I’ve been playing around with making EPUBs look more like print:

Why the madness: ebooks feel kind of sterile to me, and I’m intrigued by the idea of giving them a more analog feel.

The experiment is still early on (I’ve only automated the first step so far), but at this point the process involves:

1. Turning the EPUB into a PDF (concatenating each file in the EPUB into a single HTML file, setting some print CSS rules, and printing from HTML to PDF in a browser)
2. Turning each page into an image (at left in the above image)
3. Eroding/dilating the image to simulate ink spread
4. Adding a very slight ripple
5. Blurring the next page, flipping it backwards, and compositing it at a low opacity
6. Adding some paper texture (at right in the above image)
7. Compiling all the page images back into a PDF

Other notes:

• This does mean larger file sizes, but not prohibitively so. (For me, anyway.)
• Right now I’m experimenting with doing this statically, in PDF but I imagine most if not all of it could be done dynamically in-browser. (filter: blur(0.25px) contrast(3) in CSS applied twice to text can give a roughly similar effect to erosion/dilation, for example.)
• The current erosion/dilation method is acceptable, but I feel like there’s more room for improvement here.
• A shortcut to doing the full process is to export a blurred backwards page image, composite it onto the paper texture, and then use that as the background image on each page. You lose the variety, but it’s probably not noticeable.