Top Media Tool

I got my iPad this Friday, as a royal Kindle fan, I don’t have Kindle owner’s remorse, but I understand the angst of those who do. With its grayscale display and does-one-thing-well approach, Amazon’s e-reader is neither as stylishly alluring nor as powerful as Apple’s gadget.

iPad uses the free, open e-book standard, ePub format. The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. it looks like ePub is as close to the MP3 of ebooks as it comes. And it supports digital rights management, something that’s sure to warm the cockles of the hearts of publishers, but there’s no DRM scheme that is currently specified as part of the format.

This post will teach those who want to read in iPad how to create ePub ebook easily with guidance in this post.

There are a number of ways to create ePub content:

1. Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com): a free tool for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux that allows you to convert to ePub from a wide variety of formats. Calibre currently does a better job than Stanza Desktop at preserving styles and formatting of source documents.
2. Adobe InDesign (http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/): InDesign is a high-end publishing tool for authors and publishers, and supports the creation of ePub files.
3. Feedbooks (http://feedbooks.com/share/): You can log into Feedbooks and create your own content, which will be made available in ePub, as well as other formats like PDF and Kindle. In addition, any books you create and share will automatically be included in the “Free Books by Feedbooks” section of Stanza’s Online Catalog under the “User Created Books” area, so you don’t need to download and transfer the book separately.
4. BookGlutton API (http://www.bookglutton.com/api): If you have your book in HTML format, you can convert it into ePub using their online conversion API
5. ePub Tools (http://code.google.com/p/epub-tools): Command-line tools suitable for batch processing and integration into toolchains. Includes tools for conversion from Word, RTF, DocBook, TEI, and FictionBook.
6. Adobe PDFXML (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars) – Per Adobe’s blog, this is useful for making small changes to existing EPUBs.
7. eScape – ePub Creator (http://www.infogridpacific.com/igp/AZARDI/eScape%20-ODT2ePub) – “It lets you instantly and effortlessly turn Open Office Writer documents (ODT) into perfect ePubs…”
8. eCub (http://www.juliansmart.com/ecub) – “a simple to use EPUB and MobiPocket ebook creator”
9. Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/) – “Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.”
10. Easy EPUB (http://www.easypress.com/products/aqpep/) – By simply uploading your InDesign or Quark book files, EasyEPUB will quickly produce a fully compliant EPUB version of your book within 5 minutes.
11. DNAML’s PDF2EPUB (http://www.pdftoepub.com/) – Convert PDFs to EPUBs in 6 easy steps. The nice thing about this software is that it can handle headers and footers which are often challenging when converting PDFs.
12. Stanza Desktop (http://stanza.lexcycle.com): Stanza allows you to convert from a large variety of formats like MS LIT, Mobipocket, Kindle, RTF, PDF, MS Word, and many more into ePub.

I will use Calibre as example to show how to create/convert PDFs or other ebooks to the ePUB format:

Step 1: Download and install Calibre, the free and cross-platform ebook management tool. The below screenshots below is taken on OS X, and Calibre also works on Windows and Linux, as well.

Step 2: The first time you start Calibre, select Default as your device type.

You could get more specific, but I found going with default worked fine for me, and I wanted to keep this as device agnostic as possible.

Step 3: Drag and drop the ebook you want to convert to ePub into Calibre

edit any metadata if it’s not already to your liking (right-click the book in Calibre and select Edit meta information -> Edit metadata individually), then click the Convert E-books button in the toolbar.

Step 4: Verify that you’ve got the correct Input/Output formats:

On the far left of the Convert window, you’ll see the Input format. On the far right, you’ll see the Output format. The input format should default to the format the ebook is already in, and the output format should default to EPUB. If it’s not, just choose EPUB from the drop-down.

Step 5: Convert!

When everything looks how you like it (you can change the book cover if you’re not happy with how it looks here), click OK and let the conversion roll.

Step 6: Move Your New ePub Book to iPad.

Once the conversion’s complete, right-click your newly-converted book and select Open containing folder to find your new ePub-formatted ebook. You can stop here if all you wanted was to convert the ebook to ePub. If you’re an iTunes/iPad user and you want to get that ePub book on your device, simply drag and drop the converted ePub book into iTunes. If you’re using an iPad, plug it in, make sure you’ve got iBooks installed, and just drag the book from iTunes to your iPad in the iTunes sidebar under Devices.

Enjoy! And that’s it. Next time you launch iBooks, you should see your newly converted ePub ebook, ready to read.

More Info about ePub:

The ePUB is a free and open standard for eBooks created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It’s designed for reflowable content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. The IDPF has championed ePUB as a single format that can be used by publishers and conversion houses, as well as for distribution and sale of electronic books.

It consists of basic XHTML for the book content, XML for descriptions, and a re-named zip file to hold it all in. Anyone can make these eBooks, and since they’re essentially just XHTML, anyone can read them.

While ePUB is a popular format, it’s not without criticism. The format is great for text-centric books, but is considered unsuitable for publications that require advanced formatting or detailed layout, such as comic books and technical tomes. That could result in some issues for textbook publishers. The lack of a standard DRM scheme could cause the format to splinter into different factions unless Apple forces the issue by adopting an open scheme.