I chose to use the EPUB e-book format mainly because I knew of a free reader that works on my Apple mobile devices — Stanza. As it turns out, it was a good choice. I was worried that by choosing EPUB I would be locked out of the important readers — iBooks and Kindle. However, I was delighted to learn that I could load an EPUB onto both of those apps as well as onto Stanza!
One caveat for this part of the series: I am dealing exclusively with creating an EPUB format book using a Windows machine and transferring the e-book to an Apple device. I have no particular reason to think that the basic ideas presented here won’t work for, say, someone working with a Macintosh, an Android phone, or a dedicated Kindle reader device.
Several notes on my EPUBs so far:
- I’m not targeting them toward any particular device and I’m not using any particular CSS or styling. Taking the default settings has been satisfactory for me.
- I’m not worried about adding metadata. I could do that in Sigil or in another tool such as Calibre.
- From what I’ve read (and I haven’t read extensively), significant cleanup must be done on HTML before creating the e-book. For what it’s worth, I’ve tried iBooks, Stanza, and the Kindle reader on both iPhone and iPad and had no problems. However, it may be that publishers use different tools and do some kind of validation that my workflow output would fail. Or perhaps other devices/readers would choke on my EPUBs.
This is the end of this series of five articles on creating e-books. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I look forward to comments, questions, and suggestions.
Procedure
I ended up using Sigil to do my book-building because it was free, it seemed to work, and it was what I found first. I didn’t discover the “must always rebuild” limitation until later. Other tools may not have this limitation.
The “must always rebuild” limitation: I found that Sigil immediately embeds the HTML component files into the EPUB and appears to provide no way to regenerate the EPUB when the source documents change. Therefore, every time I change the source (i.e., every time I make an edit), the EPUB must be rebuilt to reflect the change. Needless to say, I don’t rebuild it a lot. And this limitation is why I ended up renaming all my source files: that way I could go to Sigil and simply import everything in the folder; it would automatically be in the correct chapter order.
To rebuild the e-book, follow these general steps:
- Make a safe copy of your book and materials (at least at first, and depending on your comfort level).
- Generate new HTML versions of any files that have changed. (Obviously, if it’s a new book, generate them for the first time.) In OpenOffice.org Writer, use the File menu Save As command. Be sure to choose the HTML output format rather than the native ODF format.
- Delete the existing EPUB file created by Sigil (it’s what you open in Sigil to edit your book as well as the file you copy to your e-book reader). ALTERNATIVELY, you can choose to edit this file rather than delete it. I found it too irritating.
- In Sigil, start a new book and add your files into it. Generate the Table of Contents and re-add your cover. ALTERNATIVELY, delete the files out of the existing EPUB file and add them back in again. This is the only way I found to “update” the e-book from your new HTML files.
- Save and test the e-book.
File Naming
I suggest naming your chapter files in a very particular way. I began by naming my chapter files after the actual chapter name. For example, I had a file “Sentenced.odf” for a chapter called “Chapter 1–Sentenced”. I changed the naming of my files and the actual chapters within the files.
First, I made sure that each filename started with a two-digit number regardless of what else the file was called. So “Sentenced.odf” became “01Sentenced.odf”. This made it much easier to rebuild my master document and (more importantly) my Sigil EPUB book from scratch. Unfortunately, Sigil doesn’t seem to provide any way of “re-importing” a file once it’s been included into the e-book. That meant that when I updated the file “01Sentenced.odf”, I actually had to rebuild the Sigil e-book. If I didn’t delete it and start over, Sigil would preserve the old version (not using the one on disk). I wasn’t able to find a way around this, so I chose to name my files 01, 02, and so on. That way I just pull them all into Sigil and they’re in the right order.
Within the word processor file, I also changed the chapter title. Instead of “Chapter 1–Sentenced (1428 words)”, I simplified. Chapters are now titled “Chapter 1″, “Chapter 2″, and so on. While it was easier as a writer/editor to use meaningful titles, it was much less of a spoiler for the reader (I think) to only number the titles. I guess now I know why people just use numbers.
Suggested Resources
- Stanza
- Sigil
- mobileread website (http://www.mobileread.com)
Source:
http://www.nolongervulcan.com/?p=734