[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

I suggest our wiki to find out what ePub is. If something isn't clear we can fix it. Why run off to never never land when the expertise is here.

Dale

And I suggest...what's the question, exactly? There are tons of resources out there for anyone who wants to learn how to code ePUBs. First and foremost, someone has to know that a thing such as an "EPUB" exists, and then, for whatever reason, want to make one. If they are genuinely interested, they can shell out under $10 to read Liz Castro's quite excellent "ePUB: Straight to the Point" and learn almost everything that they need to know, fundamentally, about ePUB (and can ignore nearly half of it dealing with InDesign). When they are done with that, they can come here, or to JediSaber's, to get more information about ePUB. Then they can download ePUBs made here, or any of who-knows-how-many ePUBs at PG, and see what they contain.

Curiously enough, there's a brand new "how to make ePUBs with Sigil" book for sale on the Kindle store, by a "Huey Tsen," which is a mere $3.99 ($10.99 in print). This "book" seems to tip the scales at about 30 pages, +/-, and obviously, you can point someone there if Liz's book is too bothersome for them to read all the way through.

OR they can take classes at Lynda.com. OR they can go to work for someone, learning to clean html first, and then make ePUBs. OR, they can just use a push-button interface like Jutoh.

This is, to my mind, simply reinventing the wheel. Anyone who has gotten far enough in their education/curiosity to even know an ePUB exists can find innumerable resources for making them, ranging from Calibre to Jutoh to Sigil to Scrivener to making them by hand. Hopefully, before that, they actually bother to learn some HTML and CSS, although that seems increasingly rare.

People can do what they've always done--learn that it exists, decide to learn it, do what I did (buy Liz's book and then download ePUBs here made by Jellby, particularly), open the latter up against the former and learn by doing. Maybe you feel like you wanted something different when you came here, but you, too, could have purchased the Castro book and had 99% of your questions answered before you ever came in here asking how to shortcut making an ePUB with "bells and whistles without learning HTML or CSS."

Making ePUBs is already quite simple, if someone will take the time to spend a mere week to learn. Whatever their interest--making their own book available for sale, or making ePUBs commercially for sale--I don't think expecting someone to invest a week in learning some level of expertise is unreasonable. And as numerous books are already available on the topic, and even more perfectly free, free FREE websites, what, exactly, are we discussing here and why are we discussing it?

If you're writing a book, then, great, write your book. If you feel compelled to write a tutorial for MobileRead, I'm sure that the wiki would be delighted to have your contributions. But clearly, I'm missing the point of why this is being discussed, or what the compelling need is. This constant questioning as to the "best method" to learn to make ePUBs sounds either like someone using the MR'rs as a sounding board for preparing a college paper or someone outlining a book on the topic. There are already tons of resources, and someone really interested in these resources would already have scoured the wiki, the Workshop, the ePUB forum and the sites pointed out by the people here. If you're really interested in what "newbies" need to know, why aren't you asking the newbies? Why would you be asking those of us who are already familiar with all the resources, websites, tips, tricks, etc., what a "newbie" needs to know, or, more to the point, where a newbie can find all those things?

Ask over on the ePUB forum and the workshop. Let them give you their noobie questions, and then you can formulate a competent course curricula (book, whatever). Won't those "noobs" be in a better position to tell you how they got here, what they want to know, what they don't already know, etc., than we are????

Sigil is a TOOL. It's not an entire training course rolled into one package. None of the "tools" out there take the place of doing a little learning. Everyone here had to "learn Sigil from scratch," as you ask us to imagine doing in your first post on this thread.

As far as teaching people to make ePUBs strictly in BookView...I'll be blunt. There are already far too many utterly crap books let loose in the ePUB world without adding more, encouraging people to let more poorly-coded ePUBs escape without proper coding by the "expedient" of using BookView. Sigil's not a word-processor. It doesn't have those functions, and it's not an authorial tool. It's an XHTML/CSS ePUB creation tool. It's not a "how to make ePUBs without knowing anything" tool.

Hitch