EPUB 3 Best Practices: Optimize Your Digital Books

by Matt Garrish, Markus Gylling

Ready to take your ebooks to the next level with EPUB 3? This concise guide includes best practices and advice to help you navigate the format’s wide range of technologies and functionality. EPUB 3 is set to turn electronic publishing on its head with rich multimedia reading experiences and scripted interactivity, but this specification can be daunting to learn. This book provides you with a solid foundation.

Written by people involved in the development of this specification, EPUB 3 Best Practices includes chapters that cover unique aspects of the EPUB publishing process, such as technology, content creation, and distribution.


Get a comprehensive survey of accessible production features
Learn new global language-support features, including right-to-left page progressions
Embed content with EPUB 3’s new multimedia elements
Make your content dynamic through scripting and interactive elements
Work with publication and distribution metadata
Create synchronized text and audio playback in reading systems
Learn techniques for fixed and adaptive layouts

Genres: Reference, Technology, Science, Computers, Programming

375 pages, Paperback

First published November 22, 2012

Reviews

[Brian Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand the hesitation to get overly specific with implementation details given the designed flexibility of the platform, but there is so little practical detail here it is useless as a way to get started. Serves as a decent reference to learning by pulling apart other peoples epubs.

[Peter Baumgartner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explains the ins and outs of the EPUB specification 3.0. It was written by leaders of the working group at IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum).

The book is slightly outdated: The actual specification is 3.1, the IDPF has merged their work with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and some links do not work anymore. But the different chapters cover still the essential processes and pitfalls of the actual epub production.

Although the book is not completely up-to-date I will only subtract one star: When you are doing a research then you will see that there is – after a hype around 2011-2013 – almost no recent authoritative and comprehensive material on ebook production available. One has to put together different bits and pieces from diverse discussion forums (mobileRead as one of the best), from the resellers (eg. Apple, Amazon etc.) and from blogs and the self-publishing scene. I could not find up-to-date wide-ranging relevant material on the web (videos, courses or other training material). "EPUB 3 Best Practices" is still one of the best resources available.

The authors target the "ebook practitioner" (preface iX). But even if there are many code examples there is still something missing for the practical implementation: All explanations are on a general level as there are no tools provided to apply the knowledge directly in your own book project. Sure, this agnosticism to special products is intended by the authors as they have to present all the different stakeholders of digital book production.

For me "EPUB 3 Best Practices" was very valuable as I had just started to experiment with Sigil, an opensource multi-platform EPUB ebook editor. At the moment (End of March 2018) there is only a rudimentary manual of an old Sigil version two years ago, which covers just the different functions and some introductory tutorials of the software. The reason behind different functions and what they practically do with the code is not explained. But taken book and software together I could supplement my meager practical knowledge with a clearer understanding of the epub specification.

[Benoit Blanchon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book clearly explains the structure of EPUB documents and is a useful reference for anyone who wants to produce EPUB documents from scratch (i.e., without a dedicated editor).
I'm not sure the title "EPUB 3 Best Practices" is well chosen, because the book is not a collection of patterns or recommendations, but more a guided tour of the specification.
I found the text too wordy; it was surely possible to provide the same amount of information in half the size.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful and comprehensive. Provides insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the format, and can help as a guide for creating EPUB files of your own.