The Readium project: open source EPUB 3 reference implementation

Readium | Digital Publishing meets Open Web

One of their goals is to provide an open source reference implementation of an EPUB3 reader in the browser. They have a Chrome extension which does that.

Excerpt from the site:

( 
Readium Open Source Initiative Launched to Accelerate
Adoption of EPUB 3: ACCESS, Adobe, Barnes & Noble, Copia,
Google, Kobo/Rakuten, O’Reilly, Samsung, Sony, others
support project to advance universal digital publishing
format
New York, NY, February 13, 2012 -The International Digital
Publishing Forum (IDPF) today announced the Readium Project,
a new open source initiative to develop a comprehensive
reference implementation of the IDPF EPUB® 3 standard. This
vision will be achieved by building on WebKit, the widely
adopted open source HTML5 rendering engine. A quote sheet
with quotes from the following is available at http://idpf.org/
readium-support : ACCESS, Adobe, Anobii, Apex CoVantage,
Assoc. American Publishers (AAP), Barnes & Noble, Bluefire
Productions, BISG, Copia, DAISY, EAST, EDItEUR, Evident Point,
Google, Incube Tech, Kobo/Rakuten, Monotype, O’Reilly,
Rakuten, Safari Books Online, Samsung, Sony, VitalSource,
Voyager Japan. For more information about the project,
including how to participate and links to downloads and source
code, visit http://readium.org .
)

epubmaker, Project Gutenberg tool to convert between HTML, ReST, to EPUB, Kindle, PDF

By Vasudev Ram


epubmaker is a Project Gutenberg tool to convert HTML or restructured text to EPUB, Kindle, PDF formats.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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O'Reilly Bookworm closed but other options exist

http://oreilly.com/bookworm/index.html

Inspired by nature.
- dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

Converting PDF to EPUB ...

By Vasudev Ram


Had a need recently to convert a PDF file to EPUB format to read it on my Android mobile (because I tend not to like heavyweight software such as that from Adobe, particularly for mobile, and I have FBReader on my mobile).

So googled for "PDF to EPUB" and found a few links:

http://www.2epub.com/

http://lifehacker.com/5509965/how-can-i-convert-pdfs-and-other-ebooks-to-the-epub-format

http://ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-epub

Checking out some of those methods.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Docverter HTTP API converts marked-up docs to PDF, Docx, RTF or ePub

Docverter, an HTTP API to convert marked-up docs to PDF, Docx, RTF or ePub (and other formats, both input and output).

Docverter is a paid service.

It uses pandoc, the swiss-army-knife format conversion tool (open source), which I've blogged about a couple of times before.

UPDATE: The Docverter service is not available yet - it is in closed beta. When you try to sign up, you see a form to enter your email address so they can inform you when it is open to use. They are using the model of gauging user interest and getting email addresses of people interested, as some other startups are doing nowadays. But in this case, the creator says that he already has some working code, just that it needs some improvement before letting users in. Interesting thread about it on Hacker News, where the creator, HN user zrail, also participates, answering questions about the service, including why it is a paid service when pandoc is free.

Inspired by nature.
- dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

How to create an ebook with Pandoc, the swiss-army-knife conversion tool

By Vasudev Ram


Pandoc is a tool that lets you convert many document formats to many other document formats.

I had blogged or tweeted about Pandoc some time ago, but saw this feature only today:

Pandoc can be used to easily create EPUB format ebooks.

I was interested to see that the process of creating an EPUB ebook using Pandoc is similar (in one respect only, that is one book chapter per file or directory *) to the process of creating PDF ebooks with xtopdf, my PDF creation toolkit.

Of course, the Pandoc method supports many more features (including markup, metadata, etc.) than xtopdf does. But xtopdf is very easy if you just want a simple set of text chapters converted to a single PDF ebook.

* One chapter per file for xtopdf, one chapter per directory for Pandoc.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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PDF Explained - an O'Reilly book

By Vasudev Ram



A book titled PDF Explained has been published by O'Reilly Media in December 2011. The author is John Whitington, who is the founder of Coherent Graphics Ltd, and "the author of one of the few complete PDF implementations, CamlPDF, which implements the PDF file format from the bit level up".

I had come across CamlPDF (which, as the name implies, is a PDF software product written in Caml, specifically, in the OCaml language) and its set of command-line PDF tools, a while ago (and may have tweeted or blogged about it then), but got to know about this book only today. Even though newer technologies such as EPUB are picking up (EPUB3 has been released), PDF has been and still is in very widespread use worldwide, and is not
likely to go away anytime soon; plus, its goals are not exactly the same as those of EPUB, so EPUB is not a complete replacement for PDF. So this book may be worth checking out for those who are or wish to be involved in PDF processing at a more than casual level.

Coherent Graphics develops command line PDF tools for Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix, and the Proview PDF Editor for Mac OS X.


- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Rich-layout ebooks with EPUB3, HTML5 and CSS3

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-richlayoutepub/index.html

The article is by Liza Daly, VP Engineering, Safari Books Online. It also links to an earlier EPUB tutorial by Liza, which uses Java and Python.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com
twitter.com/vasudevram

txt2epub - create an epub from text files

As the title says:

https://github.com/mfrasca/txt2epub

Came across this recently. It reminded me of the PDFBook.py program in my xtopdf toolkit, which does roughly the same thing, but with PDF as the target:

http://www.dancingbison.com/products.html#xtopdf