Exporting fixed-format ePubs from InDesign

I WANT CANDY!! – Fixed-format EPub displayed on Readium

A couple of months ago Adobe launched InDesign CC 2014. Among its new features is the ability to export your documents as fixed-format ePub 3. This is really rather exciting. Prior to this update you either had to go to a specialist conversion company or pretty much hand code files. Either way it was a palaver and often an expensive palaver at that. I’ve been using a very good conversion script (ePub Crawler) for the past year (and will continue to use it for some projects), but this is something else! I’ve just got around to having a proper look at this new capability and I’m impressed. InDesign CC 2014 can now export valid ePub 3 fixed-format ebooks as quickly and easily as exporting a PDF. Barring a few minor issues and things-to-watch-out-for, the resulting file will be identical to the InDesign book file.

What is a fixed-format ebook?
Fixed-format ebooks reproduce what is on the printed page (like a PDF). The text is live and can be selected, searched, defined and read aloud (depending on ePub-reader software capabilities). The new InDesign export places all of the page elements exactly as they are in InDesign and each word is dealt with individually, so your line endings and spacing remain intact. (It also means that if you crack open the ePub files and look at the HTML it looks like the stuff of nightmares, but that’s another story.)

Currently Apple iBooks is the only platform that really has full support for all ePub 3 has to offer, however other retailers are following (I’ve had some success with opening the resulting files in Kobo apps, for example. They will also open in Google Chrome with the free Readium extension installed and I’m pretty sure they’d be fine on Google Play.) But I have spoken to some people who are still very dismissive about fixed-format ePub – there’s just not enough support on other platforms, why would you want to, isn’t it just easier to convert to PDF? Well, yes – but Apple don’t sell PDFs (nor do any other major ebook retailers to my knowledge) so if you want to sell a PDF book you’ll have limited places to sell it. And – did I mention? – if your book is set up correctly export is no more time-consuming than exporting to PDF. So you can still export to PDF if you want to and export a version you can at least sell on Apple iBooks for very little additional outlay – probably less than the cost of getting a proof copy printed.

Fixed-format conversion is most suitable for:
✔ Children’s picture books
✔ Photo books
✔ Highly designed and illustrated non fiction and reference
✔ ‘Coffee table’ books
✔ Cookery books (and other instructional books)
✔ Any book where it is important to keep the design and layout intact
✔ Prospectuses or catalogues

So who would benefit from this?
✔ Publishers and self-publishers wanting to release backlist titles quickly and cost effectively
✔ Publishers and self-publishers creating new titles in the above fields. If new titles are designed with an eye to exporting to ePub on completion, the convertion is very quick and pain free.
✔ Photographers and artists (Photo books, portfolios and ePub albums for wedding clients, for example)
✔ Bands and other performers (tour books, blogs, programmes, etc)
✔ Organisations and retailers who would benefit from conversion of prospectuses and catalogues, internal and external training materials, etc, to ePub to allow them to be read on a wider range of apps and devices

I’ve incorporated fixed-format ePub into the range of typesetting, layout, editorial and conversion services I offer. I don’t give flat-fee prices at the moment because every project is different.
I can:
✔ Convert your final InDesign files to fixed-format ePub more cheaply and quickly than I used to be able to offer. (If your files are suitable this takes the same time as saving to PDF.)
✔ Place video and audio prior to conversion
✔ Assess your files’ suitability and make font substitutions and layout tweaks prior to conversion
✔ Re-set and layout (from old backlist, etc)
✔ Set up new titles from scratch

Sample Books
I’ve set up a couple of 30-ish-page sample books. One is the full text of The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book, illustrated by Walter Crane and the other is a section of The Candy Maker’s Guide, a recipe book first published in 1896 by a manufacturer of confectionary and baking equipment. (Both public domain texts – the photos are mine.)

Here are some screen grabs from Sleeping Beauty:

Note the overlapping text on the headings. The text is still live.

InDesign layout sample – Sleeping Beauty

IBooks screen grab showing thumbnails

This one has a path around the image of the girl on the left. Every word is in exactly the same position as in the InDesign file. (You might have noticed the overflowing text box below. InDesign will not warn you of text overflow on export – it just assumes it’s what you want.)

InDesign layout sample – Sleeping Beauty

IPad screen grab showing thumbnails

Now here are some screen grabs from the sweets book:

Again we’ve got a clipping path around the sweet jar and I put a feather on it (the path is rough, I know – but the point is that it is exactly as it was.)

InDesign layout sample – sweets

IBooks screen grab

Here’s a spread showing a mixed single- and two-column layout and images with transparency.

Sweets spread example

You can set the ePub up so that it displays a table of contents as thumbnails like this, or if you set up a table-of-contents style, you can have it display a multi-level toc in words.

Thumbnail Table of Contents

This shows looking up ‘live’ words in the built-in dictionary.

IBooks showing definition of word

So what can’t you have?
✘ Hyperlinks in text or internal links
✘ Live text that is horizontally or vertically scaled, or kerned
✘ Live text with strokes, gradient fills, drop shadows etc.
✘ Live text on a path (text will flatten on conversion)
✘ Gradients (this can be overcome by flattening to jpg first)
✘ This conversion process is not suitable for adding audio with read-along text highlighting
✘ Postscript fonts

(Adobe are still working on enhancing the export, so some of these issues will be overcome soon.)

Backlist conversion and fonts
The major issue when converting InDesign documents is fonts. Many publishers are still using (or used to use) Postscript files. These won’t work in ebooks, so if your books contain Postscript fonts they will have to be replaced with Truetype or Opentype fonts. Many common fonts have Truetype or Opentype versions, but more obscure fonts might have to be replaced with similar fonts. It’s also important to make sure your fonts are licensed for ebook use. They often aren’t. Ideally new titles should be designed using correctly licensed Truetype or Opentype fonts.

Multimedia
You can also add video and audio if you so desire – obviously if you are converting a print book you might have to make some design tweaks to make room for the media. Video and audio can be placed directly to the InDesign file. You don’t have any choice over the video/audio controls’ appearance (but I believe you can edit the css if it really bothers you.) There is also support to link to Youtube etc if you don’t want to embed your media.

Here are a couple of screen grabs from a small test file I made.

How video looks on the page. You can’t customise the controls.

The audio controls can’t be customised.

A note about tracking

I was asked about tracking text. The screen grabs below show text tracked backwards and forwards.

InDesign showing text without tracking

InDesign showing tracked text in heading and bottom line.

EPub showing tracked text

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Victorian Children’s Non Fiction: The Young Naturalist – 1879

This week I bought a DVD of digitised out-of-copyright books about Lepidoptera and other insects. The are mostly 19th and early 20th century titles. Some have beautiful colour plates and some have hand-coloured illustrations.

This one caught my eye. This was published in the UK in 1879 – and is about butterflies and shells.

Cover

title page

The writing is aimed at younger readers and goes into a lot of detail about what the Greek and Latin means in the scientific names – often recounting the odd myth or two if relevant.

Greek and Latin myths

Text about the large blue

Colour plate

Fixed-format epub with read-along audio

IPhone and iPad

I’ve now added read-along audio to the ‘list of things I can do’. Specifically fixed format ePub for IOS devices with an audio track that highlights each word.

I can’t show you a sample because I’ve been working on copyrighted material. Maybe one day I’ll get around to making something, but the first thing I learned about the process is that it’s time consuming – oh so very time consuming.

You will need:

• One fixed-format ePub
• One or more audio tracks saved in .m4a format
• A .smil file for every page that contains text

 

Method:

1. First you need to mark the start and end point of every word in the audio. (I split my audio into one file for each page –  you can use just one I think, but I haven’t tried it) Apple apparently recommends that you use a program called Audacity – which is handy because I already have it. But it is free anyway and easy to use. You will have to find the start and end point of each word by creating a selection, listening and fine-tuning it until it’s right. Then you press cmd b to create a label – you don’t have to write anything in the little box that comes up (I just did it to draw your attention to it).

When you have marked every word you can export the labels to a text file. When you open the text file all the start and end points of the label, and hence the word, are there in a list.

This will take some time. I’m sure some clever person has or will shortly automate this process, but until then there is nothing for it but to sit and listen … over and over again.

Marking the audio timings

 

2. Next you will need to create your .smil files. Below is a sample showing just three words. This is where you add your timings you made earlier (they don’t have to be in red though!).

