a tremendous increase in interest about ePub. Many new blog posts have been written trying to explain the format. We’ve also seen a big jump in the number of publishers coming to Threepress for help with tricky ePub problems or just asking for guidance about the format. While I’d like to pretend that the growth is due, in part, to a long-anticipated awareness about the benefits of open standards among consumers, publishers, and suppliers, I think it’s more likely that it was Steve Jobs’ explicit mention of ePub support in iBooks on the iPad that drove most of the excitement. What makes me most excited about this groundswell is the sudden interest in ePub from a number of clever developers.

Just in the last few days, details emerged of two new JavaScript ePub readers, rePublish from Blaine Cook (@blaine) and JSEpub (screenshot) from August Lilleaas (@augustl). These two new readers join @liza’s epubjs, which will be a year old on Tuesday. An improved version of epubjs powers the ePub Zen Garden, which helps “dispel the myth that digital books can’t also be crafted works of visual design.”

Why are JavaScript ePub readers interesting? They’re interesting to me for three reasons:

JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world and it might be the best way to get more developers interested in creating and tweaking ePub readers.
JavaScript ePub readers start challenging publishers, developers, and book readers to start thinking about what’s most important in delivering a compelling reading experience in a browser. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these choices while developing Ibis Reader, which will launch later this month, so I’m eager to see more opinions.
Building a pure-JavaScript ePub reader requires unzipping in JavaScript, which had no open source implementations until just recently. August has written about and open sourced his critical breakthrough for unzipping files in JavaScript. [Edit: Oops! I was wrong about this one. See the comments for more details.]

Colin Hazlehurst has also published some impressive introductions, tutorials, and code for the .NET/C# crowd at his InsideEpub project and on his blog.

Do you know of other techies making waves with ePub? Please let us know!

(And if you’re one of those publishers who is looking for help, contact us.)

New ePub Zen Garden contribution: GBS

Liza Daly — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:12:57 +0000

This is really funny if you get the joke, and still a nice style if you don’t. Thanks Kirk Biglione!

New ePub Zen Garden contribution: Modern 2

Liza Daly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:15:44 +0000

Another clean, minimalist style from Reece Dunn, with a nice use of small-caps:

Adding small caps to only the first line of a chapter:

#content > p.noindent:first-line
{
	font-variant: small-caps;
}

where #content is the containing block that holds the ebook.

New ePub Zen Garden contribution: Modern 1

Liza Daly — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:45:02 +0000

Thank you to Reece Dunn for this nice use of CSS typography and generous white space:

New ePub Zen Garden style: Traditional

Liza Daly — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:03:04 +0000

Thanks to Martin Jenny for a lovely “traditional” style for ePub Zen Garden, using embedded fonts for the headings (use Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5).

First ePub Zen Garden user contribution: Terminal

Liza Daly — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:29:28 +0000

I am obliged to disclaim that Keith Fahlgren made this awesome style within minutes of the site launch and I sat on it for weeks. I am lame.

There are a few easter eggs in it for other programmers to appreciate.

ePub Zen Garden

Liza Daly — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:01:01 +0000

At BookCamp Toronto this weekend I released ePub Zen Garden, modeled after the pioneering CSS Zen Garden project.

EZG aims to inspire and promote digital book design. Like the CSS Zen Garden, it demonstrates that solely via Cascading Style Sheets (and in our case a cover image), a wide range of expression is possible.

Contributions of new styles aren’t just welcome, they’re strongly encouraged.

While all browser typography needs improvement, these screenshots were taken on a Mac, which provides the best experience right now:

More information on About ePub Zen Garden.