How Many Books Could ePub Pub if ePub Could Pub Books

What if you could take HTML & CSS, package them up in a file, and publish that file as a singular artifact? That's essentially what ePub is. (ePUB? EPUB?) With Ayush's real-world experience publishing e-books, we are guided through understanding more about this important (and sometimes overlooked) spec. Alas, the devil's in the details, and we get into many of those details here on today's episode of Just a Spec.

Hosted by Jared White & Ayush and produced by Intuitive Future

Links & Show Notes:

• Follow Just a Spec on Mastodon
• The Spicy Web & That HTML Blog
• EPUB file format (Wikipedia)
• Asciidoctor publishing toolchain

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:45 Weather Report™
• 1:41 Make sure you listen to Episode 18!
• 2:27 How in the actual f--- do you write out EPUB?!
• 4:51 Just text files in a Zip…
• 6:05 The ePub spec
• 13:00 Erm…worse than…HTML email??!!
• 15:59 Experiencing ePub as a consumer
• 19:43 Wishing ePub could handle complex presentation better (like, ugh, PDF)
• 22:28 Source authoring in AsciiDoc
• 23:59 Debugging PDF generation…ain't fun!
• 25:47 Wishing reading ePub was as fun as producing it
• 28:46 Thankful to have ePub as an open format…unlike MOBI!
• 33:45 Interop for ePub? Make it so, please!
• 34:37 Outro