Epub

ePub is an open ebook standard produced by the International Digital Publishing Forum.

Latex to epub

• http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/ebooklatex.html
• Using pandoc

The <sample2e.tex> file from wikibooks.org works well although this tex file does not include any figure nor table.

pandoc -f latex sample2e.tex -o sample2e.epub

XHTML to epub

• Sigil. Its official website is on sigil-ebook.com. Source code is on github. User Guide or Tutorial is on here.
• An introduction to sigil by the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
• http://www.opensourceforu.com/2011/05/how-to-produce-ebook-in-epub-format/
• http://webdesign.about.com/od/epub/a/build-an-epub.htm

XML to epub

An article and its software called 'jats2epub' on github to convert xml to epub especially for journal articles.

Consider the article Software for Computing and Annotating Genomic Ranges by Michael Lawrence

• XML and PDF version
• epub version done by PubMed Central.

Markdown to epub

• pandoc
• https://puppetlabs.com/blog/automated-ebook-generation-convert-markdown-epub-mobi-pandoc-kindlegen

Some Examples

• The little Redis book and its webpage.

Online markdown editor

http://dillinger.io/

After export the file to .md format, we can use pandoc to convert it to epub.

pandoc test.md -o test.epub

Word to epub

• http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-a-Word-Document-to-Epub

PDF to epub

• Possibility 1: PDF to word to epub? But there is no way to convert pdf to word or open pdf in MS-Word.
• Possibility 2: PDF to html to epub. Use pdftohtml program. The syntax is pdftohtml -c MyDocument.pdf where '-c' is to include graphics. Another one is called pdf2htmlEX.

Directly download epub file

For example the article Dispersion estimation and its effect on test performance in RNA-seq data analysis: a simulation-based comparison of methods can be accessed from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed. It also provides a link to

• Go to the original journal website
• View the article like an ereader (called PubReader format) on web browser. From there, we can also view the article as
  • A classic view with an address from PubMed Central® (PMC).
  • Download it as an ePub (beta).
  • view a pdf version of the article.

Create epub

• Instructions on the creation of an ePUB with Calibre. Calibre also has a cool interface to edit an ebook. It also has a list of ebook creation tutorials on its web site.
• Create epub files manually http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/Introduction.shtml.
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-epubtut/ (no special tools needed)
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/29/how-to-make-an-ebook/
• https://www.epubbooks.com/epub, several books from O'Reilly Media
• LibreOffice
• InDesign software from Adobe
• Pages software from OS X.
• http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/EPub

Calibre edit book (open source)

• Right click an ebook and choose Edit book option to let you edit HTML, CSS and images in ePub and AZW3 books; this is a killer feature. Error checking, table of contents, merging, splitting, bulk renaming and so on. For details, see Calibre edit manual.
• Click 'edit metadata' also works like a charm.
• We can also save the modified ebook back to disk for future use.

Sigil (open source)

See the above XHTML_to_epub XHTML to epub. Have not tried it yet. It looks like it is very similar to Calibre except it has a mysterious home page.

Scriba (open source)

http://scribaebookmake.sourceforge.net/

Scrivener (licensed $40 for Windows | Mac)

• Creating an ebook using Scrivener
• It has a beta version for Linux distribution. See forum and an introduction from omgubuntu.co.uk.
• https://www.literatureandlatte.com/video.php

BlueGriffon EPUB Edition (licensed)

BlueGriffon EPUB Edition: a cross-platform Wysiwyg editor able to natively create and edit EPUB2 and EPUB3 ebooks!