April 3, 2009 12:59 PM
Like just about every publisher, we're grappling with working out our ebook publishing strategy. Many of you have expressed interest in the EPUB format, an open standard that can be read on iPhones and Sony Readers.
So we've taken a first crack at formatting a chapter—consider this an alpha—and would love for you EPUB fans to take a crack at trying it out on your favorite device. Please download the file (about 4Mb), beat on it a bit, and post your comments here (please let us know what device you're using). Send any screen shots you want to share to lou (at) rosenfeldmedia.com.
The test chapter is from Donna Spencer's forthcoming book Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, which is due out in a few weeks. For your trouble, we'll send you the EPUB version when it's available. Or, if for some reason we can't swing EPUB, we'll send it to you as a PDF.
Thanks for your help!
Updated, 5pm EDT April 3: Woops. Lesson #1 of working with EPUB: DON'T ZIP AN EPUB FILE. Sorry folks, we know better now. The link above will now get you an unzipped version. Thanks to Chris Farnum, Liza Daley, and Diane Kenedy for letting us know (and deep apologies for the hassle). Next, on to EPUB validation. (And thank to Ben Crowder too!)
Comments
Lou-
I tried on iPhone and the download link doesn't do anything. I tried on my Windows XP laptop and successfully downloaded and unzipped the file. But since the epub doesn't have a file extension, Windows doesn't know what to do with it. Is it a PDF? Something else?
Cheers,
Chris
Posted by: Chris F. | April 3, 2009 11:34 AM
1. Don't distribute it as a zipped epub file. ePub is already a zip.
2. There's no title for the document declared in the OPF file.
3. It doesn't validate via epubcheck: http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/
Posted by: Liza Daly | April 3, 2009 12:16 PM
First off, I tried loading it into Bookworm but got a bunch of errors (having to do with the title missing and such).
Then I loaded it into Stanza on the iPhone and didn't run into any errors there. The text turned out fairly nicely -- em-dashes and quotes and the lists and everything came through just fine. Italics seemed to be lost, though (I'm not sure if there were any, but the references section didn't have any on the book titles). Also, near the end the "SM" wasn't superscripted, but the "TM" was.
The headings weren't separated from the body text, and they weren't bold or anything, so it was hard to tell them apart from the body text. (The chapter heading at the beginning also had a weird line break right after "All About.")
Diagrams/images were a little more problematic. All of the images listed a Flickr source URL at the bottom and a broken image, both of which cluttered things up a bit. The non-diagram images were easy enough to see, but the diagrams were too small to read and (this is a Stanza thing) I wasn't able to zoom in to see them more clearly.
Posted by: Ben | April 3, 2009 3:15 PM
Thanks folks, lessons noted in the update above. And my apologies for the hassles so far. File is now unzipped and we'll start working on validation.
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | April 3, 2009 3:53 PM
great idea!!!!
got the file and transferred it over to my iPhone (where it seems to look much better than it does on the Mac Stanza version (e.g., colour headings).
anyway, just checking it out -- keep up the great work!!
Posted by: Greg | April 3, 2009 7:54 PM
Tonight I loaded the sample chapter onto Stanza, an ebook reader. I first downloaded Stanza as a desktop application for my iMac G4. I loaded the chapter onto the desktop application and noticed that images would not display. I also noticed that section headings had no special formatting: Stanza Desktop Screenshot.
I then fired up the Stanza iPhone app an transferred the sample chapter from my iMac to the iPhone. I immediately noticed when comparing content that images did display for the iPhone, but underneath each image there was a placeholder for a broken image that could not display. Formatting otherwise was the same (disregard the justified look on iPhone since the default setting was determined by the app): Stanza iPhone Screenshot.
Posted by: Rob Fay | April 3, 2009 9:38 PM
I tried it in Adobe's Digital Editions and it's okay but the formatting and margin spacing goes a bit awry from time to time. I still find a PDF better.
Posted by: Andy Polaine | April 4, 2009 3:04 AM
Didn't know about Stanza till I read the comments. (Still a little new to the wonderful world of iPhone.) Be sure to give folks some instructions/FAQ about using epubs. I entered the URL directly into the Stanza app on my iPhone (it was a bit long...) and successfully downloaded the file. Looks good!
