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Level 1

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Pages-to-EPUB workaround

For those interested in writing ebooks for the iPad directly through the Apple iTunes contract: There is an article with a workaround workflow so that most of the formatting and inline graphics could be carried over into an .epub document.

The article describing the Pages-to-EPUB workaround workflow is in the "How to Articles" at http://ezepub.com . Other free Author and ePublisher resources are there as well.

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link. <Edited by Host>

2-24" iMacs, 2-Aluminum 13" MacBook/MB Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.2), http://ezepub.com

Posted on Jun 16, 2010 7:21 AM

63 replies

Jun 23, 2010 11:43 AM in response to Chris Hayden

Well, it would be a lot of work, depending on what kind of book it was (I believe I mentioned earlier in this thread that the folks at Take Control say it takes a full week to convert one of their highly formatted books), but I have to agree that DW would totally not be my choice if you want to get something of that sort involved, and I'm not sure why you would. You for sure didn't save any time there and probably added to the amount of cleanup needed.

Chris Hayden Author

Level 1

105 points

Jun 24, 2010 6:15 AM in response to Barbara Brundage

Barbara Brundage wrote:
You for sure didn't save any time there and probably added to the amount of cleanup needed.

It would be a lot shorter than 15 hours depending on how well the initial document was pre-formatted. But, I do agree that none of these workflows, including building your .epub in InDesign CS5, are going to be instantaneous. One can dream, I guess.

As I said earlier, the .epub self-publisher is not excused from the finishing tasks that a professional publishing house would undertake to make a polished product. Any workflows I suggest are intended for those who are not willing to use Adobe Indesign CS5.

But regardless of the workflow, there will be time involved. Just checking a perfect book length novel should take an hour or so for those who absolutely want to catch any formatting errors.

Barbara, I'm sure you save your publisher a lot of work by submitting files that require very little tweaking in the conversion and finishing steps, but self publishers do not have have your toolset.

A lot of the battle is won in the planning - seems to be the right advice.

Jun 24, 2010 6:29 AM in response to Chris Hayden

Barbara, I'm sure you save your publisher a lot of work by submitting files that require very little tweaking in the conversion and finishing steps, but self publishers do not have have your toolset.

Nah, I'm not allowed to. I would much prefer to submit a laid out MS, for example, but I have no control over where production decides things should go and how large a particular illustration will be in the final layout.

A novel is a very different thing, since it doesn't mandate these things.

If I were going to write a novel in a web program, I would use wordpress (which is used fairly often for ebook production) instead of running it through dreamweaver, though. I was just commenting that I don't see the point of getting DW involved. I would have followed roughly your suggested workflow of WP app->Calibre->Sigil for a novel.

And novelists don't have to care about things like how ibooks 1.1 broke font tag support for body copy, a very big problem for anyone doing any kind of technical book.

Chris Hayden Author

Level 1

105 points

Jun 24, 2010 7:05 AM in response to Barbara Brundage

Barbara Brundage wrote:
Nah, I'm not allowed to.

Still, your raw MS (manuscript) is a cleaner starting point that what most people attempt. If I were doing conversions for others, I would prefer a clean text or rtf file with notes or strict minimal formatting using paragraph styles and images separately so that I could optimize the images to work best with the target reader device.

See, my workflow just got a lot simpler.

Jun 24, 2010 10:54 AM in response to Barbara Brundage

Barbara Brundage wrote:

What we can do is use InDesign, and go straight from InDesign to ePub.

Actually, that's not the end of it, by any means. There is a great deal that needs to be done to an epub after InDesign to fix output errors, and InDesign CS5 has some very severe bugs that have made it a poor choice till Adobe fixes some very big problems that are new with it.

Barbara, do you happen to have some link or reference to the ID epub problems? I still have not tried it, and I would like it to work at first attempt if possible. If there is no use even trying, I won't. If there are known pitfalls to stay away from, it would be good to know beforehand.

Jun 24, 2010 11:04 AM in response to Magnus Lewan

Hi, Magnus, for ID CS4, the best thing is to watch this:

http://instantindesign.com/index.php?view=414

(although there some specific tweaks necessary for ibooks afterwards, too)

EDIT If you aren't familiar with the basic ID process for setting up an ebook, it would be good to watch the first section, too, for a general overview

For ID CS5 problems, see

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/indesign-cs5-creates-faulty-links-in.h tml

and

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/update-on-indesign-cs5-links-bug.html

And in ibooks 1.1 span tags for body font are no longer recognized.

