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Ask Slashdot: Composing an e-Book With a Couple of Bells and Whistles
New submitter Cbhihe writes: I want to edit an e-book, a scientific textbook to be distributed on the Kindle tablet to be exact. The book is written. For that I used LibreOffice.
It comes complete with index, drawings, pictures, formulae and its present look and feel is no different from the majority of scientific text, you might be accustomed to browsing. I need advice for the next step, which consists in making this digital pile of data suitable for an e-book.. with a slight twist. The e-book should allow for:
— picture zoom-in in pop-ups on screen
— allow in-text basic interactivity, e.g. when in a exercise, multiple answers are proposed, each answer when clicked should display "Right" or "Wrong" (for instance).
Can you recommend, if not a commercial package that allows such features right out of the box, then at least and preferably open-source technology needed for me to achieve what I want ? I am willing to get down to moderate programming to use your suggested solution. I am conversant in C, C++ and getting there with Python.
It comes complete with index, drawings, pictures, formulae and its present look and feel is no different from the majority of scientific text, you might be accustomed to browsing. I need advice for the next step, which consists in making this digital pile of data suitable for an e-book.. with a slight twist. The e-book should allow for:
— picture zoom-in in pop-ups on screen
— allow in-text basic interactivity, e.g. when in a exercise, multiple answers are proposed, each answer when clicked should display "Right" or "Wrong" (for instance).
Can you recommend, if not a commercial package that allows such features right out of the box, then at least and preferably open-source technology needed for me to achieve what I want ? I am willing to get down to moderate programming to use your suggested solution. I am conversant in C, C++ and getting there with Python.
Just be HTML+javascript. Then you'll have modern Kindles (assuming they can run web browsers) and the other 99% of the market too!
You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.
The paperwhite Kindles are hopeless at showing images.
They can't do what you are asking (zoom, etc).
This has nothing to do with whatever software you used to create the file.
If you want equations to come out reasonably, you have to use EPUB 3 or iBooks Author (which isn't open source). The problem you're going to find with EPUB 3 is that most readers don't support it yet, and you might have to distribute it yourself. I have a small publishing company and we recently did a book full of equations and ended up publishing it only on iTunes/iBooks and our own site. It has the equations done in MathML so you can copy and paste them into other things. Most of your other features are things we haven't tried to implement, but I suspect will cause the old EPUB 2.x validators to barf (even if it's valid EPUB 2, many distributors are using old validators).
As far as tools, we tend to export things from Indesign (because a lot of our books are in dead tree format, too) and then fix them up with BBEdit, TextMate, or Sigil. Sigil is nice because it will render the book for you. BBEdit will open a properly zipped up epub file package and let you hand edit things inside, but it doesn't do any of the cross-file updating that Sigil does (e.g. if you change a file name it will get updated where appropriate in Sigil, but you have to do it by hand in BBEdit). TextMate doesn't open epub packages directly, but it's useful as an editor (and any other text editor with regex support will serve you about the same). BBEdit and TextMate both have good regex support (more so than Sigil). I'm partial to BBEdit, while our other editor is partial to TextMate. We have a little "tech tips" section on our main site that describes how we export a word file and make an epub from it (it should be about the same with OO), as well as how we do references. Unfortunately there aren't any good epub editors available yet that support references in a reasonable way. Assuming you can figure out the EPUB 3 implementation of the features you want, you should be able to do most of what you need with a good text editor that has good regex support.
You can run your final product through Epubcheck 3 (or whatever version you want) and verify that it's valid. Most distributors use some flavor of epubcheck 2.x and will reject it if your file throws any errors. They may or may not accurately tell you the errors, and like any compiler, you can sometimes fix 30 pages of errors by putting in the correct bit of punctuation just before where the first error is thrown.
The Kindle ebooks doesn't do what you're asking for. So either drop the Kindle ebook requirement or abandon those interactive features. My recommended alternative would be a small website. If the hardware has a basic web browser with JavaScript support what you want is trivially doable. FWIW a TiddlyWiki would be very appropriate; self-contained, portable, your content can be easily adapted to it, and extensible for your needs.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Two, look at the Push Pop press technology which published Al Gore's Incontinent Truth, now called Our Choice. Aside from the politics, the technology in the book is everything the post asked for. I am pretty sure it publishes the book as an APP, but as mentioned an ebook is an extremely limited format, especially on a kindle.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
(1) Kindles and (much better) e-books don't do that. You might as well have asked for a flying pogo-stick.
