This would ultimately be the HTML code that would appear on and in the ePub version (although I suspect nobody would have seen it there). Unfortunately, I didn't like the HTML that was getting created. I chatted with folks at a couple different publishers and they said they used DocBook. Wait, what? What is DocBook? Working in multiple formats, I longed for a way to build in a single format and then export into all of the other formats I needed quickly and easily. I'm looking at some HTML to PDF options to make this step easier but so far, I haven't found anything that's perfect. Manually laying out the content is a chore and means that minor edits to the book have to be done in multiple places. If and when I go to print, the half-letter size should hopefully be easier to print. This turns out to be the same size as the A Book Apart series of books. The next version of the PDF will likely use half-letter size. I think I used A4, which is unusually large. I used Pages and manually copied all the content into it, setting up styles and managed the layout of the book manually. It was this version that I ended up uploading to Amazon (which I'll talk about in a bit). I didn't make any other changes to get the e-book prepared for the Kindle. I had a friend try it on the device and went with it as is. Short and sweet: with such limited functionality, I used Calibre to convert from the ePub version to the mobi version. I never did find a reliable way to easy push new book updates to the device. Deleting from the device and deleting from iTunes and dragging the file back over may work. The problem is that the device caches information about the book so dropping in an updated file doesn't automatically update the book on the device with the latest version. Just drop the ePub file into iTunes and sync it to the device. Testing the ePub on my iPhone or iPad was somewhat straightforward. Hand coding the files turned out to be a better solution, although I still find updating the table of contents XML a hassle. I was able to buy an extended license to embed Quatro Slab in the e-book. It allowed me to maintain elements of the brand from the web site and bring them into the e-book. I was able to use font-face embedding, which I liked. Embedding HTML5 video, for example, will get stripped out automatically without any clear messaging telling you that the application has done so. I ended up using Sigil to expediate the conversion but discovered that Sigil sticks heavily to the spec. The XML defines the assets and table of contents and the content itself is in an HTML format. The ePub format, if you're not familiar, is just a zip file with a bunch of XML and HTML content. The problem was trying to figure out what some things wouldn't work. Apple also supports non-standard features like embedded audio and video. Searches revealed information that was often a few years old and targetting older versions of the spec. Trying to find accurate and up-to-date information on creating an ePub file targetted for iOS proved to be surprisingly difficult. I went from free to e-book to (maybe one day) print. This feels rather backwards from how a publisher would normally do it: print to e-book to free. Once I stop writing new content, I may very well do a print version, too. Lastly, I also went with PDF, which has great support across most platforms. ePub is the format that Apple uses and was a format that I wanted to push the limits on-even if maybe just a little bit. It lacks a lot of control over formatting and was the lowest common denominator. Mobi is the format used on the Kindle and other e-ink readers. Knowing my preference, I decided to try and put together the e-book in different formats, since each format has its own pros and cons. And so I started down the path of converting the HTML content into other formats. However, an e-book could be created and updated over time. With my intention to add more content, a printed format just wasn't (and still isn't) a practical option. Right away, though, many people asked for the site in an e-book and even a printed format. However, I also released it with the intention of continually adding new content to it until I had reached a point where I had a "finished product". After months of writing and not getting enough written, I released what I wrote as a web site. When I first started down the path of writing the SMACSS e-book, I had intended it to be either an e-book or a printed book. It has been an interesting experience and I thought I'd share a few random thoughts on how things have gone so far.
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