It isn’t just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter … —The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot
And you’d be right!
Long post, but with “under-the-hood” sneak-peek images!
Making ebooks is not for the faint of heart. It’s a brain-lethal combo of geeky nerdiness, creativity, concentration, and obsessive-compulsiveness that often makes me want to … pound things. I’ve heard it referred to by other epub-making hobbyists as a particularly frustrating game of “whack-a-mole.” When you think you’ve solved a problem, another pops up.
An EPUB is a group of XHMTL files, images, metadata, and fonts zipped up in a special archive. So anyone can make one. Making one that has accessibility baked in, that works across platforms, is trickier.
There is a standard for a valid epub file. There is NO set standard for the epub readers and rendering engines. A reflowable-text ebook will look different depending on what device or app is used to read it. With more robust mainstream apps and devices, the differences are fairly minor. Yet most apps and devices have individual quirks.
The ebooks I make are open format EPUB 3.0, and what you, the reader, will see, won’t be exactly what I see. We each will choose our own preferred settings, devices, or apps and that’s OK!
I learned how to make epub by reading about the process online. I started my education in 2010, shortly after getting my first e-ink reader, a Nook. My first publication was for a nephew, to whom I ended up giving the Nook.
I’ve spent time looking under-the-hood at other people’s epubs. I borrow code like crazy. I test. There’s little consensus online as to how best to go about ebook making. There’s good advice and bad. Arguments over how to handle any given element abound. Add in accessibility, and you have yet another arena of disagreement. Which means that one does one’s best and accepts that perfection is not reachable.
It’s been a rocky road!
Continue reading “The making of ebooks is a difficult matter!”
