Adrian Graham, a British author, has an absolutely fascinating article on his blog today. It is a discussion, from a layman’s point of view, of his history with e-book formats and his experiences as a user and creator of e-books. You should go over and take a look. Here is a short excerpt from a long article:
So lets go back in time ten years, slightly less actually, to 2000. By this time I had used a Palm PDA, a Microsoft powered WinCE palmtop and Psion palmtops. In early 2000 I bought a Psion Series 7 palmtop:
I did a lot of writing on it and got involved with the Psion community. I loved the elegance of the EPOC OS, the power of the built-in applications, the instant off and on, using a machine that ran in complete silence, the portability, the book-like leather binding around the device, the perfectly responsive keyboard, etc. It was a perfect device in many ways, the precursor to today’s netBook (Psion made another version of this which was actually called the netBook).
When I look back I have to ask myself, ‘What’s really changed?’
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So what about ePub? This is a growing format. Part of its increasing appeal is down to the fact it’s an open format. One of my big gripes with ePub is the difficulty I have making a clean ePub file. Every file format needs a reliable authoring tool to make it a sucess. I think this is an area where, in time, ePub will get stronger but at the moment it very weak. It a lot easiert to create clean eBooks on other file formats.
Industry professionals use Adobe InDesign to create ePub files. I’m just a ‘Joe Average’ user so I suppose I don’t know the secret tricks of getting a clean, properly formatted and tagged ePub file – I wish I did though (anyone know how, please do tell).
His comments on ‘a reliable authoring tool’ strike home.
Now that openoffice.org has made it easier to write extensions, a la Firefox, I hope somebody codes an odt to epub extension.
Now that would be cool.
Oh thank you thank you thank you for saying that. I must admit we had a very difficult time with converting my book, too; We had to use BookGlutton’s API to do it.
What is particularly bothersome is that Stanza will NOT work on our (XP) machines. Thank heavens for Adobe Digital Edition or we wouldn’t have a clue how it looks. We still don’t know how it looks on Stanza.
I wrote a post just this morning on the adoption of EPUB as I see it. Yes, we’re on board with DRMless EPUB, but let’s not throw the rest of the formats out the window just yet.
Calibre will already convert .odt files to .epub. I don’t know what conventions it uses for metadata, TOC, and chapters (it has built in chapter detection via pattern matching) when importing ODT files.
BookCreator Tool (see mobileread for details) is a “MS Word template with VBScript code” that will output ePub, using Calibre as a back-end. It can output other ebook formats too.
In general, Calibre’s any2epub capability is one of the best ways to get an ebook into the ePub format. This capability is now available via its GUI as well as the command line. Calibre also comes with a ePub reader, and it works on any Desktop PC (Windows, Mac, Linux).
The author is so right about ePub being difficult to make. As someone who makes ebooks it just grinds on me that this is the format some people are pushing. Although I’ve never had a reader ask for it. It’s just a format I read about all the time in places like this. I’ve been thinking of upgrading my Adobe InDesign for $200 to see if I can make ePubs, but I will check out Calibre first. It’s hard to slap down the $200 when I can make so many other formats that work really well for little to no cost.
Our site, web-books.com, offers free file conversion from Microsoft Word into ePub. The output has passed Google’s EpubCheck.
From a professional book-production point of view, ePub isn’t necessarily hard to make, it’s just that the tools (and the author of the post referenced above is quite correct in pointing at InDesign—I’d comment on his blog, but he requires logging in) are rather crude and imperfect, at the moment.
InDesign CS3 makes atrocious ePub files—sometimes files that even Adobe Digital Editions won’t read! CS4 is better, but neither are quite there yet. This means that once the file is output form InDesign, the bookmaker needs to unzip the ePub file and muck about with not only the XHTML files contained within, but the ToC files, metadata files, style sheets, etc.
This, I’m sure, is a temporary situation, akin to press-ready PDF files back in the late ’90s—a byzantine process which was streamlined and optimized over time. Given Adobe’s strong backing of the ePub standard, it follows that ePub production will go down the same track to easier output.
As a matter of fact—and as a completely speculative aside—I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, the so-called ‘Adobe Digital Edition’ will become a wrapper of sorts, including both a PDF file (for layout-rich applications, like desktops and large ereaders) and an ePub file (for mobile devices or other situations that require heavy text-reflow).
Aside from this is another important point, at least from a designer’s perspective: while ePub touts the ability to include embedded OpenType fonts, most of these fonts’ licenses do not allow for embedding, and most foundries (including Adobe itself) encrypt their fonts so that they are unusable within an ePub file, even if you have correctly embedded the font files in the ePub document. This is a problem that is affecting the web design community in general, especially now that most browsers support the tag.
Alan, thank you for that information. We used Calibre to convert to LIT, but didn’t think about using it for EPUB.
We’re going to experiment with that a little and see what we can come up with.
Direct conversions from a Word file to ePub will always be sub-optimal. You need something similar to a real XML workflow to produce high quality content.
@Pablo: the IDPF is working on the font embedding issue, there’s a lot of discussions concerning this particular issue. Adobe DE already support a way to encode fonts and link them to a specific ePub files but there’s a lot of concern regarding the fact that the IDPF should implement in the standard itself such practices.
@Tracy: You’ve produced a good-looking ePub file of one of your books already: http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/1954
Hi Hadrian,
Yes, I know I have Union of Renegades at Feedbooks. But that’s my free giveaway ebook. I sell my others, so I didn’t want to put them on Feedbooks.
The nice thing about ePub is that it’s open source, if you really want you can edit them manually; it’s just HTML and XML. (Details: http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp)
I’ll very much agree that there needs to be more authoring tools and readers for the ePub format, but it is rather young. I’ve reviewed all the ePub readers I can find on my website as well.
This post is the first I’ve ever heard of Calibre, I’m off to check it out!