Adventures in epub
Dec. 7th, 2009 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesBeen playing with the epub format that the current crop of readers - including my Cool-er, the Sony readerss and the iPhone Stanza app - use. Epub is a fairly new standard, and it's intended to be easily reflowable (in the way that PDF is not) so that different kit can present it well. It shares a lot of technical heritage with HTML at first glance (it's basically HTML + styles + images + provision for DRM all zipped into a container), and that's fine by me.
Epub is so much better than PDF that it's worth converting your PDFs into epubs. Sites like epub2go make that easy. Like any machine-driven PDF conversion you'll get occasional layout quirks; for regular books they're trivial (occasional line-breaks where some numpty used hard returns to control layout) but you'd want to proof-read the thing first. To edit epubs, I've been using the open-source Sigil editor and it's just dandy.
Vendors take note: offering only PDFs is lame. Adobe Digital Editions offers all the DRM you'll ever want for epub, so get with the programme. Kthxbai.
I had a crack at converting comic books for readers too. Technically it's easy: Extract the CBR/CBZ file into images (it's just a ZIP with a different name), resize to something sane (most readers' native res is 600x800), and then make an epub document that has the images in a row - since it's HTML you could easily build a toolchain to do the grunt work. Rich, colourful stuff like the modern DC and Marvel offerings turn into goopy grey even w. Must try on some line-art. Can anyone recommend a manga to rip?
Epub is so much better than PDF that it's worth converting your PDFs into epubs. Sites like epub2go make that easy. Like any machine-driven PDF conversion you'll get occasional layout quirks; for regular books they're trivial (occasional line-breaks where some numpty used hard returns to control layout) but you'd want to proof-read the thing first. To edit epubs, I've been using the open-source Sigil editor and it's just dandy.
Vendors take note: offering only PDFs is lame. Adobe Digital Editions offers all the DRM you'll ever want for epub, so get with the programme. Kthxbai.
I had a crack at converting comic books for readers too. Technically it's easy: Extract the CBR/CBZ file into images (it's just a ZIP with a different name), resize to something sane (most readers' native res is 600x800), and then make an epub document that has the images in a row - since it's HTML you could easily build a toolchain to do the grunt work. Rich, colourful stuff like the modern DC and Marvel offerings turn into goopy grey even w. Must try on some line-art. Can anyone recommend a manga to rip?
