BookGlutton co-founder: We’ve released an easy ePub conversion tool
By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers
I’m happy to announce the first tool in our Web API, the BookGlutton ePub Converter. It’s a simple way to create the IDPF’s open e-book format, ePub, from a basic HTML file. The tool can be used from anyplace on the Web, in back end scripts or front end pages, but the curious can play with it on our site, where we’ve put up some documentation and a test form.
I’ve voiced concerns about the ePub format before, but I’ve been working with it for over a year and want to make it more accessible to independent, open-source Web developers and tech-savvy Web readers. I think free tools like this, and hopefully open source libraries to accompany them, will do a lot for the ePub format.
Try the converter—and share feedback
So please, create some ePubs. Readers, convert some of your favorite HTML editions to ePub and let me know how it goes. Authors, if you feel overwhelmed about how to get your work into the ePub format, use this tool to generate boilerplates. Web developers, if you’re curious about the internal XML workings of the format, rename your epub with a .zip extension and open the files up in your favorite text editor. Ask yourself how the format could be improved for Web browsers and let the IDPF know what you think. And finally, share what you build.
Moderator: That’s an unofficial ePub logo. Hello, IDPF? When will you do an official one? Meanwhile I’d encourage people to try out Aaron’s ePub converter, as he suggestions—and share feedback in our comment area, not just privately. - D.R.
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May 8th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I’ve said for a long time that if the IDPF wants small publishers to try ePub, it’ll have to do something like this. I’ll give it a try and let you know what I think (here I’ve been hoping to have one more format to add to my tower of eBabel).
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForaBuck.com
May 10th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
As promised, I’ve done a bit of experimenting with this program. It appears to work very well with a few formatting quibbles (possibly related to deprecated HTML tags). I was able to convert an entire novel in a matter of seconds, and read that novel on the FBReader with no problem.
With a few tweaks to support graphics and minor formating fixes, this appears to be a usable system–and the price is right.
I’m going to do a bit more experimenting before I add ePub to my assortment of supported formats, but as I offer HTML already, any user wanting to read in ePub could use this as is.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
May 12th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
This is a very promising tool, however I did not see that it had support for having multiple XHTML files in the output ePub (ie for chapters). Using only one content file is on our list of things to avoid (see our ePub best practices guide) for anything other than very short content (<300K). While this is certainly allowed by the ePub spec, the problem is that for mobile readers, you will hit memory limitations for larger content, that you wouldn’t run into when the content is split up.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Jim,
I think you’re spot with the requirement for having support for multiple XHTML files.
One extra thing, as a very small publisher, I really need this to be automated — as in, the software should break up the book into a set of XHTML files based on headings or something that I can define.
I was moaning recently on an Adobe blog about this. It’s absurd that I need to go and create 100 separate InDesign files just to publish a 100 chapter ePub ebook from InDesign. There’s headings, a TOC, etc. so it must be pretty easy to work out a satisfactory structure.