A collection of tips, tricks, and best practices I’ve learned over the years for creating EPUB ebooks.
I’ve often been frustrated by the lack of quality in EPUBs produced by otherwise reputable publishers. Nothing is more infuriating than paying good money for a book, only to find it riddled with issues like:
- Low-resolution images
- Poorly-parsed Table of Contents (e.g. ALL CAPS, improper nesting, duplicate entries, missing spaces)
- Images of text versus properly styled text/UTF-8 characters
- Zero support/thought of dark mode
- Hard-coded first-line capitalization/styling
- Small caps brute-forced with smaller font size instead of using
font-variant: small-caps - Poor implementation of drop-caps
- Spelling errors/typos
- Headings marked up as links back to the table of contents
- Footnotes marked up as links instead of using EPUB footnote syntax (to support pop-up UI)
The following are super-helpful in EPUB production:
- Sigil - Easily run EPUB validation, refactor to common folder structure, catch spelling issues, find unused CSS/files, etc.
- EPUB Zip/Unzip - Quickly swap between zipped (production ready) and unzipped (editable) versions of your EPUB
- epubcheck - Official conformance checker for EPUBs.
- Official Specs
- Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base
Some useful guidance on semantics - E-Production Resources
Community site for EPUB knowledge - eBook Tricks
Includes example html/css - iBooks
- Apple Books Asset Guide
Apple’s official guidance on how to best format EPUBs for iBooks
- Apple Books Asset Guide
- Standard Ebooks
Dedicated to producing the highest-quality EPUBs of public-domain literature.- Producing an Ebook, Step by Step
- High Level Structural Patterns
- Sectioning
- Headers
- Dedications
- Epigraphs (quotes at beginning of chapters)
- Poetry, verse, and song
- Plays and Drama
- Letters
- Images
- List of Illustrations (The LOI)
- Endnotes
- Glossaries
- Semantic vocabulary