One of the websites Tarakan created and continues to manage is Architecture & Governance Magazine, a community site with several hundred articles on the arcane art of Enterprise Architecture. A&G started as an actual print magazine, but it was discontinued with the success of the website. They continue to publish a PDF file for each issue, which is downloadble on the website.
Recently someone commented that they'd also like an eBook version of the current issue. Seemed like a reasonable request, and I was curious about the process of creating an eBook, so I decided to delve into it. And that world is still quite a mess.
An evolving standard used in iBooks and other places is the ePub format - "EPUB became an official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook standard." A single ePub book file is just an archive of other files, including XHTML and CSS for content and formating, an OPF file for metadata and ordering, and media files.
I searched around the intertubes for info on creating ePub format eBooks and ... well, good information and tools are scarce. So I just dug in, trying all the tools I could find to create a eBook from various sources files in A&G Issue 6-6. I had all the source text documents in RTF format, the original Adobe InDesign source file to create the PDF, the finished PDF, and all the image files.
First I tried Calibre, a "a free and open source e-book library management application" which seems geared more toward eBook reading and library management. It has numerous conversion options though, so I plugged in the PDF file and hit "convert". I received an unreadable 100 page mess of graphics and text. Converting from a fixed-layout print-centric PDF to a flowable multi-sized text-centric epub format wasn't going to be as simple as clicking a button. I played with it a bit more, putting in the source documents and it worked better, but I could not get a new article to display on a fresh page- it just flowed through.
I had discovered a few intereting websites on ePubs, including the oddly named and likely search engine confusing Pigs, Gourds and Wikis. The author wrote a book that focuses exclusively on ePub, which I wound up buying (although in dead tree format via Amazon, because it was cheaper than the ePub format .. go figure). It focuses on using Word or InDesign to create ePub books, along with some chapters that go into the process more deeply than anything else I had found. I found another post that goes way deep into the format, but focused too much on roll-your-own for me- I was looking for a simpler, more automated approach (since we might be doing this more frequently).
I happened to have InDesign CS5 and the Issue 6-6 InDesign source file, so I tried to follow her method in the book above. But again, trying to take a print-centric file and convert it was going to take too much manual effort to make a nice looking eBook. That and I had very little experience with InDesign. So what else..? A little more searching helped me find Sigil, "a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format." Sounded perfect.
And it pretty much is- it works very well. I had learned from the Pigs.. website that the only way to get chapter breaks to work in iBooks was to create a separate XHTML file for each chapter, so I created three XHTML files, one for each article in Issue 6-6. I cut & pasted the text from the RTF files into Sigil, which stripped all formatting. That was ok- it is better to start clean and build up, so I used the WYSIWYG features of Sigil to add heading tags, bold and italics and bullet points. I could even add images, although getting text to flow around them requires some CSS work (a similar method is shown in the ePub book). Perhaps a future version of Sigil will include a WYSIWYG method to make images inline.
The Table of Contents was created automatically using the Heading tags (so be sure to use them correctly- h1, h2, ..). I used the Meta Editor to add information on the Title, Publisher, Author, etc of the eBook. I took a screenshot of the PDF and created a document for it and moved it to the first- this caused it to be used as the cover image (maybe there is a better, more explicit way to do this, but I haven't found it yet). And voila- that's it. Since Sigil edits the ePub format directly, there is no conversion process - just save and you have an ePub. The resulting eBook looked great on my iPad.
Sigil is a nice app for creating a simple ePub format eBook quickly. You'll have to dig into the code if you want to do anything more sophisiticated, but it has a nice split-screen code editor for that. So unless you know InDesign well, I'd start with Sigil and see what you can do with it.
