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eCub freebie for creating ePub books: Try it and help the dev with bug reports!
January 13, 2009 | 4:06 am
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By David Rothman
Sooner or later there’ll be a zillion creation tools for ePub, the standard e-book format that the IDPF has developed. For now, you might try the free eCub program as Mike Cane has. Then give developer Julian Smart some helpful feedback.
At this point the results could be mixed. Here, slightly edited, is a snippet from Mike Cook’s post in the useful ePub Books blog:
“When the eCub created ePub file is opened in Adobe Digital Editions, it views just fine. However, when trying to open the same file on my Sony Reader and iPod Touch, it failed with, according to Stanza, an OPF error. I will need to do some digging around to find out why it fails on these two devices, but I’m sure there is a simple explanation.”
Smart help
Anyone else noticing similar problems? And on all files? I hope the user community will be patient and helpful to Julian Smart. Version 1.02 appeared on January 8 with image-related fixes and other improvements. Share bug reports. Best of luck, Julian!
Meanwhile here’s a reminder that as laudable an effort as eCub is, it is not a substitute for the proposed ePubWriter, which would not only allow composition of e-books in ePub, PDF and other formats but also include WYSIWYG capabilities. Perhaps the OpenOffice people could take up such a project with grants from interested foundations or corporations.
Related: Earlier TeleBlog item on eCub.
Technorati Tags: Julian Smart,eCub
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Comments:
See, I was afraid of that very thing. That I’d get Abyss into finished form finally, only for it to be unusable on a Sony Reader or iPhone.
There’s a validation tool sorta link in eCub, but I’ve never tried it.
I’m not even in alpha shape for the entire eBook yet, so this can wait til the end. There can’t be anything *monstrously* wrong with the ePub file, can there? It’s all based on the HTML, after all.
I’m also going to do a MobiPocket version just to view on my LifeDrive as a test (LifeDrive screen same size as iPhone, see? good for photo scaling!). That one I will *not* distribute because I do NOT want to encourage people to use that obsolete and monopolistic file format.
Keep us posted, Mike, and best of luck with your own noble experiment with Abyss! – David
I can think of several reasons why it could potentially fail: for example incorrect XHTML markup or if you have a flow that’s larger than 300k on the Sony Reader.
300K is not much!! Especially with a book that has 27 chapters *and* about *70* photos!
I could always chop it into bits. Horrors.
Uh-oh. Just looked a PRE-alpha size of ePub. It is 2.47MB. That’s not good, is it?
I think eCub is a super tool, but you DO also need a suitable set of web tools: I use Ace HTML and TopStyle Pro so I validate my XHTML and CSS long before creating the book.
I solved problems with books I created for my Sony reader by making sure that all my constituent html files were less that 100K. Anything larger than 200 KB per file, and the Sony Reader gives up and sulks! It doesn’t seem to care about the overall size of the .epub file – for instance my copy of the Bible runs to 1.66 MB and works (slowly) without problem.