<smil xmlns="http://www.w3.org/ns/SMIL" 
 xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops"
 version="3.0">
 <body>
<par id="par1">
<text src="6-page6.xhtml#W1"/>
<audio src="audio/audio3.m4a" clipBegin="0.000000s" clipEnd="0.632985s"/>
</par>
<par id="par2">
<text src="6-page6.xhtml#W2"/>
<audio src="audio/audio3.m4a" clipBegin="0.632985s" clipEnd="0.964874s"/>
</par>
<par id="par3">
<text src="6-page6.xhtml#W3"/>
<audio src="audio/audio3.m4a" clipBegin="0.964874s" clipEnd="1.214646s"/>
</par>
</body>
</smil>

3. Next you need to mark up your html. Each word is wrapped in a span with the id corresponding to the text source number in the .smil file. For this short example you’d end up with a paragraph that looked like this.

<p><span id="W1">The </span> <span id="W2">Cat</span> <span id="W3">sat</span></p>

 

4. Next you need to update your content.opf file.

Remember to list all your audio and .smil files in the manifest and give them a unique id.

Then in the entry for the html files with audio you must remember to add:

media-overlay=”ID of corresponding .smil file”. This is really important – if you don’t do this properly it won’t work.

 

5. Then go into the css file and add this.

}
 .-epub-media-overlay-active{
 color: red;

This is saying to highlight the words in red (but it can be any colour you like).

 

6. Finally zip your ePub file back up again and test it out. If you have got everything right you should see a speaker icon in the top right of the menu bar, and if you’ve got everything absolutely right you will be able to have your file read to you and turn the pages automatically or manually. (Have you got the volume turned up?)

So then you’ve got everything right  and you try to validate it. And find it won’t validate – yep that’s right – this is quite normal; the validator doesn’t accept media overlays or some such gubbins.

 

So there you have it. Not a quick snack!

 

I used Read Aloud ePub for iBooks by Liz Castro  as my guide. The section about using GREP to help in the markup was extremely useful.

I’ve been a bit quiet lately… (or the week I built my website)

…This is because I’ve just gone freelance. Yes – it’s now up to me to find people to do edit-y things for, for money, on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

When I went freelance people the first thing most people said was: ‟Have you got a website?” and ‟Well I’ve got my blogs…” didn’t seem to cut it.

So…

I noticed that my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription included Muse – a program that allows you to create websites without coding, so I thought I might as well give that a go.

So I rolled my sleeves up and got stuck in with the help of the amazing Lynda.com training website. I’m really pleased with what I ended up with, by myself and with no coding. It’s great for my needs (so that people can see what I do and contact me). I’ve even made tablet and mobile sites and my own little icon in the browser address bar.

www.jillsawyerphypers.co.uk

Website screen shot

And what’s with the hares?

Well hares are usually pretty shy, elusive and solitary, but I have found a place where they gather – albeit a long way off. On the day I went officially freelance I was walking in the woods with my husband and two hares came out on to the track and came up close to me. I’m not superstitious, but as hares are meant to represent independence, swiftness, growth and new beginnings, it seemed like a good omen to me – so I’ve adopted the hare as my symbol so to speak. And they are simply beautiful animals too.

Ready for my close-up

Hares approach

Some formatting tips for self-publishers or It’s all about consistency

Formatting your book isn’t just about correct use of grammar and spelling. Here are some tips and pointers to making your book look like it’s been set by a professional.

