DigitalPulp Publishing (DPP), a member of IDPF, is the first publisher (as far as we know) to release an e-book in IDPF’s new “epub” format: My Ántonia by Willa S. Cather. This e-book is being freely distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
At present our e-book is only downloadable from IDPF’s web site, but will soon be available through DPP’s site. In addition, I’ve posted a message to the public IDPF Standards Forum summarizing, in gory detail, which features of OPS 2.0 are and are not supported (OPS 2.0 is the backbone specification underlying “epub” — currently OPS 2.0 is in the final Member and Public Review stage.)
There are currently two ways to read our epub:
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Adobe Digital Editions (currently in beta), or
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Use your browser to view the XML documents (which are XHTML 1.1) contained inside the epub.
For browser viewing (which will be nowhere near optimal compared to Adobe DE), extract the files using any zip application and view the “*.xml” files in the “OPS” folder. The main content document is the file “myantonia.xml”. For best results, use a current version of Firefox, Opera or IE, and keep the present folder structure so the links work and referenced CSS style sheets and images are used.
OSoft’s dotReader will also soon support “epub”.
DPP plans to issue and distribute most of the e-books it directly publishes for authors in the epub format once the OPS 2.0 standard is elevated to the final “Recommended” status. (Note: at David Rothman’s request I plan to post an article discussing the upcoming OPS 2.0 standard, as well as discuss the current status and future of OpenReader.)
Other publishers are welcome to “decompile” this epub publication and use it as an aid to learn the OPS 2.0 specification and as a template to build your own epub publications.
Happy reading!
The author of this article, Jon Noring, is VP of Development for DigitalPulp Publishing. He also contributed to the development of OPS 2.0.
FBReader groks OEBPS. It may not like the OCF container, but you can easily unzip and read with it.
is dpp using bookx in its publishing workflow to produce epub files?
Hi Robert. BookX is being used to master several ebooks, but conversion to OPS (and similar frameworks such as OpenReader and OEBPS 1.2) has to be done manually (which is a little tedious but not time-consuming since BookX gets the content structurally marked up properly.) Still working to find someone to write the perl or php script. Anyone, help?
Yo, programmers! The BookX project is a noble cause, and it will help a whole bunch of formats, not just epub or OpenReader. If we’re gonna have the Tower of eBabel for the moment, then let’s at least simplify format-jockeying for publishers. David
Thanks, David. The key to why I think BookX is worthwhile is that BookX is designed to be a relatively easy-to-author XML mastering format (not intended to be directly rendered although a high-quality BookX reading system could be built if someone wanted to do so, such as a plug-in to dotReader.)
BookX captures, in a completely standardized manner, the important essence of the book allowing easy autoconversion into most any format imagineable, and to get optimum presentation for all formats and hardware platforms. Perfect rice every time is now possible without a lot of hassle to the publisher.
This is possible because BookX focuses on strictly defining document structure and text semantics, thus allowing the building of a universal public repository of interchangeable style sheets (I’m thinking the repository would use Creative Commons licensing.) This frees the publisher to focus on the content, saving a lot of time and money, and not have to worry about style since they just find the style they like in the repository and apply it to their books (some style sheets will be format/platform dependent.) Perfect rice everytime. (Certainly, the publisher can tweak an existing style sheet if they prefer, and will be encouraged to submit a copy of their new style sheet to the repository.)
It’s not unlike clothing. People don’t need anymore to weave and dye their own cloth, cut the pattern, and sew up clothes that fit. Today they go to the store, pick the clothing depending upon the occasion, and slip the clothes on. No need for one to go to a plastic surgeon to get dressed differently!
Yet, “plastic surgery” is pretty much what is being done today by most publishers when their books need to be adapted to a new format or platform — the publisher has to go back and perform “plastic surgery” on the source format! Not very efficient.
The only downside to BookX is that it won’t apply to more complex books — it’s designed for simpler narrative-type books. But in my estimation it will be able to properly structure 80-90% of books out there. For more complex books, there are other XML-based vocabularies that could be used for mastering, particulary DocBook (which is much more complex but is similarly strict.) I even see other specialized vocabularies built on the BookX model, such as PoemX, for example, and maybe even DocX (for simpler technical documents.)