EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders
- By Elizabeth Castro
- Published Jul 28, 2010 by Peachpit Press. Part of the One-Off series.
- Copyright 2011
- Dimensions: 7 X 9
- Pages: 192
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-321-73468-8
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-73468-6
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Almost overnight, EPUB has become the favored standard for displaying digital text on ereaders. The EPUB specification is a powerful method for creating gorgeous ebooks for EPUB-capable readers such as the iPad, Nook, and Kindle. Alas, it is far from perfect, with frustrating limitations, sketchy documentation, and incomplete creation tools. This extensively researched guide to creating EPUB files by best-selling author Elizabeth Castro shows you how to prepare EPUB files, make the files look great on the screen, work around EPUB weaknesses, and fix common errors. In this essential book, Liz shares her hard-earned experience for how to:
- Create EPUB files from existing Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign files, or from scratch.
- Tweak EPUB files to take full advantage of the power of EPUB in each respective ereader.
- Control spacing, indents, and margins.
- Insert images and sidebars and wrap text around them.
- Create links to external sources and cross-references to internal ones.
- Add video to ebooks for the iPad.
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56 of 57 people found the following review helpful
The EPUB Bible,
This review is from: EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders (One-Off) (Paperback)
I've been a designer since before there was any designation between print designers and web designers, the web in its current form hardly existed. The way design has changed over the past 20 years is amazing, and now we're heading towards the other extreme where there will be no print or web designers again, all designers will know both. The world still needs us to help keep things looking good, even if design is often only noticed when it's not done well (much like housework). With the advent of ereaders there is yet another system to learn, and the available information on ebook formatting is sketchy at best, or it was until the EPUB guru Elizabeth Castro's latest publication, EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for iPad and other ereaders. This is the definitive book on EPUB formatting. As an experienced designer/intermediate coder this is exactly what I wanted, and as I also teach InDesign I'm quite familiar with the beginner's perspective and wanted something for my...
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52 of 59 people found the following review helpful
Over-looked answers not in the book, By
This review is from: EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders (One-Off) (Paperback)
I found the book interesting but clearly way behind the times in what is being done with EPUB in the Open Source community. The author complains about lack of tools and documentation when she clearly hasn't pulled up the technical spec. docs for the standard which lay everything out. She also talks about creating EPUBs by hand when this clearly isn't needed. She clearly isn't aware of Sigil. It is a full WYSIWYG EPUB editor and creator. You can use the default CSS it provides or include your own to create and edit an EPUB. I have my own CCS for Sigil/EPUB and it works great. The author talks about converting EPUB to mobi. I would never bother to do that by hand. There is a great Open Source program called "Calibre" which will manage your e-book libraries and convert between dozens of different e-book formats (as long as they don't have DRM). It is very flexible and lets you control how the conversion is done, or let it use defaults and edit the result later. More and more people are...
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A lot of great information in this little book,
This review is from: EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders (One-Off) (Paperback)
I've been going to Liz Castro's blog, [...], for a while, as I tried to teach myself ePub creation out of InDesign. This book collects all of that great information, getting down to the nuts and bolts of the coding you will need to do to make your eBook work like you expect it to. Being used to computer books that you have to wade through 1000+ pages to find the information you want, I was pleased to find out how complete this book is with 192 pages. I would have like to have seen a couple of pages explaining proper sizing and original resolution of pictures for an ePub design (to avoid getting "the head of a pin" photo in your ePub). Other than that one omission, this book covered all the other questions I had on fixing the ePubs I've created.One of the other reviewers here, Cari Jansen, gave a great explanation of the photo sizing on her webpage, [...] |
Excerpt
Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and Other ereaders: Advanced EPUB Formatting
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Using Word to Write EPUB
2. Using InDesign to create EPUB
3. Inside an EPUB file
4. Advanced EPUB Formatting
Index
Sample Pages
Download the sample pages (includes Chapter 4 and Index)
Errata
Page 17, caption of the figure:
Should be "When rotated horizontally..." instead of “When rotated vertically..."
Page 22, step 2:
Instruction should be to apply a serif font to style Heading 1, to match screenshot.
Page 26, section "Applying styles," first paragraph:
Change to "Since most of the content will be in body text (the Normal style in this example), it makes sense to apply that style first."
Page 32, first paragraph:
Change the beginning of step 1 to "Replace the tag with the code that every..."
Page 37, last code section:
Indentation should be on line “margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}", not
"div.Section1".
Page 40, in the final style sheet, .MsoQuote rule:
.MsoQuote
{margin: 0 0 .83em 0;
margin-left: 1.2em;
font-size: .92em;
etc.
This should be consolidated into a single rule:
.MsoQuote
{margin: 0 0 .83em 1.2em;
font-size: .92em;
Page 41, the Grep expressions:
The second expression should not include "class".
Page 54, first paragraph:
The name of the palette is "Character Styles", not "Character".
Page 69, step 8:
It's not "Options > Anchored Object" but "Object > Anchored Object".
Page 91: There should be an additional bullet that says "convert the EPUB file into Kindle Mobi format"
Page 133, last paragraph, page 134, CSS rule:
It says that a default value is given to line-height and that can be harmful (page 134). But the final CSS rule includes the property. Please remove the line-height line from the CSS.
Page 138, step 1 and page 140 (with extra OEBPS).
"Multiple word names must be enclosed in parentheses.": This should be quotes, not parentheses.
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