We were very happy to develop the EPUB version of HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith, the first title from A Book Apart. A Book Apart is the publishing offshoot of A List Apart, an organization hosting a fantastic digital design blog (including Web Standards for E-books by Joe Clark).
We love working with [...]
Finally there’s a commercial word processor that can export ePub.
Today Apple released an update to iWork 9.0.4 that provides ePub as one of the output formats in the Export menu, alongside PDF and Word. Apple has also provided a support page describing the differences between ePub and PDF, and a very helpful [...]
The arrival of iBooks this year helped many people understand that ebooks were already capable of interesting experimentation, multimedia, and nuanced, thoughtful design. Many of iBooks’ strengths come directly from the fact that they wisely chose to base it on WebKit, the rendering engine core used in desktop browsers like Safari & Chrome and mobile [...]
iBooks supports JavaScript-based interactivity in EPUB content.
I took some content from Cooking with Booze by James Bridle (a.k.a. George Harvey Bone). It’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, which means that this derivative work is as well.
I took one recipe and marked it up in EPUB:
I added some slightly [...]
The IDPF kicked off the next revision of EPUB with two days of face-to-face meetings in New York last week. I came away from the (lively, well-attended) meetings feeling very optimistic about the work ahead of us, as there was a humbling range of backgrounds and experience present in the room. That said, many of [...]
I re-recorded my talk at IDPF Digital Book as a video. Getting the audio synced properly was no fun so I apologize for a few production issues.
Interactivity in EPUB
View more videos from lizadaly.
Here’s the executive summary of the talk:
You can add interactivity to an EPUB book using either the <object> or <script> elements.
[...]
Our Python script to convert from DocBook to ePub using the DocBook XSL has been updated to version 1.0.2.
I’ve added some command-line options to override the location of the DocBook XSL (previously it was stuck in a settings file) and to also point to an optional CSS file.
$ db2epub.py
Usage: db2epub.py docbook1.xml [docbook2.xml]… –xsl [DocBook XSL [...]
My tutorial Build a digital book with EPUB, posted on IBM DeveloperWorks, has been out for some time (November 2008!) but it has recently been updated with some minor corrections. It also no longer requires registration thanks to a policy change at DeveloperWorks.
I’m pleased to be joining the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum.
In my nomination statement I listed three outcomes for ePub that I’d like to see realized:
EPUB must thoughtfully embrace the dramatic evolution in web technology that is represented by HTML5. Though HTML5 offers some intriguing semantic tagging, the most pressing issue is [...]
Now that I’ve got the hardware iPad, I was able to do some comprehensive reviews of the iBooks application and its treatment of the ePub format.
As noted earlier by Dave Thomas, when an ePub file is added to iTunes, the file is modified in place to add a file called iTunesMetadata.plist. This is really obnoxious, [...]