Jun 24, 2010 12:32 PM in response to Barbara Brundage

Barbara Brundage wrote:
Hi, Magnus, for ID CS4, the best thing is to watch this:

http://instantindesign.com/index.php?view=414

(although there some specific tweaks necessary for ibooks afterwards, too)

EDIT If you aren't familiar with the basic ID process for setting up an ebook, it would be good to watch the first section, too, for a general overview

For ID CS5 problems, see

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/indesign-cs5-creates-faulty-links-in.h tml

and

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/update-on-indesign-cs5-links-bug.html

And in ibooks 1.1 span tags for body font are no longer recognized.

Thanks, Barbara, that was just the kind of information I was looking for!

Jun 25, 2010 10:33 AM in response to Chris Hayden

I am having an ePub conundrum. I got my html file all cleaned up and into sigil. I tweaked and tweaked and finally got the file where I want it (I was using iBooks on my wife's iPhone 3GS to test).

Yesterday I picked up an iPad (and an iPhone 4). I noticed that there are interesting formatting differences between the two versions of iBooks which I had assumed were both the same "version" for both pieces of hardware. On iBooks on the iphone, my title page justifies center and my book text justifies left. On the iPad, my title page seems to justify left (the images stay centered). The body text force-justifies (justified left and right). But now that I think of it, my title page is probably also force-justified. I'm assuming there is no way to override this. My thought was to maybe convert the title and copyright pages to images.

Jun 25, 2010 10:57 AM in response to tasslehawf

My guess would be that the ipad is still using ibooks 1.0 while the iphone has 1.1. There are big differences between the two:

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/apple-makes-full-justification-worse-i n.html

Jun 25, 2010 11:17 AM in response to Barbara Brundage

So it was force-justifying (full justifying). Based on that blog, I was able to turn it off. I wonder if I should add an item into the preface about shutting it off.

I can't remember if the iPhone iBooks was off by default (I think it was), or if I turned it off. What a weird discrepancy.

Message was edited by: tasslehawf

Chris Hayden Author

Level 1

105 points

Jun 25, 2010 7:09 PM in response to tasslehawf

tasslehawf wrote:
So it was force-justifying (full justifying).

Don't forget to let Apple know how you feel this works or doesn't work for your books via the [feedback specific for each device|http://www.apple.com/feedback>.

Jun 26, 2010 11:50 PM in response to Chris Hayden

It's ironic that one of Apple's greatest ePub tools is never mentioned. ePub is basically glorified XHTML 1.1, and you can save a Word or RTF file directly to that with TextEdit, as chosen in the preferences. After that, it should be simple to put it into Sigil or ecub and complete the package.

Page layout software and word processors are simply not the right tools for making ePub books. But neither are Web design programs. What we need is a cross between them: A fully-developed word processor that uses XHTML as its native file format.

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,148 points

Jun 27, 2010 3:14 AM in response to AaronShep

ePub is basically glorified XHTML 1.1, and you can save a Word or RTF file directly to that with TextEdit, as chosen in the preferences.

What are you referring to exactly? The TextEdit .html option saves to html 4 strict and not xhtml.

iWeb does export to xhtml 1 transitional.

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,148 points

Jun 27, 2010 3:50 AM in response to AaronShep

PS Sorry, disregard my earlier post -- I now see the xhtml 1.0 option in TextEdit preferences.

Chris Hayden Author

Level 1

105 points

Jun 27, 2010 6:13 AM in response to AaronShep

AaronShep wrote:
It's ironic

There's lots of irony surrounding the subject of Apple providing .epub authoring tools. With a rumored 22% of the ebook market out of the gate, Apple has their own ereader iBooks.app, but no corresponding iBooks authoring kit. TextEdit does not have its own Discussion thread, and iBooks.app's Discussion is tucked in under iPad. So, I sense a shyness on rapid development for the non-pro-publisher sector.

An iBooks authoring kit is about the only thing that makes sense to me. There are plenty of 90% capable apps out there to develop .epub documents, but when you narrow the attributes as they are supported in the iBooks.app the gap left by the odd 10% becomes very apparent. Without an iBooks.app authoring kit aligned with the iBooks.app reader app, there will always be issues. BUT an authoring kit would need to be offered for Snow Leopard (or OSX in general) because most of the author/publishers out there are not going to undertake preparing books from an iPad. Just sayin'.

So, what's the plan? I, for one, will keep offering my [feedback via whatever app or device feedback form I think fits|http://www.apple.com/feedback>. I've seen good results with that in years past, and I think that is as direct a line as humanly possible to those at Apple who can make these differences.

I didn't omit any text editor, but rather spoke to the word processor parent of this thread.

Pages-to-EPUB workaround