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 [...]
Most of the time, command-line users will be able to run the epubcheck Java binary without issues. But sometimes mysterious problems occur — this happened to me on OS X before upgrading to Snow Leopard. So while it’s a bit awkward, you can use the remote epubcheck API combined with some XSLT to [...]
I wrote these to automate a really common task: zip up an ePub (properly) and validate it. It expects a local install of epubcheck.
Install these functions in your .bash_profile. This should work on any Unix-like system including OS X.
Zip up an ePub file
function epub()
{
rm -f $@; zip -q0X $@ mimetype; zip -qXr9D $@ *
}
Call this [...]
Our web tool for using the open-source epubcheck validator got a quick refresh:
Now includes epubpreflight results
EpubCheck’s lesser-known companion checks for additional issues like content documents that exceed 300K, which can’t be loaded on the Sony Reader. The complete (short!) list:
Content files that are empty or are >300k
Image files that are empty or are >10MB [...]
In the last few years many technology blogs have been participating in “National Blog Posting Month,” a play off the more famous National Novel Writing Month.
Threepress is participating: we’ll be posting ebook technology tips, code samples and updates on our projects every day for the whole month of November. Hopefully we’ll include [...]
O’Reilly is announcing today that the in-progress book, Programming Scala, has been released using the Open Feedback Publishing System, a platform I built for them that allows public commenting on digital manuscripts.
Users can comment using the web site, read the entire in-progress text of the book (updated as the authors revise it), or [...]
Want to convert from Word to ePub? These tools aren’t a magic bullet, but they should be helpful to digital publishing developers.
Paul Norton from Adobe has contributed a new software suite to the epub-tools project hosted on Google Code. The Java library provides tools to convert from an impressive number of formats: [...]
Two updates to the docbook2epub tool that converts DocBook into ePub:
docbook2epub is now installable with setuptools.
HTML entities in DocBook source are supported
Direct download of version 1.0.1.
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 [...]