• Search-and-replace is your friend – but use it wisely. Always check that your search query is set up properly and never ‘change all’ unless you are absolutely sure you really want to ‘change all’.
• Search and replace multiple spaces. In the past if you used a typewriter you would type a double space at the end of every sentence to create a clear sentence break in the monospaced typewritten text. Many authors still do this – particularly those who were brought up using typewriters. It’s not necessary anymore and can create weird spacing. This is one of the first things I do when I’m setting text.
• Change double dashes – – to n – or m — dashes. Again this is a hangover from the days of the typewriter. Typists did this to distinguish an n dash from a hyphen. The typesetter would change these into n or m dashes as indicated by the copy editor. On a Mac keyboard an n dash is created by typing alt hyphen and an m dash alt shift hyphen.
• Change default (′straight′) quote marks to typographers’ (or ‘curly’) quote marks.
• An ellipsis … is used formally to show some text has been omitted, for example in a long quotation. But it is more common these days to use an ellipsis to indicate a tailing off or pause in thought. Ellipses are three dots – not four, five, or as many as will fit on a line. On a Mac keyboard type alt semicolon (…) not dot dot dot (…) or, worse, dot space dot space dot (. . . ). If you use dots (particularly in ebooks) you could end up with a dot or two at the beginning or end or a line. There’s no need to add a full stop after an ellipsis at the end of a sentence – although some people do. Don’t use a comma after an ellipsis in the middle of a sentence.
• Check numbered lists are in numerical order. It’s very common to mis-number your points, and unless you are using an automatic list function it’s easily missed.
• Be consistent about how you treat numbers. Which ones do you spell out and which do you write as numerals?
• Check whether your numbered lists need to be numbered at all. Will bullet points do? You only generally need a numbered list if you are describing a sequence (eg a recipe) or where the amount of items on the list is an important point.
• Widows and orphans. Try to avoid having the last line of a paragraph at the top of a new page or the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page.
• Avoid having only one word on the last line of paragraphs.
• Avoid having words stacking on top of each other – particularly at the beginning and end of lines.
• Check you’ve punctuated the ends of your sentences and that there is no space before the punctuation. […end of sentence. NOT …end of sentence .]
• Paragraph spacing. Either have a line space between paragraphs or indent the first line of each paragraph. Don’t do both. Don’t indent the first line of the first paragraph after a heading.
• Decide if you’re using double or single quotes (speech marks) and use them consistently.
• Make sure your heading styles are consistent. Generally the more important the heading the bigger and bolder it should be. Make sure you capitalise your headings consistently too. Don’t have:

Heading Number One

Heading number two

HEADING NUMBER THREE

Heading no 4.

Lastly – a little bit about spelling

• Make sure your spellings are consistent. There are often perfectly correct variant spellings (eg: OK or okay; curtsey or curtsy). Pick one and stick with it.
• Use your spell-checker, but don’t rely on it. It won’t usually pick up words that are spelled correctly but in the wrong context. The girl wrote in her dairy. The girl wrote in her diary. […are two very different things!]
• A spell-checker won’t be able to tell if you mean you or your and breath or breathe either. These come up a lot. For some reason we often miss the r off your and the e off breathe when we type.
• And watch out for auto-correct – it’s often more trouble than it’s worth!

A couple of pages of Lorem ipsum showing typesetting errors and issues.

What is an ePub file? Why won’t it validate when I make one in inDesign?

Yesterday an email dropped into my inbox and I found myself doing some impromptu ePub troubleshooting on an ePub that wouldn’t validate. The ePub had been exported through inDesign – I don’t know which version at the moment.

Now – inDesign is a great conversion tool – but unless you get everything set up right it’s unlikely that your ePub will validate without cracking it open and making some tweaks. In fact – it’s unlikely that it will validate straight from InDesign whatever you do. It’s just a question of how much you do in inDesign.

So I exported one of my test files with some deliberate errors to see what I landed up with. Oh dear.

Validation errors

A while back I wrote a post on what an e-book ‘file’ is. I mentioned that an ePub file isn’t a single file at all, but a zipped-up collection of files. Screen shot below.

unzipped ePub

Just to recap: the xhtml files are the content of the book. It’s a good idea to set them up as one file per chapter.

split screen

This is a split-screen view in Dreamweaver. The xhtml on left and how it should look on the right.

The toc.ncx file contains the table of contents.

Table of contents

The css file deals with how the text is styled. This can be a world of pain, but doesn’t tend to stop your file validating.

The content.opf file is the one you really want to check out if your file won’t validate.

Content.opf file

Notice that there are a whole load of metadata fields that begin with <dc:. You are likely to have validation problems if your title, date, language and identifier fields aren’t filled in. The title is the main one. E-readers often run the title across the top or bottom of the screen and it’s pulled in from here. InDesign should pull these in during the export – but only if it’s set up to. The title field (and some others) is dragged in from ‘File Info’ in inDesign – it’s NOT the file name. I know from working in print for ages that we rarely fill in the file info box for print, or if we’ve used files as templates they might contain old info. So that’s one to get into the habit of filling in.

The next section is the manifest. This is a packing list of everything that’s in the ePub folder. If anything is listed here it must be in the folder. Everything in the folder must be listed here. File names and file types must match, or your file may not validate.

The Spine lists the order that the files will appear. Again, if there are any mismatches your file might not validate.

