This repository is the starting point for my ebook and digital publishing experiments and related code. As with many other sites and projects, the contents of this site are under development and new pieces will be added as new ideas come up.
If you have questions or comments please let me know via Github issues, twitter @elrond25 or via blog comments if appropriate.
The following eBooks experiments are currently available.
A full length book with text and cover image provided by Project Gutenberg.
The HTML was hand coded from the original text with CSS that tests some of CSS 2 and 3's pseudo elements and pseudo classes. It has only been tested in iBooks.
TODO: Work on incorporating epub:type and WARIA roles to the book
Fixed layout example using pictures from the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. Also incorporates video (no captions or transcripts yet)
Using the first two chapters of Peter Pan (see above), with additional content tailored for testing, we test multiple open sourced fonts in different styles and weights to see which one looks best for which book. Because we want to test the font, so we will not subset them. This way you can crack the book open and use the fonts contained in it.
Please note that all the fonts listed in this page use the SIL Open Font License, a similar license or permission has been sought from the author. Check each font's epub for additional information.
The following fonts are under consideration
Using Font Squirrel's Web Font Generator we'll subset Adobe's Sourcecode Sans and compare the size of the full font versus a Latin 1 subset.
Process, tools and results are discussed.
Discussed in my blog
The SASS Files and resulting CSS used to create ebook stylesheets. I've chosen SASS because it allows more flexibility than plain CSS
How far can we take technologies that are still in development and use them to create long-form content for the web? Can we replicate these long form pieces in ebook readers?
Just as with web sites/appps, we need to have a standard styleguide for ebooks. This is a first attempt at doing this and it's likely to be incomplete. Still it's a good starting point for others to improve on the idea and have samples to present to prospects :-)
A very intriguing aspect of the epub3 specification is the ability to use SMIL overlays to create synchronized text and audion books
First pass at a Python script to generate the package file for epub ebooks. The script was created primarily to reduce the manual work of listing the files in both the manifest and the spine.
The Github Repository contains working versions of the script and an example package.opf showing the result.
To make sure it survived I created a mirror of the Epub Zen Garden and hosted it in Github.