Inside the Box E-Book

David Kudler

• Herausgeber: Stillpoint Digital Press
• Serie: Ebooks for Indies
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 81

Beschreibung

An ebook is just a website in a box
But what’s Inside the Box?
In this clear, concise guide, ebook designer and indie author David Kudler folds back the lid of ePub, the universal ebook format. He introduces you to the nuts and bolts that make an ebook work.
Includes overviews of the ePub format and internal structure as well as basic guides to the HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that you need to know to make your ebooks look professional.
(Self-Publishing & Ebook Creation)
David Kudler is an independent publisher and author. He has been designing ebooks since 2010. He blogs about ebook creation, publishing, and marketing on Huffington Post, Stillpoint Digital Press, and The Book Designer.

Leseprobe

Inside the Box

An Introduction to ePub, HTML & CSS for the Independent Author/Publisher

byDavid Kudler

Copyright © 2017, Stillpoint Digital Press (stillpointdigital.com)

Published by Stillpoint/Athena

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-938808-45-6

Interested in independent publishing, ebook creation, and the ins and outs of being a twenty-first century author/publisher?

SIGN UP FOR OUR INDIEPUB NEWSLETTER NOW

and get a free ebook as our thank you!

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction — What

Is

an Ebook?

1 — Inside the Box: The Anatomy of an Ebook

Opening the Box

Step 1: Duplicate your file

Step 2: Convert to ZIP format

Step 3: UnZIP the file

What’s inside the Box?

The root of the ebook: the OEBPS folder

The traffic cop: The OPF file

The roadmap: The NCX file

All together now: The rest of the files

Clean Up

2—Speaking in Code: Ebook HTML basics

HTML

Block Tags

More Block Tags

<table></table>:

<h1></h1>:

<h2></h2>, <h3></h3>, etc.:

<hr></hr>:

<br></br>:

<img src="[file location]" alt="A description of the image"></img>:

Others:

Inline Tags

<strong></strong>:

<em></em>:

<a href="[file location]"></a>:

:

:

<span></span>:

Identity code: the ID attribute

3 — Elements of Style: CSS for Ebooks #1

The Rule of Law

Location, location, location

Inline Style

<style> Tag

CSS Style Sheet

4 — Properties of Style: CSS for Ebooks #2

The Room where it happens: Position properties

Margin/Padding/Border

Height/Width

Float/Clear

page-break-before/page-break-after/page-break-inside

Widows/Orphans

Other position properties

Dressing up: Appearance properties

Color/Background-Color

Font-size/Font-weight/Font-style/Font-variant/Text-decoration/Font-family

Text-align/Text-indent

Line-height

Display

But wait, there’s more

5 — Styling Priorities: CSS for Ebooks #3

Pecking Order: the priorities of CSS rules

9. Browser Default

8. CSS property definition in HTML document

7. Parent inheritance

6. Rule order

5. Selector specificity

4. User defined

3. Media type

2. Inline style

1. Importance

Notes

Landmarks

Cover

Foreword

This is the first title in Ebooks for Indies, a series of books that I'm releasing aimed at making ebooks easier to understand for independent authors and publishers. While creating an ebooks is a much easier process than it was even five years ago, it is still shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. I want these books to help you peak under that shroud and get a sense of how ebooks are created, how to make them better, and how to sell and market them.

I have aimed them at folks who are new to ebook production — this first volume is probably the most technical in the whole series, and it should be accessible even to a neophyte. That said, not eveyone feels comfortable playing around with the markup code and style rules that underlie how an ebook looks. Other volumes in this series will address the best ways to create ebooks without having to look at HTML or CSS.

At the same time, there was no way to cover the entire subject of coding ebooks without making this book overwhelming and unwieldy. I want Inside the Box to be a thorough introduction. I have included links for where to find more information in the text.

I hope that you find this book helpful! Let me know what you think of it — you can email me at [email protected] or reach out to me on social media. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

You can also check out my blog at stillpointdigital.com, where I talk about ebooks, about independent publishing, and about writing — since I am, like you, a writer. In fact if you sign up for my mailing list now, I'll send you a free ebook... on ebooks!

