Author Archives: huw

Ebook Covers: a Kindle Consideration

Posted on February 13, 2011 by huw

Book covers displayed on product pages in Amazon’s Kindle store are emblazoned with a special logo: the words “kindle edition” appear below the book cover, and a small image of a Kindle reader is superimposed onto bottom-right corner of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Kindle | Tagged | Leave a comment

Kindlegen Bloat: Strip it or Leave it?

Posted on February 4, 2011 by huw

If you’ve worked with many ePubs and converted them with Kindlegen while paying attention to file sizes, you might well have noticed that the Kindle files are much larger than the original ePubs — typically around twice as large. It … Continue reading →

Posted in Kindle | Tagged | 3 Comments

Kindle CSS Weirdness

Posted on January 24, 2011 by huw

Here are some Kindle CSS gotchas I’ve come across recently. I’ll update this post with more such oddities as (or if) I come across them. text-align:center; fails if designated as !important, even if the left and right margins are set … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

ePub Validation, iTunes and Flightcrew

Posted on January 20, 2011 by huw

You might already be aware that iTunes modifies any ePub files that it transfers to a device, by adding its own metadata file (iTunesMetadata.plist) into the ePub container. Epubcheck version 1.1. issues warnings when validating such modified files, because the … Continue reading →

Posted in Validation | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

ePub-compatible Kindle Centering

Posted on January 12, 2011 by huw

Amazon’s current Kindle-formatting guidelines offer two ways of centering content. The recommended method is to enclose the element within <center>…</center> tags, and the alternative is to apply the formatting within the element’s tag: <p align=”center” style=”text-indent:0″>…</p>. Unfortunately, neither of those … Continue reading →

Posted in Formatting | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

iBooks v1.2 File Update Failures and Glitches

Posted on January 11, 2011 by huw

When you transfer a new version of an ePub file into iBooks, it can fail to recognise the new information. Generally I find this to be a problem when fine-tuning CSS in order to improve a layout, because iBooks refuses … Continue reading →

Posted in Reader Updates, Workflow | Tagged , | 3 Comments

iBooks v1.2 for iPad Supports Auto-Hyphenation

Posted on January 11, 2011 by huw

This is a welcome update, and makes justified text more readable on iPad/iBooks. It also illustrates a benefit, discussed in Handcrafted Ebooks, that comes from leaving control in the hands of the user where possible. An ePub that doesn’t enforce … Continue reading →

Posted in Formatting, Reader Updates | Tagged , | Leave a comment

iBooks/iPad and Text Alignment

Posted on January 11, 2011 by huw

A new (to me) wrinkle on iBooks for iPad: at first sight, this e-reader refuses to let you override body text alignment without applying dummy <span> tags. But while working on the ePub edition of Ransom Seaborn, I found that … Continue reading →

Posted in Formatting | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Introduction

Posted on January 11, 2011 by huw

Handcrafted Ebooks is a fairly technical guide to ePub formatting and ePub-Kindle portability. It’s aimed at those who are happy to use (or learn) XHTML, CSS, text-editing and text-processing with standard, cross-platform tools. It’s in the nature of such a … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment