Quote:
Originally Posted by aapezzuto
I don't care if it ever gets read natively on devices... If it is a good standard, and we can start converting all of our books to a single format... then regenerate them from there... Thats fine!
So, anyone willing to put their 2 cents in on what it will take for this format to become popular with people who archive their own books?
Im guessing they will need to build a good editor that can be used to easily alter/generate .epub files... without having to figure out all the compression levels for files, and mime types... etc...
Maybe a version of the spec that was meant to be read by a user rather than a software rendering engineer.
|
Here are three pages that discuss creating an epub by hand. The first one is the most detailed.
http://www.hxa7241.org/articles/cont...7241_2007.html
http://www.ebooktechnologies.com/OCF...singWinZip.htm
http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp
The structure of OPS 2.0 (epub) is in many respects much simpler than the previous OEBPS spec. This makes generating an epub with nothing more than a text editor entirely possible and actually, not too painful.
Only a few files (which are all text) are specific to the OPS spec. The content itself is valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2, which is usable in a wide variety of other ways, and can be generated by the usual web creation tools. The only caveats are that the OPS spec defines a subset of XHTML that must be supported, leaving the rest as optional. The same with CSS. This is not a major problem, as the vast majority of XHTML and CSS are required.
The few files specific to OPS are also text. In fact, they are XML. Since the content of these XML files will be very similar from one ebook to another, you can easily use one file as a template for creating another ebook.
As you can see when you have read the referenced web pages, there is only one mimetype file required and it is only one line. It doesn't change, so you can keep using the same file for all your epub ebooks. As far as compression, only this mimetype files must have no compression. The other files use standard Zip compression.
One thing to be cautious about when reading those web pages: they were written before the OPS 2.0 spec was finalized (which was very recently). There are a few differences between what those web pages recommend and the final spec requires. Nothing major, but you need to double check things.
We still need more tools to make creation of an epub easier. Doing it with a text editor is not for everyone. Even I would prefer a tool dedicated to the task. Perhaps Hadrian can offer some helpful advice, since he has setup some type of automated system on his web site.