(2) You may be confusing pop-up with box-out or even foot-note. If you want the 'less accomplished' to keep up then you can't do it with pop-ups[1] Instead write two books.
(3) An e-book reader is not a multi-media volcano of goodness. The opposite: A constrained text reader with occasional images and no character.
[Footnote 1] Note that a box-out remains in clear view forever. A pop-up vanishes after first use, so after being shown it isn't there for re-reference. A footnote a diversion for someone with a particular interest.
What you described is not an ebook, and there is no good reason to overload "ebook" with all of what you intend.
There's every good reason to "overload" an ebook with the features that the OP asked for. Many people (probably more than ever) are reading their ebooks on tablets that are perfectly capable of rendering all the features identified, and more. It's quite reasonable to want to put all of that into a neatly packaged file that a person can dl to their tablet and use offline. It's so reasonable that the group that defines the EPUB format has updated the format to support HTML5 in EPUB 3.0, which would be how those features all get implemented. The people who make readers haven't kept up with that-- most readers are still limited to EPUB 2, and many distributors are still using outdated versions of EPUBcheck to validate files, so they reject perfectly valid EPUB 2 files because they're too lazy to update their validator (which is free and open source).
As a reader of scientific material, I would like to see many of the features that the OP requested-- I read quite a few electronically published papers and books, and unfortunately the most common format remains flat PDF, which kind of sucks for reading technical content on a small tablet. An html based format (like EPUB) that encapsulates the whole paper or book, including scalable images and graphs, copyable equations, and video where appropriate, would be a much preferable format. And don't say "just read it off the web". I do read it off the web, but I also download papers to archive, and if the publisher disappears (it happens) or I stop having access to that publisher (e.g. my employer's library drops the subscription), I'd still like to be able to read the article in its entirety, along with all the multimedia supplements.
you need to keep up-to-date, too.
Sigil 0.92 was released on Dec 18 2015.
here's what the latest entry on http://sigil-ebook.com/ says:
Sigil-0.9.2 Released
December 18, 2015 ~ kevinbhendricks
Sigil 0.9.2 is a bug fix and stability improvement release of the stable Sigil-0.9.X series. It includes all of the changes and improvements so far and it has shown itself to be very stable in testing. Most of the changes from our last release Sigil-0.9.1 are bug fixes:
Bug Fixes:
. Update BuildingOnLinux docs
. Update Building on Mac OS X docs
. Fix example clips/searches loading on Linux
. Simplify UseBundledInterpreter Logic
. Fix bug when adding existing html links to stylesheets not being updated
. Fix bug in Well-Formed error messages due to bug inside gumboâ(TM)s error.c
. Add xmlns=âhttp://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml attribute to html tag if missing
. Fix lost DOCTYPE info when splitting or merging
. Completely rework pretty printing via gumbo to be much more robust
. Make identification and storage of page-map.xml more robust
. Restore Sigilâ(TM)s update checker thatâ(TM)s been broken for a while
. Update sigil_bs4 prettyprint_xhtml and serialize_xhtml routines to use logic of code in GumboInterface
. Update sigil_bs4 to use numeric entities when faced with nbsp so they do not get lost later in Sigil
. Fix bugs in sigil_bs4/prettyprint_xhtml and serialize_xhtml routines that failed to handle some void tags properly
. Fix out of date error message referencing Tidy
. Coerce missing or bad doctypes to meet either epub2 or epub3 standard
. Inject empty title tag if missing from head
. Html escape Index entry text used to create index.html
Improvements:
. Include Pull Request 161 by pinotree âoeSwitch TempFolder to QTemporaryDirâ to improve safety
. Preliminary Linux binary installer support added
. Add ability to change Sigilâ(TM)s user preferences directory by specifying a new path via the SIGIL_PREFS_DIR environment variable (path must be user-writable).
User Interface Changes:
. Add some keyboard accelerators to the Spell Check dialogue see Sigil Issue# 164
. Completely revamp Cleaning to use âoeMend Codeâ and remove PrettyPrintGumbo as on option
. Rename PrettyPrintGumbo to âoeMend and Prettifyâ and move to CodeView Right-click menu and Tools Menu
. Rename âoeSanity Checkâ to âoeWell-Formed Check EPUBâ and remove check icon people confused with FlightCrew
. Change ToValidXHTML by using serialize not prettyprint
It is hoped this release will provide a stable and up-to-date version of Sigil while development work continues on adding some additional epub3 support features.