Too many bells and whistles can irritate the reader, and even confound the ebook reader software or device. The first tip is to keep things basic and uncomplicated. That said, you can use any word-processing tool here that generates good HTML or XHTML in the end. Another advantage of starting from OOo Writer is that ODF serves as a good parent format from which you can repurpose your content as a PDF document, a Web page, or (as in this case) an ePub ebook.īut for those of you who wear see-through wrist watches to admire the mechanisms as much as to read the time, we will briefly discuss a more direct approach, later on, which assumes a knowledge of the ePub format and XHTML/CSS. Our workflow lets you concentrate on your book, rather than fiddle with the format. We will begin with Writer, because it gives us a familiar tool to work with and maintain the original source of our ebooks. Since the content of the book is stored as XHTML, the shortest way to an ePub book should start from a good WYSIWYG editor for XHTML. You can learn more about the ePub format from the IDPF website. We will not go into the intricacies of the format here - rather, we will concentrate on a workflow to produce an ePub ebook that passes standard-compliance checks. Among other things, it contains a manifest of the contents, metadata information, and the book’s content as files in the XHTML 1.1 format. zip, you can open it with an archive manager. It is a zipped container format if you change the extension from. You will note that with this add-on, you can not only read ePub ebooks, but also create a repository of your favourite ebooks, either as saved local copies, or as bookmarks in Internet repositories.ĮPub is an open ebook format developed and maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). An ebook will never smell as good as that old leather-bound volume of classics on grandfather’s bookshelf but the ebook format, residing inside an ebook reader, will let you carry that entire volume in your pocket.īefore we get into the creation of an ebook, should we not get a feel for what browsing an ebook feels like? Download the Mozilla add-on for reading ePub books, and point your Firefox browser to one of the many sites that host DRM-free ePub content (see References).

What epub