Posted by: Chris F. | April 4, 2009 11:15 AM
I've downloaded it from Stanza on my iPhone. I'm seeing almost nothing. Headlines mostly, and green on black. Let me know if you need a screenshot.
Posted by: mortenjust | April 4, 2009 3:47 PM
Sorry about that! A new one; not sure why that's happening. If you don't mind, please send the screenshot to me: lou (at) rosenfeldmedia.com
Posted by: Louis Rosenfeld
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April 4, 2009 3:49 PM
Successfully downloaded to Stanza on iPhone (had to write down the URL and enter it in Stanza). Stanza has crashed on me a couple times - of course might be a Stanza issue and not your file. Also, after I exit Stanza and come back, the chapter appears as a blank item in the list - no title. Still selectable though.
Glad to have my hands on Donna's new book!
Posted by: Patrick Lowery | April 4, 2009 9:56 PM
fix the MIME type on the file. Right now the file has the mime type of text/html. The correct type appears to be "application/epub+zip". You can add this to your server by either modifying or create a .htaccess file in the downloads directory containing the line: "AddType application/epub+zip epub"
Posted by: e.p.c. | April 5, 2009 9:30 PM
• can you convert the eps to a PNG or JPG?
• the images in the PDFs seem quite large on my laptop screen, do they need to be that large?
• do the images need to be PDFs or can you use JPG/PNG? I think that would help reduce filesize. I mean, just doing save-as JPEG from Preview.app on my Mac reduced the filesize of Figure 2.1.pdf from 480k to 72k.
Posted by: e.p.c. | April 5, 2009 9:42 PM
I'm a new epub user and found the following for use of epubs on my iPhone:
Posted by: Diane Kenedy | April 6, 2009 11:49 AM
People have already mentioned the missing required metadata, but this is a really big deal -- there's nothing in the file to identify it except for an auto-generated UUID.
All the images in the file are either EPS or PDF, neither of which are OEBPS core media types. This means that (a) viewers cannot be expected to display them and (b) the file is invalid due to the lack of fallback items for the non-core-type images.
The NCX table of contents contains no actual data. If there isn't going to be a real TOC the spec allows not having one, although actually having one is probably the better approach.
The paragraph formatting is a little odd... It looks like 0.44em of spacing between general text paragraphs? Most commercial e-books books tend to have print-like paragraph formatting, with no space between paragraphs and a line-height-or-so text-indent. Viewers for small-screened devices usually allow the reader to override this with their own settings.
The XHTML looks good though -- good job!
Anyway, HTH.
Posted by: Marshall T. Vandegrift | April 8, 2009 4:51 PM
Hi all, thanks again for the fantastic response and help. It seems we're a few ebook consultant's hours short of getting this up and running. I'm sending out feelers looking for such a person, but if any of you have any suggestions, please let us know. Thanks!
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | April 15, 2009 9:47 AM
hallo,
I put it on my iRex iLiad ebook-reader which uses the fbreader app to read epub books. The formatting isn't fantastic, but that is probably the fault of the reader app rather than your xhtml/css as it is similarly poor on any (x)html doc I read on the iLiad. The images don't work either, it just gives the name of the image and the flickr URL for it.
Your PDFs do, however, look fantastic on the iLiad, so I'm happy enough with them. Good luck working out your epub troubles and good on you for supporting open ebook standards
Posted by: Andrew Loch | April 17, 2009 12:48 AM
I've taken a look at your ePub sample using my Sony Reader PRS-505 and I do have a few comments.
The paragraphs are not correct. They have spaces inbetween and no proper indents. This makes for a lot of wasted space per page. Also, it doesn't look nice.
Now for the most serious errors...The graphics that have text...NONE of them are readable on the 505. They are too wide and when they get reduced to fit the screen, they don't display properly. You'll need to do some serious work on those so they can be easily viewable.
Posted by: Jon Wolf | April 22, 2009 12:11 PM