Making ePub books the easy way

Many of you may be familiar with my ePub tutorial over at www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/

If you are, or if you are thinking about self-publishing, or if you need to edit any of your ePub books for any reason, I've now posted the first part of a Sigil tutorial:

http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/Sigil01.shtml

The first part is a brief overview of what Sigil can do, and what all those buttons are. Coming soon, importing your book into epub using Sigil, and formatting your content.

 

The top part is the menu and toolbars, much like every other application out there.
The pane on the left shows the contents of the ePub Container (This should look familiar if you've read my manual ePub tutorial.)
The middle pane shows the contents of whatever file you've opened from the left pane. Sigil can edit any part of the ePub file, including XHTML files (your book), CSS files, the ePub structure files, and you can add images to the ePub file right from Sigil too!
The right pane is the TOC, or Table of Contents, viewer. This is the stuff that shows if you press the Table of Contents button in your e-Reader.
Sigil can edit XHMTL files in either WYSIWYG, or code view, or a combination of both. (CSS files and the ePub structure files can only be edited in code view.)
Let's look at what the toolbar buttons do....

For more, check out the full tutorial at the link above, and check back in the next few days for the other parts.

A Sad Day

Today's a sad day. My church has decided it no longer needs a church library. The good news is that I've managed to get a couple of carloads of free books. The bad news is at least one whole dumpster's worth of books got thrown out, and I didn't even get to look at any of those.

It's another sad reminder that not that many people are reading anymore. And it's a crying shame.Not just for the entertainment that -at it's worst- is better than most of the stuff on TV; but also for the fact that a lot of people in the church today have questions about what they believe, or why, and the answers have been molding away in the church library (well, more mildew than mold, but...)

Most of the people in the church didn't even know we had a church library either. I've been thinking for a while about doing reviews on this blog. On the one hand, everybody reviews books. On the other, I obviously need more ideas for content, and perhaps someone reads my blog (I know, I'm crazy...) that doesn't read any of the others. So, in the near-future, look for mini-reviews for books I love, and links to some of those other sites when they review a book I love too.