The ePub edition of my reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon is now available. You can read it in Stanza or iBooks on your iPhone/iPad, in Aldiko on your Android, or using any number of other EPUB readers. (For iPad reading, I should add that the PDFs work nicely in iBooks, and the typography is (ahem) much better than iBooks’ EPUB display.)
Maker’s note: I’m finding that my md2epub script has made EPUB production incredibly easy. Granted, I’m working with books that don’t involve charts or tables or images or pull quotes or anything complicated, just straight text, but it’s still a breeze.
Following in the footsteps of my reader’s editions of the Book of Mormon and D&C, here’s that reader’s edition of the Pearl of Great Price I mentioned earlier.
It’s available in both PDF and EPUB. You can also buy a hard copy on Lulu.
Let me know if you find any typos or if the EPUB doesn’t work on your reader.
Basically, I’ve taken the text of the D&C, stripped out all the verse numbers, reparagraphed the text, reorganized the sections chronologically (I only had to move a handful of sections), gave each section a name (based loosely on Dane Laverty’s post, but I think I only kept around 10% of his titles), and pulled the date and place of each revelation up to make them more visible.
This also marks the release of my first EPUB. I’d thought about exporting straight from InDesign, but I’m a do-it-myself kind of a guy (at least at first), so I handcrafted this one. The process: I exported the text from InDesign to a plain text file (before I did copyfitting), then used Vim and some regular expressions to put a marker in between each section. I couldn’t figure out how to split the sections into individual files from Vim, so I wrote an awk script that did it for me, then wrote a Python script to take each text file and put it into an HTML file formatted the way I wanted it. And there were a few other scripts I wrote to generate various parts of the EPUB. All in all, not too bad, though I wish EPUB readers like Stanza would give me at least a little more control over formatting. (None of my CSS worked. Sigh.)
I should add that I’ve tested the EPUB in Stanza on my iPhone and in iBooks on my iPad and it works fine in both places. Let me know if it doesn’t work on your reader (or if it looks weird).