Finally there is an optional section called the Guide. This isn’t created by inDesign at the moment. You will have to go in and create it manually. It seems to be more of an issue if you want to convert to Kindle format. It shows the Kindle software where the cover, table of contents and the start of the text is located. It won’t stop your ePub validating, but if you convert to Kindle format it may throw up an error if it’s not there.

content.opf file. Spine and guide

And finally don’t have spaces in file names – EVER. It’s a good idea to get into the habit of just using letters and numbers for any files you create. You’ll notice that the majority of warnings in the first image above are down to my inDesign file name containing spaces.

And remember – validation is only the beginning – you can have a file that validates perfectly, but it can still be riddled with formatting errors that will cause it to give poor user experience.

iBooks Author experiments

Last week was a week for conversations with various individuals and companies about fixed-format epub, KF8, Adobe DPS, book apps and their various merits, capabilities, pitfalls etc. During those conversations I was reminded of iBooks Author. I downloaded it ages ago, but had only given it a cursory glance.

So over the weekend I took it for a test drive. (Please note: I’m using my own photographs and made-up or placeholder text. The ‘book’ is a test of the program’s abilities.)

On the plus side iBooks Author is free to download.
But on the minus side it only works on a Mac running Lion and above. Which leaves a lot of potential users out in the cold.

Another minus (for some people) is that if you want to sell any books you create, you must do it on the iBooks Store. But you can easily test them on your iPad, give them freely away, er, free, and you can make PDFs (although they won’t have any interactivity and I haven’t tested the quality).

Anyway:

When you open iBooks Author you’re presented with a number of templates to choose from. They range from photo book layouts to text-heavy ‘classic’ layouts, recipes etc. You seem to have to choose a layout to start with, but they are all completely customisable. The ‘basic’ layout is probably the one to go for if you want to go it alone.

This is a screen shot of the iBooks Author with my test book in progress. Note it implies that you have to import images through iPhoto. You don’t. You can drag and drop from desktop or Bridge. There’s a pull-out drawer of styles on the right and page thumbnails on the left.

Screenshot of iBooks Author

You test your book by hooking computer to iPad with the iBooks app open and clicking Preview. The book is downloaded to iBooks and is completely functional – except it has ‘Proof’ written across the corner of the cover. (The book next to it is Animals from Miles Kelly.)

iBooks library screen

This is a chapter opener, with the thumbnail table of contents along the bottom. The table of contents is automatically generated and updated.

Chapter opener and table of contents thumbnails along the bottom

If you work with InDesign, Quark or even Pages, Word, etc it’s all very familiar territory. It’s also quite similar in a lot of ways to Blurb’s BookSmart program.

The interesting stuff is the interactivity that is possible through widgets. The program comes with a selection of these which include galleries, scrolling boxes, interactive questions, media (video and audio), inserting Keynote presentations, pop-up labels, 3-d images and HTML functionality.

Gallery. Tap the thumbnails to view

Embedded video has to be in .m4v format

Zoom-ins

Zoom-in zoomed in

You can also make HTML widgets in programs like Hype, and I found a site called Bookry which allows you to create all sorts of widgets. I made a wordsearch to go in this book.

Wordsearch widget from Bookry

Wordsearch poster image

These are multiple choice question widgets. You can have standard text or picture questions with up to 6 options or drag label or image to target questions. It will show you the correct answer and total your answers at the end of the test.

Questions widget. Drag the answer to the correct spot

Questions widget. Drag the image thumbnail to the correct spot

I’m still playing with this, but I really like it and think it could have interesting possibilities if you’re happy to be limited to Apple platforms.

Experiments with Kindle Fire HD

On Friday my Kindle Fire HD was unceremoniously shoved through my letter box.

The box

Its attractive packaging and seemed to cushion the device’s fall onto the tiled floor in my porch.

You open the box by pulling the perforated cardboard tab.

Kindle Fire HD packaging open

The Kindle Fire HD comes with an USB cord and an instruction leaflet. It switches on on the short side. The button is recessed and not easy to see, so you won’t keep turning it on by mistake.

It’s already pre-registered to your Amazon account.

Kindle Fire HD home screen

Notice it says Jill’s 2nd Kindle at the top of the screen. Items you’ve looked at appear in the carousel. I gather this is a modified Android OS – it’s certainly similar to my Sony S tablet. There’s a free app of the day at the moment. Jamie Oliver today.

Very gratifyingly, the Adobe DPS folio I experimented with in the summer loaded on to this straight away once I loaded the Adobe content viewer app.

