This weekend I’ve been trying to put together the bits and pieces of the Null_Pointer Writer’s Edition ebook. I have decided to use the epub format as that is becoming a standard. The next step was either learning how to create the epub files or finding a program that lets me build a book in the epub format. I chose the later, as I just don’t have to time to do everything by hand.
Unfortunately, the program I tried to use, eCub, was just not intuitive enough for me to figure out. It let me use txt and html pages but in the end, the book looked fugly. So I googled the epub format and set about making my own epub files. It’s really not so tough for someone who knows how to program for the web.
My biggest hurtle will be in making the draft versions of NP into suitable html pages. Draft One was already converted for the web, so stringing it into one big file, is not so hard. The tough one will be all the blog enries that I cut and pasted into one Word document. I’m going to have to feed that one through another program to weed out all the Microsoft propriatary format code.
Basically, epub is a web page controled by CSS and xml. I have created my chapter pages and now I am inserting the content that I want to include. It’s a slow process, but I’m not in a big hurry. I plan on releasing the Writer’s Edition several months after the trade paperback and regular ebook versions.