Michael Pastore reviews “Epub Straight to the Point” – new book on Epub creation

There is a bit of buzz out there about the Kindle e-book or IPad "app" supplanting the open source ePub format. This must not happen.

Michael Pastore reviews “Epub Straight to the Point” – new book on Epub creation | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home:

"You have probably heard the joke about the very amateur Shakespearean actor who, while playing Puck in the middle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — was booed and pelted with organic tomatoes. The actor ripped off his mask, stopped performing, turned to audience and then shouted: “Don’t blame me, I didn’t write this junk!” … For a while, EPUB ebooks shared the same fate as the Bard: some hasty critics looked at some badly-made EPUB ebooks, and then griped that the EPUB format is a failure because it cannot make nice-looking books. Castro dispels that myth; her Chapter 4 — Advanced Epub Formatting — covers advanced topics including how to prevent ebook reading devices from overriding your CSS; how to choose the fonts in your ebook; how to create drop caps and small caps; how to control spacing and indents (essential when formatting poetry); how to insert images and their captions; and how to enhance (or, as some people [link to my Carr review] might say, increase the distractions in) your EPUB ebooks by adding links, tables and videos."