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Build a digital book with EPUB

The open XML-based eBook format

Liza Daly, Software Engineer and Owner, Threepress Consulting Inc.

Liza Daly is a software engineer who specializes in applications for the publishing industry. She has been the lead developer on major online products for Oxford University Press, O'Reilly Media, and other publishers. Currently she is an independent consultant and the founder of Threepress, an open source project developing ebook applications.

Summary: Need to distribute documentation, create an eBook, or just archive your favorite blog posts? EPUB is an open specification for digital books based on familiar technologies like XML, CSS, and XHTML, and EPUB files can be read on portable e-ink devices, mobile phones, and desktop computers. This tutorial explains the EPUB format in detail, demonstrates EPUB validation using Java technology, and moves step-by-step through automating EPUB creation using DocBook and Python.

05 Feb 2009 - As a followup to reader comments, the author revised the content of Listing 3 and refreshed the epub-raw-files.zip file (see Downloads).

27 Apr 2010 - Refreshed the epub-raw-files.zip file (see Downloads).

03 Jun 2010 - At author request,revised the content of Listings 3 and 8. Also refreshed the epub-raw-files.zip file (see Downloads).

11 Jan 2011 - At author request,revised the content of Listing 5. Changed second line of code from <item id="ncx" href="toc.ncx" media-type="text/xml"/>; to <item id="ncx" href="toc.ncx" media-type="application/x-dtbncx+xml"/>.

12 Jul 2011 - As a followup to reader comments, revised the content of Listing 14. Removed ` character near end of first line of code from <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?`>. Revised code now reads: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>.

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Date: 13 Jul 2011 (Published 25 Nov 2008)
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (170 KB | 28 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 194576 views
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Before you start

This tutorial guides you through creating eBooks in the EPUB format. EPUB is an XML-based, developer-friendly format that is emerging as the de facto standard for digital books. But EPUB isn't just for books: With it, you can:

Bundle documentation for offline reading or easy distribution
Package blog posts or other Web-native content
Build, search, and remix using common open source tools

About this tutorial

Frequently used acronyms

API: application programming interface
CSS: Cascading stylesheets
DOM: Document Object Model
DTD: Document type definition
GUI: Graphical user interface
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
SAX: Simple API For XML
W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
XHTML: Extensible HTML
XML: Extensible Markup Language

You start this tutorial by generating an EPUB book manually to help you learn all the components and required files. Next, the tutorial shows how to bundle the finished digital book and validate it against the specification as well as how to test it in various reading systems.

Then, it covers generating EPUB from DocBook XML—one of the most widely used standards for technical documentation—and how to use Python to completely automate EPUB creation with DocBook from end to end.

Objectives

In this tutorial, you:

Learn what EPUB is, who's behind it, and who's adopting it
Explore the structure of an EPUB bundle, including its required files and their schemas
Create a valid EPUB file from scratch using simple content
Use open source tools to produce EPUB files from DocBook, a widely used schema for technical documentation and books
Automate EPUB conversion using Python and DocBook

Prerequisites

No particular operating system is assumed for this tutorial, although you should be familiar with the mechanics of creating files and directories. Use of an XML editor or integrated development environment (IDE) is strongly recommended.

For the later parts of the tutorial on automating EPUB creation, this tutorial assumes that you know one or more basic XML processing skills—XSLT, DOM, or SAX-based parsing—and how to construct an XML document using an XML-native API.

No familiarity with the EPUB file format is necessary to complete this tutorial.

System requirements

To complete the examples in this tutorial, you need a Java interpreter (version 1.5 or later) and a Python interpreter (version 2.4 or later) as well as the required XML libraries for each. However, experienced XML developers should be able to adapt the examples to any programming language with XML libraries.

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