An analysis of EPUB3 (and, uh, a bit more) | The Digital Reader

An analysis of EPUB3 (and, uh, a bit more) | The Digital Reader:

"by Strahinja Markovic

Editor’s Note: This editorial was written by the developer of Sigil, an open source Epub editor. His experience has given him an understanding of the Epub spec that few share.

He’s passionate about his work, and that passion comes out in this post. The language is rather graphic."

I really enjoyed his take on Apple and the corruption of e-book standards.

Three New Editions in Sony Reader Family - decent hardware but SonyDRM fragments market

Three New Editions in Sony Reader Family | e-Bookvine

Of course Sony is using its own flavour of DRM on ePub books so they cannot be transferred to other systems. There are now three major ePub DRM systems out there --  essentially that means there are three versions of ePub. This can cripple the open ePub format thus opening the way for the standardization on proprietary formats like Amazon's AZW.

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."

SIGIL - multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor

This is the best open-source WYSIWYG html editor I've seen since Kompozer. While it is not as feature-rich at html as Kompozer it succeeds in its main mission to provide a powerful yet elegant tool to create all the components that are involved in authoring an ePub electronic book.

ePub packages are rather complicated and this tool provides a professional interface to create and manage the html, xml, css, (etc. etc.) components without sugarcoating anything.

I've not spent too much time working with ePub files as my ebookwise e-reader it too old to handle ePub files (even converted) in any useful way. The documentation associated with SIGIL is a great tutorial and reference for learning how to create ePubs from scratch.

sigil - Project Hosting on Google Code: "Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.

* Free and open source software under GPLv3
* Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac
* Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16
* Full EPUB spec support
* WYSIWYG editing
* Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View
* Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries (more than 200) with full descriptions for each
* Table Of Contents editor
* Multi-level TOC support
* Book View fully supports the display of any XHTML document possible under the OPS spec
* SVG support
* Basic XPGT support
* Advanced automatic conversion of all imported documents to Unicode
* Currently imports TXT, HTML and EPUB files; more will be added with time
* Embedded HTML Tidy; all imported documents are thoroughly cleaned; changing views cleans the document so no matter how much you screw up your code, it will fix it (usually)
* An actually usable user interface
* Native C application
* Bugs :)
* And a lot more..."