Threepress Consulting blog » epubjs

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.)

epubjs updates: Safari support & pagination hints

Liza Daly — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:31:57 +0000

Safari is now supported (this John Resig post was invaluable). The screenshot below proves it!

There’s also a guide to how far you are in the current section. It’s based on a percentage rather than an absolute number of pages (similar to the Kindle’s pagination indicator).

Initial code release post.

Update Feb 18: Key controls have now changed
n = next page
p = previous page
j = next chapter
k = previous chapter

Update April 3: IE 7 now supported (and possibly IE 8, haven’t checked).

Introducing epubjs

Liza Daly — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:52:31 +0000

To celebrate TOC I’m announcing an early prototype of epubjs: a pure Javascript ePub reader. The entire application is only 11K (plus 53K for jQuery 1.3).

This is a pretty rough release, still very messy, but I’m hoping to evolve it into a lightweight reader that authors or publishers could add to their websites with minimal technical expertise.

Currently the reader works only in Firefox and requires that the ePub be expanded out in the top-level folder containing the JS code. (There are some issues related to browser security, and that it’s only been tested with this single ePub, and that I wrote a lot of this on the train ride down to New York).

You can extract the code directly out of the HTML file, or track it via Subversion:

svn checkout http://epub-tools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/epubtools/epubjs epubjs