Table of Contents

Introduction

Print vs. ebook vs. website

Static vs. Dynamic

Appearance

How it’s read

The order of things

Formats, durability, and batteries

Searchability

Highlighting and sharing passages

Copy protection

Buying new books

What is EPUB?

Navigating a sea of ereaders

Anatomy of an iBooks page

Who is this book for?

1. Using Word to write EPUB

Styling your Word document

Setting up styles in Word

Applying styles

Saving Word files as HTML

Preparing HTML files for EPUB

Using a text editor

Declaring the file to be XHTML, not HTML

Moving style data to its own file

Declaring the language used

Adding quotation marks around attributes

Adding closing slashes to empty elements

Finishing cleaning up XHTML code

Using the text editor’s syntax checker

Making an EPUB

2. Using InDesign to create EPUB

About using InDesign for EPUB

One file or many?

Styles in InDesign

Creating styles

Applying the main Body style

Applying headers, quotes, and other special styles

Replacing local formatting with styles

Drop Caps and Nested Styles

Add images

Placing an image

Creating text wrap within the flow

Add links

Creating a style for links

Hyperlinks

Cross-references

Create a navigational TOC

Preparing your book in order to create the navigational TOC

Creating a Table of Contents Style

Add metadata to your ebook

Export EPUB from InDesign

Exporting EPUB from InDesign CS4

Exporting EPUB from InDesign CS5

3. Inside an EPUB file

Unzipping an EPUB

The files that make up an EPUB

The mimetype file

The META-INF folder

The OEBPS folder

XHTML and CSS files

The toc.ncx file for the navigational TOC

Writing the content.opf file

Creating the cover

Zipping and testing

Organizing files before rezipping

Rezipping after edits

Getting the new EPUB file to the iPad

Further editing, rezipping, and testing

Validating your EPUB file

Converting EPUB to Kindle’s Mobi

4. Advanced EPUB Formatting

Ensuring ereaders use your CSS

Cleaning up InDesign EPUB files

How InDesign writes XHTML

How InDesign writes CSS

Fonts in your ebook

Choosing fonts

Fonts available for ebooks on the iPad

Ornaments, dingbats, and symbols

Using non-English fonts

Embedding fonts

Controlling text alignment

Keeping elements together

Controlling a header’s position

Keeping captions with their images

Setting widows and orphans properties

Setting page break options

Drop caps and small caps

Having CSS mark the first letter and line

Tagging the first letter and first line explicitly

Controlling spacing

Controlling indents

Formatting short lines

Borders and backgrounds

Creating a sidebar

Hyphenation

Adding soft hyphens

Using left-aligned text

Working with images

Size

Wrapping text around images

Wrapping text around sidebars

Creating links

Creating tables

Video in your ebook

Creating your video

Adding code for the video

Index