I look forward to hearing what you think.

David Kudler

Introduction: What is an Ebook?

There are lots of very complex questions when it comes to ebooks:

text and image formatting,

different file formats,

various workflows for creating ebooks,

and much more.

Defining “eBook”

For now, before we get into the more esoteric issues of ebook design, I'd like to start by defining the subject: just what is an ebook?

This may sound like a very simple question to answer, but it isn't as straightforward as you might think, and being able to answer it correctly will make many of the thornier issues of creating ebooks just a bit easier.

If I were to ask most folks to answer that question they'd probably say that an ebook is a digital file for reading text on a digital device -- a computer, tablet, or smart phone. And that answer would be true, so far as it went.

Unfortunately, that definition would cover a wide variety of documents that aren't ebooks. A Microsoft Word file, for example, is a great way to compose and share formatted text -- heck, you can even add images and hyperlinks, just like an ebook.

Word docs, however, are by definition meant for writing and editing the text, not for distributing it commercially. We don't want our readers rewriting sections of our books without our permission, do we? If they don't like what we've written, fine; they can write their own books!

PDFs

A kind of digital file that is frequently referred to as an ebook but that isn't is the PDF -- the now-universal Portable Document Format invented by Adobe as a way of distributing print documents digitally. Not only is it how we share our own personal documents (letters, etc.) through the internet, but it's how publishers have been transferring print-ready files to commercial printers for decades. How is that not an ebook, you ask?

The PDF isn't truly an ebook because it retains its format no matter the size of the screen that displays it. It will always be an accurate representation of the paper document that it represents -- on a 27″ monitor, on a 13″ laptop display, on an 9.7″ iPad screen, or a 4.8″ Galaxy s3 phone.

The basic unit for a PDF is the page. And so as the screen shrinks, so does the page size, and with it the size of the words, and with them both the readability. Anyone who's tried to read a PDF on a small screen knows what I mean.1

Characteristics of an eBook

What a true ebook, then, does, is to present correctly formatted text and images no matter the size of the screen it's being displayed on. In order to do this, ebooks get rid of the idea of a page; the text will format to flow properly, and when one screen is full, will flow to the next -- that is, they are reflowable.2

Images will resize (if the book has been properly designed) to the proportions of the screen. Ideally the book will be attractive and easy to read on any device -- and because each software application for reading ebooks has some reader controls, some whose vision is no longer as strong as it once was (like, say, me) can make it larger, while someone who doesn't like serif fonts can have the book display in sans-serif or, heck, Zapfino (don't try this at home). And this can all be done without changing the ebook itself -- the changes are simply user preferences within the app.

To give an idea of what I mean, here is a photo of the same book displayed on a number of different devices -- just the ones that I happened to have on my desk:

The History of eBook Formats

Now, there's another kind of file that is meant to do very much the same thing -- and you've almost certainly looked at dozens today. Web pages provide exactly the flexibility that ebooks require. And so when the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) started looking at trying to create a new ebook standard over a decade ago, they looked to the language of the Web -- HyperText Markup Language or HTML -- as a basic building block.

At the time, there were many competing "ebook" formats that publishers and distributors were trying to get tech companies to use:

PDFs,

Palm's mobi or Mobipocket files (the database-driven basis for the original Kindle file format),

Microsoft's LIT (an HTML-based format, but proprietary, intended for books to be read on the Microsoft Reader app),

and a few more.

The IDPF created a format that specified a self-contained set of HTML files in a very specific format, and called it ePub. In the past decade, it has become the standard ebook file format. Most ebook reader apps and devices use some variation on the ePub file format to display text and images properly. That includes:

Apple's iBooks,

Barnes and Noble's Nook,

Rakuten's Kobo,

and many more -- including all of the Kindles that Amazon is currently shipping.

3

And the ePub file itself is nothing more than a self-contained package containing a group of HTML files, with its own set of styles for formatting and a navigation document (or two) for making sure everything gets displayed in the right order.

And that is what an ebook is: a website in a box.

Next, I'll talk about what that actually means.

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