Adobe DPS folio

The screen is lovely. These photos don’t do it justice at all. New users get, I think, 5 gig of cloud storage (and a months free Amazon Prime, incidently). This is the gallery screen for the cloud storage. You can download to the device to view offline or you can sideload photos from your desktop.

Kindle Fire HD Photos screen

Books look good. There is now a night and sepia theme (like iBooks) and a text-to-speech facility. It’s a female, American voice, though, and I haven’t found a way to change it.

Kindle Fire HD text to speech facility

 

Just need to get it a cover now, so I can chuck it in my bag of gadgets.

 

When is black not black? Kindle for iPad app

I recently upgraded to IOS 6 on my iPad and was able to download the latest version of the Kindle app. Having a muck about on it as you do, I noticed that you can now reverse out the text (night theme) like you’ve been able to do on iBooks for a while. So I pressed the ‘black’ button and the background went black and my text went … er … slightly less black. So I fiddled with it some more, I changed fonts and font sizes. I switched it on and off again. Then I opened to a self-published book I’d recently downloaded – and black with white text. Hmm. Checked a few more downloads. Black with white text. Back to another in the series I’m converting at the moment – black with slightly less black. Hmm. A test book I made a couple of months back – black with white text.

OK … check the css files. Ah! The test book css shows the text’s hex number is #000000, but the files I’m currently working on have hex #1a1818. This is the colour that InDesign CS6 generated from the ‘text black’ swatch (RGB 26,24,24) during ePub export. So once the css was changed to #000000 the file displayed properly.  It seems that the black theme setting on the Kindle app will only reverse the text out to white if it is pure black.

I don’t remember changing the css on my test file, but I could have. If I didn’t though, it seems that InDesign used to convert to #000000 in CS5.5. Incidentally night theme works just fine in iBooks3 without changing the css.

Oh it’s fun this conversion lark, isn’t it.

 

To continue this: I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to not specify text colour at all. I got a Kindle Fire this morning and the ‘night’ theme plays up even with the text set as #000000. It also plays up with embedded fonts, but that’s another story…

So what’s an e-book file then?

So what’s an e-book file then? What program do I open it in? Why can’t I edit it? What’s the difference between an e-book and a kindle and an ePub? 

An e-book is just an electronic book – any ‘book’ that you can read on your computer or an e-reader is an e-book.

An ePub is a type of e-book. They can be read on computers using programmes such as Adobe Digital Editions, Kobo desktop, Calibre etc. You can also read them on iBooks on the iPad, Kobo app or readers, Nook (in the US) etc.

Kindle is the Amazon reader. The e-books you can read on them often get called kindle books, but the file format is really what used to be known as mobi. You can read them on any Kindle app, or a Kindle reader or in a program like Calibre, which is also a conversion program (but that’s another story).

The reason you can’t open an ePub or Kindle/mobi file on your desktop and edit it like a Word file is that they aren’t really files at all. They are a zipped-up collection of files, similar to a website. In the case of ePub files, if you change the extension to .zip (PCs only) apparently it will miraculously unzip to show you this collection of files. I don’t know if this works because I don’t own a PC, and I would suggest if you try it you do it with a copy, because you might not be able to zip it up again. But I have a script on my Mac called EPUB zip that does the same thing. If I drop an ePub file on to it this is what I end up with:

Epub unzipped folder

Just a quick run through of these files: The files at the bottom with .xhtml endings contain the text of your book – one file per chapter (if you have set the files up that way) – you can edit these files using a text-editing program. I use a fantastic and free program called Textwrangler and sometimes Dreamweaver. The doc.ncx file is where the clickable table of contents is. Images go in the image folder including the cover image. Fonts go in the fonts folder (er – obviously). The css folder contains the css files (cascading style sheets) that style the text (bold, italics, that sort of thing). The OEBPS folder contains the content.opf file. This file is a packing list – all the files that make up your ePub must be listed in this document, along with essential metadata and the instructions the e-book reading software needs to display the book properly. The META-INF files contain a load of required gubbins, but generally you shouldn’t have to open them at all.

When I’m creating ePub files I do all my formatting in Indesign, then export to ePub and unzip, edit and zip them back up again. Then it’s crucial to check the files on as many apps and e-book readers as possible. Check that the table of contents works, check at different text sizes, different fonts (if available). Check that your formatting hasn’t been lost. Phew – loads to do…

And with that, off to cook dinner.

To be continued…